High-productives sharing a habitat (was High-productives as virtual

> Instead of focusing on the High Frontier why don't Billionaires and
> patent attorneys focus on building a City Under the Sea or a domed
> city in Antarctica? Each would be cheaper than building an orbital
> settlement.
>

This is true, and it's a problem for any scheme that proposes building
orbital cities just for the sake of building cities. The sensible
answers fall into only two classes:

1. Build them in space in order to make or do things that can be made
or done only in space;
2. Build them in space because that's the direction humanity needs to
expand long-term (for any of the various reasons you may believe that
to be the goal).

O'Neill proposed SSP as the primary driver, which is an answer in
class 1. Lately some very intelligent people (e.g. Stephen Hawking)
have been pointing out the need to colonize space in order to ensure
mankind's survival, which is more in class 2.

> What is the purpose of spending $200 billion to establish a City under
> the Sea or a domed city in Antarctica?
>

Not much that I can think of. There isn't much of anything (except
perhaps a few kinds of research) that can be done there that can't be
done elsewhere, and it's not a direction that leads to open-ended
economic expansion.

Of course there ARE groups working on undersea settlements anyway, but
I'm not a fan; unlike space, which has no ecosystem, oceans are rich,
diverse ecosystems which don't certainly don't need us mucking things
up (any more than we already have).

> Mike, you hit the nail on the head, IMO, with the Savage comparison. I
> was never taken with his fanciful scenarios in that they were too
> divorced from reality to be taken seriously.
>

True.

Best,
- Joe