Questions about "The High Frontier"

On Thu, 25 Oct 2007 02:14:02 -0500, in a place far, far away, Pat
Flannery made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

Even when the English showed up in America to set up agriculture, it was
primarily to establish a source of supply for addictive drugs (tobacco
and sugar cane for rum) manufactured via slave labor, set up by
religious zealots and political outcasts (the Puritans and Cavaliers) in
the period after The Restoration.
If that's the model you want to emulate... religious nutcases who burn
witches, predatory corrupt aristocrats, slavery, and drug lords...for
colonizing space - be my guest.

It seemed to work out pretty well by the end of the eighteenth
century.

On Thu, 25 Oct 2007 18:01:32 -0500, in a place far, far away, Pat
Flannery made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

Ferdinand III's Castille - pre ocean faring nation
Today's U.S. - pre space faring nation

We've sent manned expeditions to the Moon, which is easily as
ambitious as Columbus's voyage.
So I think that classifies us as a spacefaring nation.

If that's your minimal criteria, we are no longer a space-faring
nation.

On Thu, 25 Oct 2007 18:01:32 -0500, in a place far, far away, Pat
Flannery made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:


And that's the problem with space mining...you can get the materials far
cheaper on Earth than you can in outer space

Not if the costs of transportation render them more expensive.

, so it doesn't make any
sense to bring them to Earth from space, and that means you only use
them in space.
And what do you use them for? To build things to find and move around
more of them, so you can build yet more things to find and move around
more of them.
It's pointless in the long run.

In the long run, as Keynes said, we're all dead. What's *your* point?

On Thu, 25 Oct 2007 03:34:23 -0500, in a place far, far away, Pat
Flannery made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:



Johnny1a wrote:

This isn't really valid, except in the very shortest term. It's
simply impossible to make meaningful predictions about changing
economic, religious, and social impulses over the long term, and any
of those can transform 'utterly impractical' to 'let's do it'.


Well, if you want changing religious impulses, take a look at the
defunct L5 society and Timothy Leary's frozen head popping up like Harry
Seldon to lead the true believers on every few years, while SMI²LEing at
them.

"Timothy Leary's frozen head"?

"John Schilling" wrote in message
...

It's the workers you are rotating to and from Earth every month
or two where the week spent in transit is going to be a significant
loss, and where each worker has half a dozen opportunities every
year to say, "Screw it; I'm sick of living in a tin can and I've
made enough of a fortune already and I just found a girl I don't
want to leave quite yet, so I won't be back for the next tour."

We're viewing this similarly, save that I visualize tours of duty being
closer to 2 years than 2 months. The opportunities for "defection" might
come less frequently. But (in the absence of Earthlike living conditions or
the possibility of a family life in space) it might make signing up for
another tour of duty even less palatable if you know it's a decision that
you can't reverse in less than 2 years.

--


Regards,
Mike Combs
----------------------------------------------------------------------
By all that you hold dear on this good Earth
I bid you stand, Men of the West!
Aragorn

Jim Davis wrote:
Mike Combs wrote:


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.


Coincidentally, this is one of the main reasons why we have oil
rigs but not SSP in HEO. Any SSP and/or space colonization scheme
presupposes enormous improvements in transportation costs.

The topic of this thread was can high transportation costs justify the
construction of nice employee housing.

I live in what used to be an Arizona mining town. In Ajo's early
development, commutes to Phoenix or Tucson were impractical. First there
were tents. Then nicer tents. Then full blown house, with running water,
sewer and electricity. John Greenway was twisted his shareholders' arms
to build a downtown Ajo that included a commercial district, a park, a
protestant church, a Catholic church, and a school, all laid out
symmetricaly.
http://virtualguidebooks.com/Arizona...AjoPlazaL.html

This helped attract stable workers that wanted to stay and raise
families. Many of the oldtimers were very loyal to Greenway. His
investment in building housing, schools, churches for the miners was a
good one.

Once the infrastructure for the mine was established, it made
construction of houses, schools, etc. easier.

Assuming an orbital workplace (granted a questionable assumption but
that was the assumption of this thread), transportation costs would be
very high. Johnny 1 A has asserted that the high transportation costs
wouldn't justy building nicer facilities for the workers. A
questionaable assertion.



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


But your solution is to provide them with a *less* decent place to
live.

(rereading Mike's posts) . . . Don't see that solution. Where did he say
that?

