On Tue, 02 Oct 2007 17:48:06 -0000, in a place far, far away, Damien
Valentine made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

On Oct 1, 2:10 pm, Pat Flannery wrote:
Damien Valentine wrote:
So I just got through O'Neill's "The High Frontier". There seem to be
some philosophical inconsistencies -- O'Neill claims to be promoting
individual freedoms and small-scale economies by building monolithic
power satellites and kilometer-scale orbiting cities, for instance --
but that's neither here nor there.

I've the original book; as I remember it, it wasn't so much a political,
economic, or social system he was promoting as much as the technology of using space colonies for large scale manufacturing...

No, sir; the copy I just read, at any rate, specifically promotes
colonies as bastions of individualism and freedom (although he
specifically avoids describing details of colonial government), and
also as a reservoir for Earth's population growth (which would at this
point have to be 200,000 people shipped out to L5 _every day_).

That's not so many. More people probably transit daily through the
three largest US airports than that.

Of course, the growth is set to decline and go negative later this
century, by the time such colonies would be built.