Re: GZGL FH - Habitats in Space.

On Wed, 2 Dec 1998, Andrew & Alex wrote:
> In GZG's Future History, will there be any space habitats, O'Neil
colonies,
> B5-like space stations, or similar? Or, with FTL drives, will people
just
> find another earth-like planet to live on?
>     What's your thoughts, ideas or comments?

jon t recently indicated that he envisaged alpha centauri as colonised 
primarily by space stations. this sounds cool.

[executive summary: space habitats are useful for mining asteroids and
gas
giants, a bit useful for certain industries and vital for enabling
interstellar trade]

consider humanity's perennial motives: food, resources, and trade. i
assume there are lots of habitable planets, perhaps due to terraforming.

* food

growing food in space is not terribly efficient - you have to provide
enormous areas, filter the sunlight, import immense quantities of
nitrogen
and carbon, etc. a planet is by far better for this one.

* resources

you can get metals from asteroid belts and hydrocarbons etc from gas
giants,  ice-over-ocean moons, etc. these are pretty much
non-terraformable, so sealed environments will be needed. you can build
domes on ice moons like titan, and you can tunnel into big asteroids,
but
for gas giants or small asteroids space habitats are the thing. for
asteroids, this has the plus that you can move your habitat once you
have
mined all the rocks in one area.

* trade

trade involves four things:

+ production of raw materials - dealt with above under food and
resources

+ manufacturing - in general, it is cheaper to site a factory on a
planet
than in space. however, there are some processes which work better in
zero
g, such as making silicon wafers, ball-bearings, maltesers and dilithium
crystals. these would need space factories, along with habitats for the
workers. another reason for space factories would be to place the
factory
close to the source of raw materials if they are very bulky.

+ consumption - this is a chancy one, but: duty-free. a space habitat
has
a good shot at claiming tax-haven status, and so would be a shopper's
paradise. this is analogous to the role of France as a nearby source of
low-tax alcohol for us brits.

+ transport of goods - freighters connect all the above stages; services
required by freighters include refuelling, repair, and	transshipment
and
processing. transshipment is simple - move stuff from  one freighter to
another, say if one company sells a cargo to another or  links up small
and large ships into a big freight network. processing is not 
manufacturing but repackaging, like grinding up ore or containerising
bulk
cargo. malta (a tiny island in the med, near the suez canal) has made
its
fortune from this. this is rather similar to b5, without the political 
gunk. these tasks all require workers, and since the ports will be in
deep
space, habitats will be needed.

i really can't see space habitats purely for people to live in as being
very important: i think history teaches us that expansion is in search
of
resources rather than anything else. things like religious freedom
account
for a tiny fraction of human exploration (sure, the pilgrim fathers were
the first to settle in north america, but it wasn't them who truly
colonised the continent).

Tom