Space Colonies: Debate: Return to Son of Still More Comments on O'Neill's Space Colonies
Return to Son of Still More Comments on O'Neill's Space Colonies



David Shetzline urges the space colony people to remember the lessons of the past.

"Yawp". OK, who is that word from?

Jonathan Feiman brings up a point Arthur C. Clarke once mentioned in passing, that it may be difficult to get a decent cup of tea in space.

John Holt's entry is quite lengthy, long enough to get hidden behind a cut of its own over on the host site. His basic point is that you cannot just say "this problem or that problem will be easy to solve" and then wave your hands, you have to actually get into the meat of the subject - which is going to involve things like math and chemistry - and examine all of the issues involved in the project.

This triggered a long back and forth between Holt and T.A. Heppenheimer (otherwise known as the spoilsport who ruined Bussard ramjets) that reminded me a bit of some energetic discussions on sci.space.* back when it was not populated mostly by crackpots and people too stubborn to admit the time has come to emigrate to more fruitful venues.

Paul L. Siegler offers a comment I was going to mock for its use of capital letters. On closer examination, I will mock it for looking like a pitch for his company.

[Herman Kahn used to litter his books with pitches for the Hudson Institute that were as subtle as German soup ad. It was very cute]

Douglas Nommisto offers a Cold War justification for a larger US space program: if the US is not careful, the Commies might grab space for themselves.

As it turned out, Buran was a bit of a dud but the Soviets did have a fairly impressive manned space program. It turned out holding the High Ground in space was less important than not having an economy that was pissing blood (But very few people in the West had any idea how badly off the Soviet Union was back then).

Gurney Norman manages to overcome his rational side with an appeal to woo. One of the many characteristics of the 1970s was a credulousness that was not, sadly, killed with fire before it could spread.

Gary Snyder and M. Phillips offer comments too brief to consider.

Albert Himae dismisses the idea of space colonies by comparing them to Brasilia, Brazil's capital city, famously created by governmental fiat in the middle of nowhere like those other failed government project cities, Ottawa and Washington DC. At the time it was known as something of a failed project. I seem to recall modern Brasilia has a healthy growth rate and a well-developed economy and also that many elements of the glorious plans for its development were abandoned or changed in the half-century or so since it was created.

Gerard O'Neill's comments are much like previous pitches by him, although now he's interested in the idea of recovering volatiles from Near Earth Asteroids. He urges haste as a cost-saving measure.

Stewart Brand offers the hope that techniques learned in space could be applied on Earth to improve life there [1] and that even failure could be education, which are both sentiments I would agree with (This whole series of entries is the second one in action).

Were there really two million SF readers back in the 1970s?


1: Not to pick on KSR but it was always striking how much better technology worked the farther you got from Earth. I assume the over-populated hordes of that world radiate some kind of anti-technology field.