Human Behavior in Space

I'm not too sure what an arcology is. Is is a large, more-or-lessclosed habitat on land?
Darren Brown wrote:
Al, Tom,
How about arcologies instead of an ocean colony? It should be
cheaper and would kill three birds with one stone, urban sprawl,
housing shortage and practice for building orbital habitats, who
knows it might even help fund the start of a habitat.
Darren Brown
tntucker@... wrote: .
We must also recognize the need for many thousands of
people living in ocean based colonies that are dedicated toward
breaking away from earth in order to fund the effort. Waiting for
NASA is a fools errend IMO. The ocean colonies are ideal for adaption
since people who get cold feet can row back to shore :-)

While I think ocean colonies are very cool, I don't think they will
make much difference for space colonization. Ocean colonistswill
probably have their own concerns and be about as interested in space
as their land-living counterparts, maybe a little more, but not much.
Al Globus
Al Globus
aglobus@..., (650) 604-4404
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html
The dinosaurs weren't spacefaring. We are. I don't think that's an accident.
Maybe we are life's taxi to the stars.
I think we should:
1. Devote half of NASA's budget ($7 billion) to reaching NASA's 2020goal of
reducing launch costs to Low-Earth-Orbit to $220/kg with a 0.01% failurerate.
This should enable space tourism. The resulting orbital hotels willneed to
develop efficient orbital life support and other necessary technologies.
2. Build orbital space colonies. The materials in the largest asteroidare
sufficient for orbital colonies with a combined surface area about500 times
greater than Earth's. Eros alone could make over ten thousand spacecolonies,
each with about about 10 square kilometers of 1g living area.
3. After a few generations of orbital living, people won't need theircolony
to be near Sol. Then small groups of colonies with populations in the
tens-of-thousands can set out on multi-decade journeys to nearbystars.
Except the launch goals, none of this is even a little bit official.