Manufacturing in space

Omar,

Ignoring magic and super tech (same thing really) there aren't a lot of
options. At first, in small habitats, you are not going to have enough
people to have all the skills needed to make everything a modern
civilisation needs (wants), interesting question by itself, how many
people/skills do you need to have a functioning, modern, hi-tech, space
based civilisation? You are going to have a need for skills that are not
needed down here and I mean need, not want, you can survive without pet
therapists but try it without industrial chemists.

Here is a possibility, lots of robotics and 3D printers, things like the
rapid prototyping, add to that advanced bio-tech that allows you to *grow*
many of your needs. I'm not suggesting that you will grow chairs or cars but
how about plants that produce plastic or micro-organisms that produce high
strength fibres and so on, we have already started on this track and I can
only see us going further down it. Peter Hamilton uses this a lot in his
stories (not that being in a story makes something inevitable), growing
*coral* into a house as an example, the possibilities are huge.

We may not need a huge industrial base to maintain a habitat, just a
versatile one and of course there is no reason why a habitat has to be a
solitary thing, they might be arranged in clusters, joined or just near each
other, this would give you a larger base to operate from.

Just some thoughts.

Darren

On 12/6/06 12:09 AM, "Omar E. Vega" wrote: