progress

On Saturday, October 4, 2003, at 12:06 AM, Xenophile wrote:

> --- In spacesettlers, "newhome84" wrote:
>
>> you call this site "space settlers" is anyone really trying to make
>> progress or is it just talk
>>

Having studied space colonization for over twenty years, and done a
little bit of actual work, my estimate for the cost of building the
first genuine orbital colony is a least a couple trillion dollars. The
next important step is much better launch vehicles, which will
certainly cost tens of billions of dollars to develop. Some important
progress on self-sustaining ecological systems could probably be done
for only a few millions of dollars.

The point is, as a practical matter, what we can do is talk. This is
significantly more valuable than you might think. Right now orbital
colonization isn't on the nation's (or the world's) radar. It should
be, and only talk, and lots of it, has a chance of getting it there.

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

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