Posted on 11/29/2010 5:19:10 PM PST by KevinDavis
Popular science writers have been colonizing space via descriptions of the near future akin to science fiction at least since the 1920s.1 Retrospective story telling is attractive not only because of the overlap in the audiences for popular science and hard science fiction but also it lends a measure of pleasing inevitability to the promise of space colonization. For writers intent on sneaking past the messy problems of financing and populating their future space colony, there is nothing quite so effective as the sense of inevitability for giving readers permission to engage in wishful thinking. Crucial to the perpetration of this literary deception is analogy to some incorrectly conceived historical episode of frontier opening on Earth. Consider the following three examples.
(Excerpt) Read more at thespacereview.com ...
We got to start somewhere..
some have already started..
Mars seems along way away..
Luna seems more logical place for now..
The moon is a great launch site.
It’s also a harsh mistress...
I don’t regret ever leaving Earth’s orbit but it seems like a good jumping off spot to a lot of places to me too.. I don’t think I can pass a flight physical tho.. Oh well..
What a view.. we do need space tourism, reliable transportation and stable self-supporting facilities.. who knows, it may happen yet. the question is who will own it and pay for it..
Better than mars, Mars needs women.
That’s the best three examples he could come up with for colonization ideas??
How about Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”??
How about the race of Pierson’s Puppeteers and their “Fleet of Worlds” in Larry Niven’s “Ringworld” books...a perfect Kemperer Rosette of five worlds, accelerating away at just under light speed, from the blast front coming from the galactic core that won’t reach where they were for millions of years...the ultimate in paranoia; take all of your home worlds and run...
While we’re talking Larry Niven, let’s talk about the Pak Protectors and Starseed Lures...
While we’re talking Robert Heinlein, let’s talk about Lazarus Long...
And how about the Herbert’s Butlerian Jihad and the Great Diaspora...??
How about Arthur C. Clark’s “Rendezvous With Rama”, a fifty kilometer long alien cylinder with it’s own automated civilization inside? In the third novel someone actually finds a way to travel outward in Rama...
For starters...
Cheers!!
I haven’t heard about the numbers, I have a feeling by the time Voayger reaches Alpah Centauri there will be a colony there...
I believe New Horizons would pass the Voyager probs if its trajectory were to take it out of the solar system.
I wish I were still alive to witness it when it happens.......
We weren't, you just happened to bring him up.........
I read a book years ago, written by the late Isaac Asimov, that made a compelling argument that interstellar travel at relativistic speeds may be impossible. I think in the future, we will colonize the solar system. As far as venturing out much further, I don’t think so.
I think the author just scanned the literature looking for any libertarian/conservative ideas he could attack.
I would go with Asimov’s Foundation. (Nobody else is out there)
Have you ever thought how much “The Mule” in the Foundation Trilogy resembles BHO?
True enough. Although these three do sound pretty silly.
If you examine the history of colonization, the early attempts always lost massive amounts of money, unless one of two situations applied:
1) There was a dense native population already in place. The colonizers essentially replace the native rulers in exploiting them. This is the India/Indonesia model as described in the article.
2) A highly in demand and easily exploited resource is discovered. Discovery of massive silver lodes in Mexico and Bolivia saved the Spanish colonies in the New World, which were in the process of economic disintegration due to the disappearance of the "dense native population" as a result of Old World diseases.
Similarly, the growing of tobacco saved Virginia.
The New England colonies are a partial exception to this rule, but then they were self-financed and never intended to turn a profit for stay-at-home investors. I suspect it was a good many decades before they returned a profit on the original investment.
Your examples all skip over the messy problem of how to initially colonize the solar system.
Speculation about the world 100 or 1000 years after that “first step” has been made is much easier.
Personally, I doubt we’ll get anywhere with human colonization of space without a drastically different drive. All our present systems essentially consist of throwing stuff out the back door to move the ship forward. The mass of reaction force this requires is crippling.
There are four basic forces in the universe. Two of them are electromagnetism and gravity.
We have (we think, anyway) good understanding of and ability to control the electromagnetic force. If we gain anything remotely similar in knowledge of and ability to control gravity we’ll be on our way to the stars.
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