"Mike Combs" wrote in message ...
"warrenb" wrote in message
...

It makes more sense/cheaper to live on the bottom of the ocean, or build a
biosphere in the desert

This proceeds from an incorrect assumption: that the problem is we're
getting too crowded and we need to develop another place not currently
filled with humans in order to hold the spillover.

That's not true at all. The practical reason is that we are running
short of critical mateirals - as pointed out in the URLs I provided
earlier. We don't have enough energy on Earth we don't have enough
strategic materials on Earth to meet the needs of an industrial
humanity. THe solar system has these in abundance. We can collect
solar energy and use it to make synthetic oil or oil replacements if
done cheaply enough. We can capture rich asteroids and bring them
back to Earth to provide critical raw materials. This is the
practical reason to support space travel in the present age.

That's not the reason
why we want to develop space. We want to develop space because we want to
have a destiny that lies beyond this one tiny little corner of the universe.

That's not practical enough. While it is true humanity has always
developed its frontiers when the resources of the center have failed -
while it is true that Earth is the center and the solar system the
frontier in the present age - we still need a practical focus for our
activities. And here it is. We obtain solar energy efficiently from
the sun while in space. We obtain critical materials from asteroids
moved to Earth orbit with space faring technologies like nuclear pulse
rockets.

There is also a spiritual dividend to space exploration. Fully 1/3 of
all lunar astronauts had a life-changing spiritual experience from
their trip. The environmental movement can be shown to be a result of
Apollo 8s picture of Earth taken from the moon - floating alone and
vulnerable in space, without international borders.

This suggests that for astronauts who travel far from Earth (not the
high-altitude flight of the Shuttle or SS1) a significant portion of
them will gain deep insights that will illuminate future spiritual and
political experience.

This sort of experience and growth is uniformly feard by police states
- but this sort of thing is essential to the continued Ascent of Man!
(Okay I admit, I've recently watched Jacob Bronowski again on the
Science Channel! )