Digest Number 713

On Saturday, September 27, 2003, at 03:09 AM, Michael wrote:

>> I do not believe population control will be an issue.
>
> It is an issue now and we have an entire planet to use, so it would
> certainly be an issue for a much smaller space settlement.
>

As mentioned before, if your colony fills up you build another one.
Ceres (the largest asteroid) has enough material for about 150-300
(depending on your shielding assumptions) times the surface of the
Earth in 1g living space. Should be enough for awhile, particularly
when you consider that most of the Earth is nearly uninhabited
(consider the oceans, deserts, mountains, antarctica, and most of
Canada, Greenland, Alaska, and Siberia).

The materials in one asteroid (the largest ) are sufficient to make
orbital space colonies with ~150 times the surface area of the Earth in
usable real estate. See http://lifesci3.arc.nasa.gov/SpaceSettlement/
for details.

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

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.