War in orbit???

This is a bit of an aside, but the Earth has been *cooling* for about 50
million years. Recently (100,000, 1,000,000?) years ago we started
having ice ages. If the cooling trend continues we could be headed for
a snowball Earth. This has apparently happened in the past. The Earth
gets covered with a couple hundred meters of ice. Kills everything
except a few bacteria. Perhaps our greenhouse gasses are a way to
reverse the cooling trend before its too late :-).

"Combs, Mike" wrote:

> I'd far rather discuss the proposition that only in an era of space
> resource use, orbital construction, and orbital settlements would we
> be able to build a much smaller sun shield which might reverse the
> catastrophic effects of a runaway greenhouse effect, if we can't
> manage to get CO2 emissions under control in time. Or alternately, if
> the climatologists are dead wrong and in fact we're heading into
> another ice age, one could then talk about orbital mirrors.I was
> thinking I had seen a student design project which used the former
> scenario as the economic motivation for industrializing and settling
> space, but now I can't find it.It's possible that if we want to
> continue having the kind of climate which we consider "normal",
> development of space construction infrastructure might be the only way
> to achieve that. At the very least, SPS would be an aid in helping to
> reduce CO2 emissions.
>
> Regards,
>
> Mike Combs
> (903)-868-6314
>
> From: bill t [mailto:qwerty172@...]
> Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2001 4:23 PM
> To: spacesettlers@egroups.com
> Subject: [spacesettlers] Re: War in orbit???
>
> Well there is always a light sail 10 000 km in diamter set
> up between
> the earth and sun just far enough to be able to protect it
> from launch
> craft. 2 weeks of darkness will break the photosynthetic
> chain killing
> 50-75% of the plant life.
>

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>

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 2020
goal of
reducing launch costs to Low-Earth-Orbit to $220/kg with a 0.01% failure
rate.
This should enable space tourism. The resulting orbital hotels will need
to
develop efficient orbital life support and other necessary technologies.

2. Build orbital space colonies. The materials in the largest asteroid
are
sufficient for orbital colonies with a combined surface area about 500
times
greater than Earth's. Eros alone could make over ten thousand space
colonies,
each with about about 10 square kilometers of 1g living area.

3. After a few generations of orbital living, people won't need their
colony
to be near Sol. Then small groups of colonies with populations in the
tens-of-thousands can set out on multi-decade journeys to nearby stars.

Except the launch goals, none of this is even a little bit official.