On Oct 24, 12:25 pm, "Mike Combs"
wrote:
"Jim Davis" wrote in message

. 96.26...



Mike, you're a good guy and everything, but the above is a textbook
example of thinking with your heart instead of your head. In any
other context except space (you yourself bring up oil rigs) you
would quickly recognize the absurdities. But since this is space
we're talking about...well, things are different in space, right?

This big difference is that a person on an oil rig can pop back and forth
between it and land much more quickly and inexpensively than a person
working in HEO can pop back and forth to Earth.

Yeah, I'm aware that I'm arguing events will go in the direction of my
fondest dreams. So caution is called for. But I think part of my point was
that a company might have a perfectly selfish reason for wanting to provide
their workers with decent places to live (namely, a desire to not have to
train and educate new recruits every two years because nobody wants to stay
with the company any longer than that).

And you could be right in principle, eventually.

The trouble is that O'Neill Habs are not just 'decent places to live'
in the usual sense, there's a huge gap in options between 'bare-bones
construction shack' and 'O'Neill Hab'. You have to go a _long_ way to
make the O'Neill justifiable on any terms other than 'for its own
sake'.

I'm actually more-or-less on your side of the debate...on a longer-
term time scale. I _do_ think humans are going to spread out into
space, probably eventually on both the planets and in artificial
environments in space. I doubt very seriously if any O'Neill Habs _as
such_ will ever be built, any more than we ever built the Jule Verne
cannon to send men to the Moon, or built da Vinci's flying machines to
make air travel workable.

But it's not going to happen in accordance with the economic/social
motives O'Neill posited.