Habitat Issues

--- In spacesettlers@egroups.com, "Combs, Mike"

>> Not only could we not keep up with the population increase I don't
>>
>>know that you could get that many volunteers
>
> Given the ideal living conditions and climates made to order that
one could have in
> orbital settlements, I think
> finding volunteers might not be that hard. Of course it's true
that (I think) less than 1% of
> the population of
> Europe decided that immigrating to the New World was the thing to
do, and similar
> percentages will probably
> hold in the future.

Hello Mike, opps, sorry, excuse me, --- *ACCENT ON* --- G'day mate,
;-)

Ah, I'm sorry, please forgive me, it's an Aussie joke sort of but it
helps to introduce my first point. You would be surprised how many
people think we really speak like that, and to tell the truth at times
as few of us do, though when most people (I mean from overseas, not
counting the kiwi's, they don't count as from overseas, at lest from
here) hear me speak, they usually ask what part of England I'm from.
Like most popular myths or stereotypes, it exists only peoples
imagination's. Mind you there is a grain of truth in most popular
myths. A lot of people have these strange beliefs about Australia (a
few of them amaze me) and some of our native wildlife, there is the
idea that swimming at an Australian beach is a constant battle with
sharks, everything that moves is venomous and that you will see
kangaroos bounding down the streets as soon as you step off the plane.
I'll grant you that we have a lot of sharks but the ones in the
rivers (rare, snakes are more common and I'm not joking about that)
and the harbours and bays (several kinds, most very small - less than
2 metres and some without teeth, well they have teeth but not like
normal sharks teeth) are pretty harmless and the even the dangerous
ones in the ocean don't normally bother people (true we have had 3
fatal attacks this year but they are the first in years, we've only
had something like sixty or seventy since colonisation, 200 years, I'm
pretty sure about the numbers but going from memory I'll stand
corrected if anybody has other numbers). We do have a lot of venomous
spiders and snakes but few problems with them, if you leave them
alone, most of them will leave you alone. As for the kangaroos, the
only place in Sydney you'll see them is in a zoo, finding one
wandering the streets of the main cities is so rare as to be a news
item, *except* here in Canberra. Our capital is not very large, just
300,000 people and spread out over a large area with lots of bushland
between suburbs, giving the fauna plenty of green corridors to move
around in. With nobody to shoot at them (discharging a firearm in a
city is frowned on and will earn you a stay as a guest of her majesty
at the Iron Bar Inn) they are very common and have little fear, damn
things are also a traffic hazard, I see them dead on the roadside
everyday. So in fact in Canberra you can get off a plane and see a
kangaroo running down a street (although I will grant you it isn't
likely, the airport has a big fence).

All of this is a round about way of pointing out the problem of urban
myths and wishful thinking and how most people who think about any
type of space habitat have this kind of utopian dream of a large full
fledged O'Neil colony that is open to public immigration, that is even
less likely than getting off the plane in Sydney and being greeted by
that kangaroo, it's possible but don't hold your breath.

The amount of effort and expense of building a habitat is huge and
without an overwhelming reason to build it will not be done on a large
scale first up. A far more probable scenario is a small basic station
that like Mir will start as new and will soon become small, cramped,
dirty and less than comfortable. This may then be expanded to become
a larger and more comfortable place where people will want to live and
not just work. This station will either be government (most likely
military) or belong to a single company (or a consortium). The
advantages of a station in orbit from a military point of view is
incredible, of course there are treaties to control this but.. Even
if you don't arm them an orbital station can do a lot of things and it
would be very hard to convince everybody that it wasn't armed. In
fact that may even be a problem that a habitat may have to overcome.
You build a large O'Neil colony and start to send power back to Earth
in the form of beamed microwaves and are feeding industry with cheap
nickel and platinum group metals as well as high tech trade goods.
Down below you have green groups (not the ones who can do maths, the
others who think electricity is the work of the devil) raising hell
because you are cooking birds in the path of the beam and everybody on
the ground under it (yes, I know that is not the way it works) and are
killing the Earth by pumping in all that energy into the biosphere and
melting the ice caps. Then the others worrying about those large
masses falling out of the sky everyday, to that you add the
governments who object to having you looking down on them. Now just
about everybody with an education will understand that those
objections are fit only for landfill but you can be sure that somebody
will make them and then somebody else has to refute them and then
somebody else will make them again and so it goes around. Some of the
people will believe the crazy claims, giving rise to the urban myths
leading to death by a thousand cuts.