Hop

Pat Flannery wrote:



Hop David wrote:


Ferdinand III's Castille - pre ocean faring nation
Today's U.S. - pre space faring nation


We've sent manned expeditions to the Moon, which is easily as
ambitious as Columbus's voyage.
So I think that classifies us as a spacefaring nation

Yet another tangent -- the definition of spacefaring. Not a tangent I'm
interested in.

Nor am I interested in ISS being in LEO dead end, that has nothing to do
with the question of whether high transportaion costs justify
construction of nice worker housing & facilities. Nor does it have
anything to do with using lunar or NEO resources.

Nor does Timothy Leary.

Hmmmm. Dashing off on different irrelevant tangents, a preoccupation
with Timothy Leary . . . You're tripping! My hat's off to you. I'm told
that stuff's been really hard to find since the Grateful Dead stopped
touring.

Hop

Jim Davis wrote:

John Schilling wrote:


How do you figure that? If the workers are living in a
permanent habitat adjacent to (or integrated with) the actual
work site,


What if the habitat is *not* adjacent to (or integrated with) the
actual work site? (Sort of like, you know, here on earth.) Is this
something we can be sure of?

Elsewhere I mentioned Ajo's worker housing and facilities were built
adjacent to the mine. It _does_ make sense to build worker housing and
facilities adjacent to the workplace when transportation is difficult
and expensive.

Last time I checked the homes adjacent to the Ajo mine were, you know,
here on earth.

The mine's investors could've build the miners' homes and schools a
hundred miles from the workplace. Yeah, that makes sense.



then the commute time is negligible and absenteeism certainly
ought to be negligible - where are the workers going to go?


Home. This habitat *is* going to be a *home*, isn't it? Not just
some glorified minimum security prison with conjugal priveleges,
right?


It's the workers you are rotating to and from Earth every month
or two where the week spent in transit is going to be a
significant loss, and where each worker has half a dozen
opportunities every year to say, "Screw it; I'm sick of living
in a tin can and I've made enough of a fortune already and I
just found a girl I don't want to leave quite yet, so I won't be
back for the next tour."


Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Just tell your workers they can't
choose whom they want to associate with from the billions on
earth; they're going to have to make do with whomever isn't
already spoken for among a few thousand on a Stanford torus.
They'll be lining up around the block to jump at that chance.

Indeed it does. There were Ajo miners who chose to associate with a
small Ajo population rather the teeming hordes back east. I could
substitute "Ajo" with a long list of isolated mining towns.

Hop

Hop David wrote:

This helped attract stable workers that wanted to stay and raise
families. Many of the oldtimers were very loyal to Greenway. His
investment in building housing, schools, churches for the miners
was a good one.

Yes, Hop, we all know that earth is a perfectly wonderful place to
live and that it is perfectly practical to start out with animal skin
tents and stone knives and work your way up to skyscrapers and
bulldozers as quickly or as slowly as you please. What is your point?

But your solution is to provide them with a *less* decent place
to live.

(rereading Mike's posts) . . . Don't see that solution. Where
did he say that?

Where *didn't* he say that? He wants the space workers and their
families to move from earth to a Stanford torus.

Jim Davis

Hop David wrote:

Elsewhere I mentioned Ajo's worker housing and facilities were
built adjacent to the mine. It _does_ make sense to build worker
housing and facilities adjacent to the workplace when
transportation is difficult and expensive.

Someplaces it does (places that are habitable, a populous nation
like the *United States* for example), someplaces it doesn't
(places that are uninhabitable, like the seas, the poles, space).
Note that the distinction between habitable and inhabitable hasn't
changed at all since paleolithic times. Will space be an exception?
Possibly. But no one's going to take your word for it. And no one
except a hopeless romantic is going to be persuaded by absurd
comparisons to Ajo, Arizona.

Last time I checked the homes adjacent to the Ajo mine were, you
know, here on earth.

Where people have been living for, you know, tens of thousands of
years. Do you suppose Ajo might just be more of the same in Arizona
instead of something *fundamentally* different like space?

The mine's investors could've build the miners' homes and
schools a hundred miles from the workplace. Yeah, that makes
sense.

Hop, Arizona used to be inhabited exclusively by neolithic Indians.
Do you *really* think it a good model for space settlement?
Or do you think perhaps the surface of the seas, the Arctic, and
the Antarctic which defy settlement at every level of technology
down to the present might be more appropriate?

Jim Davis