To senualpilgram's Free State Proposal

On Friday, September 6, 2002, at 10:15 PM, victoriatangoman wrote:

> In the end, it may be cheaper to launch from the US and jump through
> all of the bureacratic hoops, than it would be to spend $10-20
> billion dollars on a launch platform and floating island for a new
> nation of space enthusiasts who don't want to have bureaucratic
> oversight from any government organization.
>

Not only that, but if you build your own platform and/or get an island
outside of a nation-state, no nation-state will come to your defense.
There are plenty of armed groups with boats that could easily invade
your little piece of land. Once you start supplying your own defense,
it get's expensive and you start looking a lot like a ---- nation state.

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