On a positive track the first generation of space habitat we should
give way to larger and more civilian habitats were the people living
there are not all employed by one company/government who built the
habitat with an economy directed entirely to one end and you start to
have an internal economy with secondary and support industries but
really the main hurdle is the cost which has got to come down a long
way before large scale civilian immigration happens, this will come
with scale but that takes time. Now unless somebody comes up with a
new kind of way to orbit (that is a very cheap way) then I feel we are
stuck with this as much as I dislike the added wait.

I don't know that the ideal weather and idyllic living conditions in
the, hmmm..let's see, I guess about third generation habitat (the
kind that O'Neil envisioned) would be enough of a draw for the average
man on the street, for you (I feel safe in that statement) and most
definitely me (I *know* about that one) it would be enough (hell, I'd
go to the first generation, even with the noise, smells, cramped
spaces and other discomforts) but consider the down side for most
people; first it would be the equivalent of moving to a new country,
then there is the problem/costs of visiting the family and friends
back home (unless that cheap transport or some other kind of virtual
visit comes about), the long list of strange laws and new customs you
will have to learn (living in a small, closed environment you need to
take special care of your waste, how you water the garden, making sure
the doors are closed and keeping track of the other special living
conditions) some of which may on the surface seem pointless and
arbitrary (but in fact would be there to stop really serious problems,
consider for example a person with a desire to die and take as many
others to god with them) and there are others but they can all be
summed up by saying you may need better bait than just a comfortable
house and rain by timetable. The other side of this coin is that a
desire to live in orbit would most likely not be the only
qualification to live there it would be too expensive to take just
anybody, also you have to make sure those who do go are going to want
to stay and will fit in. You are right about the conditions though,
life in a habitat has the potential to be the best possible. If it's
designed right it would look like you were living in the kind of
pruned, trimmed, neat, polished, planned, perfect forest/Garden of
Eden/tropical island/rural countryside/rustic village or what ever
else takes your fancy that has never existed in reality. The real
beauty is that all of these are possible, one habitat could be 18th
century France and the next polished steel and glass 28th century,
open parkland or tropical rainforest with as many kinds of lifestyle.
Of course this would all be surface and under the skin I think the
realities of keeping what is in fact a very complex machine running
would force a strong similarity. Habitats as fashion?? Interesting
idea.

>> or that shipping excess people is the way to control population
>> increase. Aside
>> from the right or wrong of transhipping population you don't cure a
>> disease by treating the symptoms, you need to get at the cause.
>>
> Very true. In this case, the root cause is actually poverty. As
you say, if we can help the 3rd world
> to raise their standard of living, population growth will slow.

This brings up an interesting paradox. You really need two things to
have a space habitat, the technology to build it and the money to
afford it. Part of the world can afford it and part can not, do we
spend the money to build what many will say is a rich mans amusement
or do we spend the money helping those who couldn't afford to build or
go to a habitat? Building a habitat will, repeat WILL be attacked as
a waste of money that should be spent feeding the poor but I really
believe that we would be making an investment that would allow us to
not only feed but raise to equality those poor. If a habitat didn't
return the investment in it 100 times within a single life time I
would be stunned, in fact stunned is not a strong enough word, a
habitat or better yet many habitats should have the potential to make
the world wealthy, that is not to say everybody would be equally
wealthy but that's how the world is.

>> But I don't agree that we don't
>> currently have *any* frontiers but this would be a
>> wonderful addition
>> to the ones we have and open to more people and
>> certainly the best.
>>
> I meant "frontier" only in it's most literal sense, i.e. a
> new place where people can go to live and raise families.

Yes, I knew that;-)but still we do have a few real frontiers here but
I can only think of two and they are kind of limited. Real frontiers
are important but not as important as the less tangible type and while
we have more of them, this one is so much bigger with so many
possibilities, in fact in one sense, this frontier has all the others
as just small parts of it.

Darren Brown