Plant Nursery In Space?

From: "Al Globus"
To:
Sent: Wednesday, August 28, 2002 2:10 PM
Subject: Re: Fw: [spacesettlers] Plant Nursery In Space?

This is probably true. The reason I want trees in my colony is simply
that I like trees -- a lot. Space colonies probably won't be a good
place to send illiterate, technically uneducated people for quite some
time. Well educated people can do quite nicely on Earth, thank you.
Therefor, colonies -- from the beginning -- need to be attractive places
to live. Therefor, we probably need trees.

I completely agree with trees in a space colony serving purely ornamental
purposes. However, you don't really need to have fully grown trees (as I
understood from victoriatangoman's post) to do that. Any large-scale
engineering project on Earth begins with tiny, "newborn" trees that grow as
the years pass.

For instance, my mother visited Braslia around 1960, when the city had just
been finished, and the trees were really small because they had just been
planted. Many years later, she visited the city again and the trees were
already fully grown. However, the fact that the trees were very tiny in the
beginning did not prevent the rapid growth of the population of the city.
(As a matter of fact, there were people leaving in/around Braslia *before*
its opening or tree planting, because of course thousands of workers were
needed.) I guess that the same thing happened with Washington, which is also
a planned city, isn't it?

Lucio Coelho