Re: Building a map of habitable space

On 30/01/2012, at 23:06 , Roger Burton West wrote:

> Somewhere between the two is another possibility: borderline-habitable
planets become regarded as "habitable" for lack of a decent alternative.
Sure, you have to stay in sealed buildings or wear a mask to scrub out
(most of) the sulphur dioxide, but once you get used to the smell it's
fine...

Arguably this already happens on Earth. There are places in Australia
that only a miner would regard as habitable, and I was reading recently
about the mining boom in Mongolia. How do night temperatures below -40C
strike you? If we ever start mining in Antarctica, the lowest
temperature recorded there is -89C, which makes the Mongolian winter
seem balmy, and approaches the -107C lowest recorded surface temperature
on Mars. Saturation divers live for weeks on end in sealed hyperbaric
"living quarters". At present, people tend to accept living in such
conditions for short periods for high pay, but if it took months to get
there... Robert Hughes' "The Fatal Shore" might make instructive
reading.

It's strange, but SF universes and future-histories tend to read as if
discovering FTL travel *bang* immediately leads to interstellar
exploration and colonisation. This doesn't make a lot of sense unless
the future-history includes a *lot* (a century or two?) of vigorous
prior space-technology development, and space-craft design progress,
simply to allow long-duration space missions in our local solar system.
If you took away the warp-drive, the starship Enterprise would still
require sub-light propulsion, life-support systems, artificial gravity
etc. If some bright spark in a physics lab invented hyperdrive next
week, what could we do; send a Soyuz to Alpha Centauri? But, just to
take an example rather than pick on one author, Jerry Pournelle's
CoDominium timeline has four years (2004-2008) for discovery of the
Alderson Drive through to first interstellar exploration, with
colonisation beginning roughly ten years after the first exploration
ships leave the solar system!