Re: [OT] Bureau of Relocation

On Thu, 11 May 2000 sportyspam@harm.dhs.org wrote:

>   On that note...  India has officially become the second country to
have
> in excess of 1 billion people.

i missed that one. i've heard of UN projections that the population will
overtake China soon. scary.

> On Thu, 11 May 2000 Aron_Clark@digidesign.com wrote:
> 
> > IIRC there was also mention of this Bureau in "The Outposter", which
may have
> > preceded West of Honor.  Though I'll have to check the copy rights. 
Certainly
> > seemed to be a logical argument for colonization.  Over crowded,
economically
> > strapped homeworld ships excess population to the stars.

hold your horses - exporting people is *hard*. this is where my flipmode
alternative comes in - keep the people, set up space farms and import
food. you do the processing spaceside, so you only have to ship solid
starch and protein interstellar. shipping bulk food (space = free
refrigeration 8) ) is much cheaper than shipping people, and it doesn't
matter if the transit time is in years as long as the supply is steady.
now, i haven't done the maths, so i can't show that shipping food would
be
cheaper than shipping people - it might be tricky, given the propensity
of
people to multiply etc. otoh, you'd have unoccupied virgin worlds to
farm
(after you've terraformed, natch), so the farming itself should be cheap
(well, cheaper than colony-building).

tom