On Oct 2, 12:48 pm, Damien Valentine wrote:
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_).

As I noted above, for O'Neill the Habitats were the point, and yes,
there is a contradiction between his libertarian ideals and the
realities of what would be necessary to actually create the things. I
suspect he sensed that, and tried to create a convincing sleight of
hand to hide it from himself.

You could actually make a plausible case that an O'Neill Habitat would
of necessity be a highly _disciplined_ environment, certainly the
option of leaving if you don't like how things are run would be much
trickier in an O'Neill than on Earth. Most of the idealistic
component of the whole concept is more about dreams than thought.