Space: Exploration and Exploitation

Intro

Space, the final frotier, my mission, to boldly split infininatives that no one has split before.

I often wonder why humans living and working in space isn't as common as it is was portrayed in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It seems to me we have a whole mansion to explore (the universe) but we've taken all our stuff and put it in the toilet (the earth). Don't get me wrong, I love the earth, but its getting pretty cramped and it seems pretty stupid to let all that space go to waste.

The general state of affairs as I see it

People tend to look at human progress in two ways. First there's people
who think that progress is essential and for all intents and purposes infinately sustainable.
On the other end of the spectrum there are people(greenies mostly) who think it is mostly damaging and only sustainable for the short term and that the enviroment should be protected from these modern evils at all costs. I happen to fall
somewhere in the middle.
The two extremes of thought are both seriously lacking in strength, their arguments tend to tiptoe around any info that doesn't support the bullshit that flows like Niagra falls from their demented little inbreed mouths.
Pro progress people tend to waffle on about how the earth has more then enough to support humans for a billion years. This may be true but at the same time their arguments concerning our impact on ecosytems and biodiversity tend to be vague, something along the lines of "oh, well we might be sending millions of species extict, but you know, they might of died anyway, and hey most of them are only icky bugs anyway. Ewww!"
The greenies of course go on about how technology is all bad and that mobile phones are giving blue whales breast cancer, which in turn causes global warming which melts the polar icecaps and drowns the poor inocent panda bears.
They tend to be huge hypocrites as well with staments like "Hey dude I'm a tree hugging vegan, I don't kill panda bears."
While at the same time leaving out the fact that their vegetables come from land that has been cleared which always destroys thes habitats of native animals and plants.

The case for Space

Human have adapted their behaviour so well we can live in numbers that wouldn't be sustained by an animal of the same size and diet. The behavioral adaptions that have allowed us to do this are:
Agriculture - this allowed us to abandon seasonal migration. Without settling down it is almost impossible for technology to improve beyond a primitive level.

Medicine - without it our average life spans would be considerably lower, probably around 30 - 40years as compared to the 70 - 80 years of most first world countries.

Elimination of competitive species and Promotion of helpful species. For example we clear land of non food producing plants to make way for crops, then we kill off any "pests" that eat our crops. We clear land for pastures to feed livestock, then we kill any species that kills our livestock.

Food Storage and transport - surplus food can be stored so survial is not affected by natural seasonal differences in food supply. This is also tied in with commerce.

These adaptions mean that our:
Our population has rapidily increased
The area of land needed for human habitation has increased
Our need for resources has increased
And we have put great pressures on our natural enviroment.
If your not conviced of how much human actions can disturb the earth's delicate biological systems lets look at a good example, the Ashwan Dam in Egypt.
I pick this because it's a typical example of how projects with good intentions can have a bad knock on effect.
The Ashwan Dam is a hydro-electric dam in the Nile river.
Before it was built the Nile would flood annually which wasn't great seen as exceptionally great for the people who lived next to it.
So when they built the Dam they thought "Great we can stop the floods, fit in heaps of people in by the river and sell lots of electricity. Hooray!."
What they didn't count was that the floods were a very important part of the natural cycle.
The floods would bring silt to the shores of the nile.
This would make the land around it very fertile for crops.
In fact in ancient times people would be taxed according to the level of the floods.
Now of course without the floods the land is less fertile and requires fertilizer(which a lot of farmer there can't afford and it can produce algal bloom when it runs off into the rivers) and has resulted in the desertification of much of northern africa.
It's something that can't be reversed without flooding the homes of millions of people that inhabit the shore of the Nile.

Space give us a place where we can mine, grow crops etc. without upsetting all the natural systems organic and inorganic that keep us alive.
We can exploit space free of guilt because there are no biological systems for us to stuff up except what we put there.
.
The difference between the closed enviroment of the station and the closed enviroment of earth is that we can control the enviroment in the stations and of course we'll understand alot more about it compared to the earth.

I'm not suggesting we should abandon earth entirely but I do think that the human population is way above what it can sustain enviromentally. Every species has a sustainable population limit and humans are no different. I wouldn't be suprised if thelimit of how many humans our planet can support is less than 1 million, which is about what it was at the dawn of human exsistance 150-200thousand years ago.
So I'd suggest in the future the population of the earth will be less than the population of space.
Now you may wonder how this will ever happen, how do you get people to moved from this small but comfy rock.
This is something that stumped me before until I remembered something similar has already before in human history - it was the industrial revolution.
The move from earth to space is not unlike the move from country to city in the industrial revolution.
Pre-industrial village industry is analogous to earth based industry and city based mass production is analogous to space industry. The main problem will be making sure all countries rich or poor will benefit. All too many
technological developments haven't reached the people who need it most in developing countries.

Questions and Links

So this leaves us with few questions, such as:
how do we make space travel cheap and reliable?
Where do we live in space?
How do we profit from space?
I'll use some links to other pages to show possible answer to these questions.
Email me at yabbleshite@yahoo.com

Transportion -

The Thomas Townsend Brown Site A site about an obscure inventor who experimented with electrogravity-the real future of space travel - err well that's if it isn't the bunch of crap that NASA says it is...who knows?
visit this site for short T.T.Brown Biography
X-33 resuable lauch vehicleNASA single stage earth to orbit vehicle
Habitation - Space Settlement this is very good website with space station info, essays plus a few good hard scifi stories written by the author.
Industry - P.E.R.M.A.N.E.N.T.A good site with info about space mining.

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