Hello everyone!

i believe that space settlement will be very different
from Earth's traditional migrations due to costs and
hostile environmental conditions to humans settlers.
No private citizen, at least inthe beginning of space
settlement,will have the capacity to afford or to
participate to its colonization.
Colonies will grow from small human settlements
financed by multinational corporations that can prove
to be economically viable and provide a return of
capital.
Without an economic profitability there ill not be
human space colonies, land or space based.
Giorgio
--- "Combs, Mike" wrote:

From: jwsmith42000@...
[mailto:jwsmith42000@...]

> I am not paranoid but I do not like anyone who begs
the
> government to steal my money, and then waste much of
it
> on useless activities that will not do us any good.
> Robert Zubrin does that on a regular basis.

I don't disagree with most of what you say about The
Mars Society. But
still, I think if Zubrin had got his way in
everything, we'd have still
been better off than if we had instead just continued
to mess around
with the Shuttle and ISS, and nothing else. That
said, I think the
approach Bush has advocated (provided he gets his way)
is a better
approach than Zubrin's, which seems to basically be
that Mars is the
only significant target beyond the Earth, and anything
other than Mars
isn't worth doing. His rejection of any kind of
infrastructure
development other than on the surface of Mars means
that his plans don't
offer anything to anyone with even slightly different
space plans. His
scenarios are for those with eyes for one target, and
one target only.

> I believe that space will be settled in the
beginning by
> people who want to be different.

The "in the beginning" part is the only part I would
disagree with. I
would even agree that long-term, dissatisfaction with
Earthly society
will be the single biggest driver of space migration.
For example, I've
written short fiction about several families
immigrating to the Asteroid
Belt due to what they perceive (rightly or wrongly) as
religious
persecution. In other words, the Pilgrims all over
again. I just don't
anticipate that the process will start out that way.

Establishing the first few beachheads will cost
hundreds of billions of
dollars, and I just can't see small groups of space
settlement
enthusiasts (and we are small) raising the money on
their own. I think
it will only happen after large multinational
corporations (and perhaps
even consortiums of many such corporations) make the
initial investments
in infrastructure that, once established, might have
the effect of
bringing the costs of subsequent developments down to
the range that
small private groups might be able to consider.

Regards,

Mike Combs