
Why I thought we'd all be living in space by now - pg
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/About/Education/SpaceSettlement/70sArt/art.html
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ryanwaggoner
The reason that we're not isn't technical capability: it's a lack of demand.
Why spend hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars to put 10,000 people in
space? Because we can? Not good enough...space exploration and colonization
will only really pick up when we must do it to survive and/or there's a
serious financial incentive.

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gravitycop
People do not move to, and telecommute from, Hawaii because they must do it to
survive. It also is not cheap for them to do so. 1.3 million people currently
live in Hawaii, though it would be cheaper for them to live on the mainland.

If Hawaii can attract telecommuters, perhaps Earth orbit can attract
telecommuters.

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rsheridan6
Hawaii has nice weather and beaches. What does Earth orbit have?

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gravitycop
Earth orbit has:

    
    
      A continuum of accelerations, down to zero g.
    
      Hard vacuum.
    
      A sense of place that is not Earth surface.
    

Do they look like they are having fun?:

<http://images.google.com/images?q=zero+gravity>

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rsheridan6
That would be fun until you had to take a piss.

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gravitycop
Indeed. Moving away from the axis-of-rotation increases acceleration. When you
are ready, you can go back to zero-g, or .5 g, or 1 g, or 1.5 g, etc. Instead
of having to pay thousands of dollars each for airplane parabola rides, it is
all right there.

For the same reasons that ski bums live near ski slopes, zero-g bums might
live near zero-g. When you live in a spinning orbital habitat, you can have
rapid inexpensive access - a veritable season pass - to a variety of
acceleration levels.

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TomOfTTB
It’s sad because the Biosphere 2 is pretty close to this by all accounts. But
the disastrous second mission (which had nothing to do with technical
problems, see here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2#Second_mission>)
really hurt the development of biosphere’s on earth which in turn hurt the
cause as a whole.

But the reality is this...

1\. Biosphere 2’s first mission was an overall success, albeit with a few
glitches

2\. The International Space Station exists and is working relatively well
proving we can put a self contained environment in Space virtually without
problem

Combine those and you see that the technology is really in our grasp.It’s
simply been held back by a few unlucky events that have kept us from ironing
out all the bugs.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think we’ll have a 10,000 person colony in space
any time soon. But I think an artificial environment off the International
Space Station is possible and I wish more research was being done.

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rms
Cut the US defense budget in half and we'd have 10,000 people on Mars in 20
years. It's an issue of priorities.

~~~
eru
Either by using that money to lowering taxes or finance NASA.

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TomOfTTB
Your both probably right but priorities come from Public Sentiment more than
anything else. So it's as much the fault of people not talking about it (which
I'm guilty of) as it is the fault of anything else.

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vaksel
the problem is that there is nothing to do in space. If there was some mining
of asteroids or lets say trade with aliens...then sure space colonies would
make sense.

All we need is some gold rush for unobtanium, and there'll be 100,000 in space
in 5 years

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gaius
You mean like the tritium that's just lying there on the surface of the moon?
As soon as we have working fusion reactors on Earth that'll make the Saudi
oilfields look like pocket change.

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gravitycop
It is Helium-3 that is on the moon. Tritium is _Hydrogen_ -3 (and has a half-
life of only 12.3 years, so it is unlikely that there is _any_ on the moon).

~~~
gaius
You're completely right, my mistake.

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zandorg
It's a shame SpaceX has so many employees. They're offering a 4x saving on a
rocket trip, but I think it could be 10x by cutting out dead wood from mission
control (eg, more automation) while it's still possible.

~~~
randallsquared
If they continue to be a private company, they can add automation as they
scale up without adding so many employees, and achieve the same. Reducing (the
percentage of) employees in favor of automation seems like something to do
after launches are so routine that all the decisions have been made multiple
times.

~~~
zandorg
I agree, especially about the 'private' part. Going public (I think) tends to
have value by having a lot of employees. Staying private won't affect the
market cap if they lay people off.

I'm not saying slash and burn, just that the lowest launch cost is made
possible.

~~~
randallsquared
Hm. I actually was referring to not becoming bound too tightly to the
government (that is, "public sector"), when I said "private". I do agree that
not becoming a publicly-traded company may help them stay small and lean, but
I'm not sure that's a major risk anytime soon anyway.

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debt
Space is incredibly dangerous. We need to put computers in space not people.

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ericb
Meh.

Air travel should be dangerous by all rights, but there is something north of
50,000 people in flight over the US at any given time.

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evgen
Air travel gets you to a place that you want to go to. Going into space just
gets you a pretty view and not much else. To quote Gurtrude Stein: 'there's no
there there"

~~~
ericb
I think you underestimate weightlessness and the possibilities moving and
floating in 3 dimensions brings. Space sports could be very different from
sports today.

What is the grand canyon other than a pretty view?

With no gravity, aging in space is a different proposition.

Insurance against nuclear and meteor catastrophe on earth is worthwhile, if
only as a backup copy of civilization.

Once people start living in space, cultures will fragment and evolve in ways
they never have before. Colonies will have their own recipes, foods,
traditions, etc. We bring the "there" with us, or create it "there."

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tokenadult
How much is it costing to put people into space currently? Once people get
there, what can they do that is worth the expense of sending them there?

