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Monday, January 28, 2013 - 4:18pmSanction this postReply
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It is important to dream.  It is also easy to quibble with the technical details here, which, really, are not technical details, but the stuff of dreams.  European colonists in America at first attempted to recreate the old world.  The English found that their thatched roots were fire hazards in the drier climate of New England.  The Spanish tried unsuccessfully to get wool exports from what is today New Mexico.  Then, they adapted.  So, too, will space colonization be very different from what is imagined in Monart Pon's article.  But that is not important now.

Similarly, the economic and political arrangements that make this possible in the first place, and then those which sustain it, will be as different from our imaginings of capitalism as Thomas More's  Utopia was from our society.  Edward Bellamy's socialist fantasy Looking Backward, Huxley's Brave New World, and, of course, Orwell's 1984, all projected futures that did not happen.  That, too, is not so important.


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Monday, January 28, 2013 - 6:51pmSanction this postReply
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... just to say, getting divorced from my first wife was momentarily heartbreaking, but I got over it.  Not being on the Moon is worse than that.  Here we are in 2013...  The only space station is a research outpost for four people. 

We lost our nerve, for one thing.  And, government funding was not the way to go.  If you have read The Man Who Sold the Moon, or seen the movie Destination: Moon, then you know that industrialists should have done this -- would have done this, had not the government co-opted the space program. 

See Forbes here
Today, most proponents of colonizing space tend to stick to solid bodies on which to plant their flags. But for a brief idealistic moment some four decades ago, the idea of self-sustaining, free-floating space colonies housing tens of thousands of off-worlders was taken very seriously by members of the “L5 Society.”

See the biography of Gerard K. O'Neill here.

My "cousin" Tom Marotta of Marotta Space Research here.

Not my best work, but documented, nonetheless -- Space Colonies: an Annotated Bibliography by Michael E. Marotta on Amazon.

But I would be happy to pay taxes if we had a colony on the Moon and stations in space and a base on Mars, even if we shared it with the Russians and Chinese.




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