Re: Mars colonization versus Stanford Torus

John Schilling wrote:

Because there are conveniently-located bits of land all over and
around the Pacific ocean, because it is unambiguously easier to
build the support infrastructure and arrange a congregation of
customers on land, and because almost nobody was spending more
than a few weeks without touching some chunk of land.

It is also unambiguously easier to build "support infrastructure
and arrange a congregation of customers" on earth rather than in
space.

The very first whaling ships to venture into the Pacific, yes,
they may have spent three years out of Nantucket and two years
without touching any civilized port. Once Pacific whaling
became an industry, whaling ports with all the amenities of
any other civilized town started cropping up on various Pacific
islands near the whaling grounds. And made as much of a profit
as the whalers, and in most cases outlived the whalers.

Sure. But unfortunately for your analogy there are no comparable
earth-like "space islands" near the "SPS construction grounds". The
notion of building "space islands" from scratch is more properly to
be compared to building sea islands from scratch. Regretably, such
an an analogy offers little comfort to space colonization
prospects.

It's an interesting question, if the Pacific were bare of
islands, whether dedicated support ships or other open-sea
platforms would have been built to serve the same need. Moot,
because the Pacific does have plenty of islands and no ship is
ever more than a week or so out from one.

An interesting question but easy to answer. No, they would not have
been built. The expense would have been too great.

Outer space, it's not so clear. In one respect, celestial
bodies are good places to put the support infrastructure for
space industry. But, aside from asteroids if there happens to be
one in the right place, celestial bodies have gravity wells that
complicate the equation: "Let's go land on the Moon to
reprovision and give the crew some R&R", is a trickier
proposition than "Let's go sail over to Maui..."

But that is the assumption Mike Combs is making. He is assuming (on
top of a lot of other things) that it will be more profitable to
build space colonies than to rotate workers on a fixed schedule.
This is not an assumption I'm willing to grant. Indeed I would be
very much surprised if this turned out to be the case. Terrestrial
experience strongly suggests otherwise.

So I don't know whether, e.g., the bulk of the support
facilities for deep-space operations will be on the Moon with
just a transit terminal at one of the Lagrange points, or
whether we'll end up with big Lagrangian stations and just some
mines on the Moon.

I would suggest that the bulk of the support facilities for deep-
space operations will be on earth for a very long time to come.

But it will be one or the other. Whether people are building
power satellites or exploring Mars or whatever, they are going
to need services and supplies, and there will be money to be
made in providing them.

There better be or there will be no power satellites or exploring
Mars.

Well, no, actually it isn't. At most, your argument supports
the thesis that "space" colonization will be focused on bodies
like the Moon and Mars, rather than on free-space platforms.
Rather like Pacific colonization was focused on places like
Hawaii and Australia rather than on giant rafts. Fair enough.

Uh, no. My thesis is that space colonization of any description is
very much an open question and can not be considered inevitable.
The highly emotional appeal of the subject tends to obscure this,
though.

But we did at least colonize the land masses, not just send
people out from the civilized world on multi-year resource
extraction missions.

Yes, with negligible exceptions, humanity lives where it has always
lived since prehistoric times.

And the "land mass/celestial body only"
analogy, is weakened by the gravity well bit.

I make no such analogy. I merely point out that humanity has lived
where it has always lived. Sometimes humanity has found it
desirable to visit other, less hospitable places (the seas, the
deserts, the poles) but it has never seen fit to colonize such
places.

Perhaps space will be different. The case has yet to be made.

Claiming that space will only ever be populated by
space-industry workers under the most spartan of conditions, is
like claiming that there are no towns or cities on any Pacific
island, just savage natives and passing ships.

No. Its like claiming that there are no towns or cities on the
Pacific *Ocean* or the Canadian archipelego or Antarctica or the
Rub'al-Khali or that there never will be.

Jim Davis



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