Multiculturalism, LightCraft, etc

From: "Darren Brown"
To:
Sent: Quinta-feira, 2 de Novembro de 2000 01:10
Subject: [spacesettlers] Re: Ok, radiation shielding is necessary *anywhere*

[snikt]
> True to a degree but don't tell that to the French, they are really
> sensitive about English being a "lingua franca", the reason most
> diplomats and passports use French as a second language is that until
> this century the place that English now holds was held by French, it
> was the official language of everything international (during the
> Olympics, there was a small protocol problem here during the games,
> our Governor General - our head of state is the English Queen and the
> GG is her Vice Regal presences in Australia but has very little real
> power - refused to speak in French before English). From memory (and
> a source I can not remember so it may not be correct) there are about
> 1 billion English speakers, as a 1st or 2nd language. Now there are
> about that number of people in India and more than that in China, I
> know that they don't all use the same language but with a strong local
> media that will change but maybe not as fast as English is picked up
> from satellite. I like the idea of people all around the world being
> able to talk to each other, communication is the foundation of
> peaceful interaction but I also understand how people who do not have
> English as a first language might feel some resentment. By the way
> it's my daughter that is learning Spanish, I'd like to but time is not
> on my side.
>

Yes, I forgot about French - it was the international language, specially in
diplomacy, a long time ago. Also, it seems that German was a language widely
used in scientific papers around the beginning of the century, but I'm not
sure. I was assuming that economy is the only significant force defining an
international language (as in the case of English), but those examples prove
that I was wrong. Who knows, maybe population majority is also a force
driving towards international languages, and in the second half of the next
century everyone will be speaking Chinese. ;-)

[snikt]
> Australia is such a mix of people these days that it is very common to
> walk down a street and see sighs or hear people talking in almost any
> language you care to name. As I sit here I have just changed TV
> stations, the one I was watching (well listening to in the background
> as I read and typed) was the Multi-Cultural station (SBS, we have five
> free to air stations, two government stations - SBS & the ABC - and
> three commercial stations, plus pay TV which is not the same all over
> the country). SBS broadcasts in a large number of languages with
> English subtitles where needed, today we have had the usual overseas
> news programs in Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin, Indonesian, German,
> French, Serbian and a couple I can't figure out from the name and then
> they are followed by programs in Mandarin, Polish, English, French,
> Czech, French, English, German and French. This is not the only
> languages they vary day by day and the bigger the film/television
> industry of the country the more air time they will get. Australia's
> mix of cultures gives the station an audience. In fact Australia's
> Multiculturalism program is a good example of some of the problems and
> solutions that would come up in a habitat with a mixed nationality
> population. With a few exceptions (every country has it share of
> intolerant low life's) Australians are in the main happy with a
> population with mixed ethnic backgrounds. There are at times some
> tensions (most often with people who are fighting or having some other
> kind of strife in the country of origin, this tends to stop or
> decrease after the second or third generation as the children have
> trouble identifying with their parents causes). We are proof that
> such a culture is possible and from my own experience I can tell you
> that a lot of the changes that have happened over the years are
> positive, a lot of things the immigrants brought with them have been
> made part of our everyday life and this has added a lot of variety to
> everything, although sometimes the mix can have odd outcomes. All in
> all I think it has been a positive thing, in fact some of the things I
> thought I would not like have turned out to be things that now I can't
> imagine being without. If you saw some parts of the Olympics and the
> other programs that were made at the same time some of the things that
> come from such a mixed culture would have come through although I
> should point out that still the majority of Australians have an
> Anglo-Saxon/Western European background but the mix is changing. With
> a habitat and with a number of habitats I think you might have a lot
> of strange cultural outcomes but from living in Australia I believe
> that they will be positive outcomes, in fact they may even be one of
> the better things to come from a habitat.
>

Unlike Australia, which is a place of relatively new colonization, Brazil is
what could be called a "finished" example of multiculturalism in many
aspects. Our colonization begun in the 16th century, and for 500 years there
has been cultural and genetic mix of Portuguese, African and Indian (or
"Native Brazilian") people here; also, in the 19th century, there was a new
wave of European immigration, mostly Italian and German; and, finally, in
the early 20th century, a Japanese wave (oddly, Brazil has the biggest
population of people with Japanese ancestry outside Japan). As a result, we
are a very... peculiar people. Theoretically, we speak Portuguese, but it is
*so* different from the Portuguese spoken in Portugal - due to the inclusion
of a lot of African phonemes, and also Indian words, plus simplification of
other words - that some linguists say that it should be considered another
language. (In fact, I can barely understand what people from Portugal say.)
Racial mix, in every conceivable variety, is the rule - it is kind of
difficult to find someone who looks purely white or purely black or purely
Indian; I work for an American company and, in one of my business trips to
the US, some of my American colleagues were just wondering *why* Brazilians
look so different from each other ;-). Also, since we are a very big country
of old colonization, there are expressive cultural differences - accents,
food, etc - from region to region. Now, as the rest of the world, we are
suffering a new wave of multiculturalism, brought by the globalization - our
cable TV is filled with American and European programs, there is the
Internet, and economy is becoming a swarm of transnational companies.

So, if multiculturalism will be the rule for habitats, then I would also
welcome that rule. However, I'm not sure if that will be the case... In the
early decades of space colonization, probably there will be few places to go
and those few places will be crowded with people from every part of Earth.
As time progresses and the construction of new habitats accelerates, on the
other hand, maybe some habitats will be massively colonized by people with
the same ethnic/cultural background. And, since each habitat will be much
like an island, kind of isolated from the others, the tendency for such
uniformities would be to remain.

