Re: Footsteps to Mars

In article <1169611192.273979.276430@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Ordover@xxxxxxx wrote:

There was little effort put into crossing the Bearing Land Bridge -
either the people just followed the game and walked, or, as recent
evidence seems to imply, used wooden boats to move several dozen miles
at a time.

That seems trivial to us these days. To those people, it was a pretty
big deal, though I agree not a huge one. In the same way, building
space settlements won't be a huge deal either at some point.
Technology, in general, makes us all richer, and simultaneously makes
everything easier and less expensive.

Europeans were driven by nothing but economic motives - the search for
arable land and gold.

Right, i.e., resources. In the same way, we'll be driven into the solar
system by the search for resources, and they are out there to be found
in amounts thousands to millions of times as great as on Earth.

There is no arable land and no monetary exchange
material in space.

Incorrect. Arable land is whatever you can grow crops in, and we
already have the technology to grow crops in materials found abundantly
elsewhere in space. And "no monetary exchange material"? You mean like
gold, platinum, and diamonds, all of which are available far beyond
what's available on Earth? The biggest problem with them is that
they're so common, they may lose most of their value which is currently
based on scarcity. Fortunately, our monetary systems really aren't tied
to the scarcity of certain materials anymore.

In fact, the resources in space are few and far between

Man are YOU behind the times. The asteroid belt alone contains enough
resources to support 10 quadrillion people at Western standards. And
the Jovian Trojans look likely be even richer. And those are just two
regions of the solar system; there are many more.

and do not include free air, free water, free construction
materials and free or nearly free food like the Americas did.

Sure they do. Or will, as the technology to exploit them becomes as
affordable to us as oceangoing ships and steel were to the colonial
Europeans.

Space is a cold, airless, waterless and foodless desert where even
rocks are hundreds of thousands or millions of miles away from each other.

It's hard not to dip to ridicule when faced with such statements.
....Must...not...laugh...at...ignorance...

Life left the ocean because there were untapped and safer resources on
land

Right, just like the vast untapped and safer resources in space compared
to Earth.

there are no such resources in space

So, so wrong. Go read a book. I recommend "Mining the Sky" by John S.
Lewis. Follow up on the references therein if you doubt his statements,
and keep working your way back until you're either arguing with the
(very solid) observational data, or arguing with the calculations (which
require nothing more than grade-school arithmetic). A word of caution,
though: that book is about a decade old, and considerably more resources
have been found since then (e.g. NEOs and lunar hydrogen), so it
actually understates the available resources a bit.

in fact, as far as we can
tell, life, even after billions of years, never evolved to "crawl" out
of the atmosphere and into space, because of the hostile and
resource-free environment of space.

Give it another century or two and see what it does.

Best,
- Joe
.

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