Fran, thanks for the education. I did speak quite hastily, didn’t I?
Perhaps, even though I spent decades digesting the best SF to be found, I lack vision. Still, given the current human condition/ situation, I just don’t see how any set of humans we got to, say, the asteroid belt, would do better than those of us here on earth. By this I mean that fairly quickly they would be using up resources and polluting the cosmos let alone other aspects of being human, like mini- wars.…but more importantly, technologically I don’t see it happening before we exhaust earth. On Jul 29, 2:50 pm, frantheman <[email protected]> wrote: > On 29 Jul., 20:03, ornamentalmind <[email protected]> wrote:> For the > record, the above was written by fran and not me. > > > And, yes, air, food, water...none are found in the asteroid belt. > > Sorry, orn, not true for two out of three. Water and the gases needed > to constitute a breathable atmosphere are there. In fact, you really > only need oxygen, which can be easily won from water - the resultant > hydrogen left over could be used, among other things, as a propellant, > or source of energy. What we probably really need is the technology > for controlled fusion to get a lot of this going. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining > > In the absence of FTL travel we seem to be limited in the foreseeable > future to the solar system. The scenario which Allan presents > (habitats in the asteroid belt) seems quite possible. The belt is a > rich source for all sorts of anorganic material - the economics of > extracting increasingly limited resources on our planet will make such > a step increasingly attractive in the next couple of hundred years. > Despite all sorts of philosophical, ethical and practical objections, > it seems likely to me that the genetical engineering djinn is already > truly out of the bottle, leading to possible applications in the area > of hydroponics and synthetic food production, perhaps even human > genetic engineering with respect to problematic aspects of > weightlessness. > > I'm not saying that that many of the possible paths of development > don't contain aspects which I, personally, might find disquieting. > But, given the human characteristics of monkey inquisitiveness and our > propensity to take risks to make a potential buck - as well as more > noble motives - I do see it as probable that we will go this way. We > will probably not see it - our grandchildren probably will. > > Francis --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Minds-Eye?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
