Here's the hitch about people living in space stations. OK, we have
the technology for a closed ecosystem in space. Well, wouldn't it be
much much much cheaper to create the same closed biosphere ON EARTH?
We could set them up in the Sahara, the American West, Siberia, the
Australian outback, the Gobi Desert, Canada, Greenland, Antarctica, the
Oceans...
Millions of them, housing hundreds of billions of people, all for a
fraction of the cost of building them in space, with very little
environmental damage since they are sealed biospheres. Plus, you have
the advantage that if your biosphere breaks you have a back-up life
support system, Earth's biosphere.
And anyway, the place to develop biospheres is on earth, not space!
Trying to figure out closed ecologies is difficult enough without
multiplying the cost by several thousandfold by doing it in space. We
will figure out closed ecologies on Earth first. Imagine we have the
technological know-how to build a self-sufficient moon base. Well, why
build the damn thing on the moon? Why not (shudder) Canada? Well, OK,
it will be more difficult to set up our libertarian utopia in (shudder)
Canada. But if biosphere living is so good, soon us libertarian
utopian biospherists will outnumber the native (shudder) Canadians...
=====
Darryl
Think Galactically -- Act Terrestrially
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