View Single Post
  #29  
Old October 3rd 07, 05:21 AM posted to rec.arts.sf.science,sci.space.history
Pat Flannery
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 18,465
Default Questions about "The High Frontier"



Mike Combs wrote:

It might have been T. A. Heppenheimer who said, "Space colonies are a kind
of political Rorschach test".


That's a very good analogy; everyone sees in them what they want to.
Utopia or something like living in a giant tin can?
Amazingly enough, there is a very close analogy to living in a space
habitat here on Earth - a place untouched by most laws, where everyone
lives in fairly close quarters in the middle of a hostile environment
with only fairly rare visits from outside groups; that being the
Antarctic science stations. I've talked to two people who were stationed
at them, and they didn't exactly compare them to a vacation on the
French Riviera.

But I am sanguine about space habitats as political experimentation
laboratories. If one's society ultimately fails (or just consistently
performs poorly), it would have to be a result of its underlying philosophy.
In a space habitat, one could hardly blame resource depletion, an energy
crisis, population pressures, a crop failure, or inconvenient location.


How about if a neighboring colony blows a hole in yours to let the air
out, then seizes it for their own, as they want to increase their
population?
The other problem is political extremists and Utopian true believers;
the concept of little flying political laboratories is going to attract
those two groups like bees to honey, and a political uprising inside of
a space colony has a real potential for getting its entire population
killed.
The people it is going to attract are the last ones you would want on
board, rather like what happened to the L5 Society itself.

Pat