Posted on 03/20/2006 3:30:14 PM PST by KevinDavis
O'Neill! With two L's! *holds up 3 fingers*
Lunar Homestead Act, anyone?
We could claim Mars for the U.S., and then subdivide it, and sell land-parcels to the Middle-East to reclaim our petro-dollars.
Advanced technology (nanotech, space elevator) needs to be developed to make these schemes far less expensive to implement.
between the ears of most Democrats...
There was a another book out in the mid 1970's I enjoyed reading was titled "Colonies in Space" by Heppenheimer. Of course the Whole Earth Catalog is a classic and must have on any book shelf IMHO.
This is a fascinating subject, but I have always been skeptical of our ability to establish colonies in space.
The big question that nobody has answered when it comes to space colonization is WHY. It's easy to throw around lofty goals like diversifying our habitat, improving human knowledge, or exploring for alien life, but all of those goals ignore the reality of colonization.
Once your first explorers map the way, REAL colonists will only show up if you can demonstrate that colonization will be personally profitable for them. People don't move for ideals, they move for wealth. People with nothing settled the west because it gave them land they could generate money with. People fled from Europe to the America's not for some lofty ideal, but because the America's gave them a chance to escape their feudal system and profit. Heck, even the Mexicans who come here today do so because they want to generate wealth.
The problem is, how are you going to show Joe Average that he can make a ton of money and improve his own personal fortunes by moving to the moon or Mars? There's no rain there, no surface gold, no farmable land, and no hope that any of that would change within a dozen generations. Pro-colonizers are basically asking people to move tens of millions of miles so they can work some white or blue collar job in a giant bubble for the rest of their lives. Since wealth extraction (probably via mining) will be a large scale operation, the wealth will go to the top, leaving the average settler no better off than they would have been staying here on Earth.
It'll never fly without a personal profit motive, and I've never seen any kind of reasonable attempt at defining one. That situation will change dramatically if we ever find a Class M planet to colonize, but at the moment colonization is largely a profitless exercise and is unlikely to find many takers.
Wealth AND freedom - in the asteroid belt.
1967 UN Outer Space Treaty (which we wrote) prohibits.
Wealth for whom? Joe Average isn't going to have the heavy mining equipment, space suits, and orbital smelters needed to profitably mine anything in space. There's a ton of money there for the companies that CAN mine asteroids, but it'll be limited to those with the capital to stomach the startup costs. The people who work those asteroids will be employees, not settlers, and they will generate income, not wealth. Without a wealth building model, there's no incentive for individuals to move out there and stay (what use is money when you have nowhere to spend it?) The people who work the mines will end up living lives like those on oil platforms...generating large sums of money out in the middle of nowhere, but returning to the mainland to actually LIVE and enjoy their income.
It's the same reason that people don't live in Antarctica or on the bottom of the ocean, both of which are FAR more technologically feasible and less expensive. We don't do it because there isn't any real benefit to it. There's lots of potential for wealth generation in both places, but it's wealth generation that would benefit stockholders, not individuals. Since COLONIZATION is driven by individuals, that problem has to be solved before people will move anywhere in any real numbers.
The incentive to stay is freedom. With nearly unlimited money and building materials, you have as large a habitat to live in as you wish. Eventually there will be cities and millions of others to interact with and to trade with. Few will want to return to Earth.
That didn't seem to matter much during the Gold Rush. Perception, rather than reality, is key. A good marketing campaign, and we'd be off to the races. The real winners will be the suppliers of ancillary items (bubbles, space-suits for excursionary activities, entertainment), not the extractionary industries. Could probably be most easily marketed to seperatist groups, the same as Colonial America. The Puritans, et al, voluntarily accepted a lower standard of living in material terms for increased personal freedoms.
None of that will happen while the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty is in effect. No significant money for private space development will be available.
"1967 UN Outer Space Treaty (which we wrote) prohibits"
Reason #999 to dissolve the UN. I'll bet that little tyrant Kofi literally believes he runs the Universe based on that authority.
The UN Treaty has nothing to do with the UN.
Why not just allow a public offering on NYSE, with the stipulation that any shareholders have to be on-board for the mission? We could basically get all of the gullible moonbats who have nothing better to do with their money to ship themselves into space, and pay for the privilege, to boot! They'd all be shareholders, so the wealth-building model (or perception of one) would be in play.
"The UN Treaty has nothing to do with the UN."
So it seems the liberals declared the lifeless void of space a sort of 'biological reserve' then, and off-limits to private development? Who were the signatories?
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