[snikt]
> I first saw a mention of this type of craft in a book called "A step
> further out" by Jerry Pournelle, then next in an articles in
> "Scientific American" and "New Scientist". The Scientific American
> links;
>
> http://www.sciam.com/1999/0299issue/0299beardsley.html and
> http://www.sciam.com/1999/0299issue/0299beardsleybox4.html
>

Thanks for the links, Darren! The second one shed a lot of light in the
lightcraft concept. So far, I had find very little information on the
subject using search engines and stuff...

As for the first article, it is... awe inspiring. With so many companies
competing for cheaper access to space, it is hard to believe that none of
them will find a way. However, for now we can say that the schedules
presented by the majority of those companies were way too optimistic: it
seems that the article is from February 1999, and none of the experimental
flights scheduled for 1999 and 2000 seems to have actually happened.

> I also recall an interview with Robert Forward where this type of
> craft was talked about so the idea seems to have been around for some
> time. The Pournelle book is interesting (a quick look at the Barnes &
> Nobel web site - bn.com - shows they still have some copies in the out
> of print section), it has a chapter devoted to the reality that an
> astroid belt based nation would have to deal with. It assumes that
> some kind of fusion based rocket able to manage 1G for prolonged
> periods (a common staple of such stories used to make the transit
> times manageable, that is days and weeks not months and years), and he
> find that the capital of such a nation would most likely be not be on
> one of the larger rocks but on Mars. So much for the independent
> republic of the astroid belt.
>

Hmmmmm... I think that speculation envisioning the asteroid belt as a bunch
of cities-states, each one based in its own asteroid and politically
independent from the other ones, is more likely to happen. Even if such
fusion rockets that can cross the Inner Solar System in a week are actually
invented, each asteroid will still be an "island" physically insulated from
the others. Looking at corresponding earthling analogies - for example, the
Caribbean and Polynesian islands - we see a lot of small, different nations,
even though you can go from one island to the other in a matter of hours.

Also, unlike Earth's nations, asteroid cities will be isolated from each
other also under the telecommunication perspective. Due to the lightspeed
barrier, a phone call (or a session of internet surfing) from an asteroid to
other one a few gigameters way would be impracticable. Therefore, under any
point of view, asteroids would be much more isolated from each other than
islands on Earth are from each other, and so they would develop as different
nations, I think.

[snikt]
> Yes, we don't know all that we should but given a way to orbit then
> building a habitat with a reasonable pseudo gravity shouldn't be that
> big a problem. While micro-G might be great for a while it would soon
> present problems with day to day life. When the first long term
> stations were being designed (Skylab, Mir) they encountered a lot of
> problems with lots of little, basic things that would make living
> there forever uncomfortable, people might be able to adapt to the
> physical things but they will not want to be uncomfortable. Just
> consider basics like cooking, no way to keep things on a plate, no
> convection to cook things in a pot or how about babies, they wouldn't
> be born with the knowledge of how to use a toilet with suction or how
> to stop from choking on the vomit they often bring up after feeding.

Indeed, I still don't know why so far none of the space stations actually
built (skylab, Mir, ISS) have artificial gravity. If the problem is
interference with micro-G experiments, that could be easily avoided by
building a zero-g chamber with no rotation. Astronauts and cosmonauts could
perfectly dwell in the gravity sectors of the station and work in the zero-g
sectors. Without the problems associated with zero-g, the permanence of
astronauts in orbit could be much longer...

[snikt]
> Now you have to get a population and then you have to house, feed,
> clothe, water, entertain, supply air and a general environment for
> them. What happens to the excess heat or do you need to supply heat?
> Where does the sewerage go and what happens to it? What do you
> produce and who buys it? How do you get it to your customers?
>

I think that the question of heating is just a matter of engineering, though
in a domain much larger than usual. As for the sewerage, however, this is
part of a much more complex problem: how to maintain a self-sustained closed
ecosystem in the habitat.

But perhaps that problem is not *that* complex at all. First of all, unless
you're planning to make an interstellar travel or something like that, no
habitat would be a really closed ecosystem: there would be constant input
and output of raw materials and living beings, and you would not really need
a perfect recycling of everything. As for some specific and very nasty
problems, like sewerage, perhaps the most practical (and cheaper, and
quicker, and cleaner) solution would not be try to recycle the thing by
feeding several strata of different species of plants or bacteria or
something; since you're in an environment with an endless and abundant
supply of energy from the Sun, you could simply vaporize sewer decomposing
it in its molecular/atomic components, and then using the ashes and gases
so obtained directly in your agricultural sectors - after all, plants need
mineral salts and gases, and that is what you would get by vaporizing sewer.
(Of course part of the sewer could be cultivated as an organic fertilizer,
but I think that vaporization of most of the sewer would supply a quicker
solution for other needs, like water recycling.)

Now, the economy problem: the first economical utility that I see for
habitats, like that of basically any new colony, is supplying raw materials.
In the case of space habitats, those "materials" could also be energy: since
fusion reactors are always things for "50 years from now" and oil price is
always skyrocketing, I think that solar power space stations can be an
option for an energy-hungry world - provided that the cost of getting to LEO
drops significantly, of course. Also, asteroid mining seems to be another
relevant activity: it is true that there are yet many mineral resources on
Earth, but thanks to our political divisions, there are nations (Japan,
Europe, etc) that are incredibly poor in many natural resources, including
metals, and easy space travel could open a door for terminating their
dependency on other nation's resources.

Last, but not least, there is the potential for space tourism, at least for
habitats in LEO (and perhaps around the Moon or in the lunar surface)...

[snikt]
> Darren Brown

Dr. Omni
ICQ# 53853815