Transportation within a habitiat

On Monday, July 8, 2002, at 04:36 PM, victoriatangoman wrote:

> I believe it would be more likely that orbital societies will
> evolve. They'll start small, with everything within walking
> distance, and with no public transportation. As their size grows, I
> think the first step will be some form of mass transit.

I see no particular reason to believe mass transit will be the choice
for every colony, or even most. My guess is that the personal freedom
to go when and where you want will be important to people, and they will
develop systems to do just that. This implies vehicles sized for one or
a few people under occupant control that travel on prepared
right-of-ways that go pretty much (although not quite) everywhere. In
other words, roads and cars.

The dinosaurs were destroyed by an asteroid because they weren't
space-faring. It's almost as if Gaia then thought "Well, dinosaurs
worked pretty well, but space-faring is necessary. Maybe I'll should
try mammals this time." Humanity is now developing systems to detect and
deflect asteroids, and could build orbital space colonies to spread
beyond Earth to insure life would survive a planetary catastrophe.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html