BizarIdea

On Friday, October 4, 2002, at 10:17 PM, Xenophile wrote:

> --- In spacesettlers, "victoriatangoman" wrote:
>
>>
>> How about a corkscrew colony. No jokes please!
>>
>> It could be like a torus, but any time we wanted to add capacity
>> we could.
>
> You might eventually wind up with something very like a banded torus.

Banded torus has lower shielding requirements. However, if the
corkscrew is very tight (walls touching), this advantage goes away.

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