You talked about building an O’Neill colony. I laid out the few simple reasons why it won’t happen in our lifetimes and why we have no idea what would be built in the long term. Those are the only opinions I expressed, and I expressed both because at no point did you bother to clarify what time-scale you were talking about, and it seemed simpler to address both.
I shall look it up. I actually enjoy these sorts of ideas quite a lot. I have quite the opposite of contempt for both the imagination and pioneering spirit that drove 20th century dreams of space utopias. Apathy? I find it interesting. I have enough humility to know we’re cave men compared to anyone who might eventually build self-sustaining space habitats. And @popobawa4u is quite right that I’m dismissive of this sort of thing as a life-raft to this century’s problems, because climate change is a real problem we have to solve, and leaving won’t do that. Again, in some cases you seem to be unrealistically suggesting near term colonies. Other times you seem to be talking about the long term. Feel free to clarify when you think Earthlings will build colonies and I’ll narrow down my arguments.
So you’re already blaming me for your failure before you’ve even failed? Look dude, either the reality is you can or you can’t. Don’t blame me when the economics of space colonization come home to roost.
So prove me wrong. By all means. I’m not going to ignore reality simply because you don’t like my brusque attitude toward arguments that do.
The thing is that you’d either need a whole fleet of them and other machines to fix them when they broke or so many you can discard those that do. Or, more realistically, you’d need a space-based industry to build and maintain them on site, in the vacuum of space. That’s decades of work in robotics and self-replicating machinery. The technical term is von Neumann probe (this is the robots that @austintx was probably vaguely referring to above, and it’s the tech I was referring to). That’s the bare minimum we’d need to even start the very long process of gathering resources for and building an O’Neill colony. If we could, then we could start that long process, provided you could get the funding. Who would invest in such a thing? Congress cuts NASA’s budget every chance it gets and you can bet scientists like me will be there to protest wasting public science budgets on boondoggles like that; it’s not personal, there’s real science to fund.
That actually gets to what I’m saying. I’m not hubristic enough to imagine what a civilization that far down the road would really build. But even extrapolating from now and ignoring all the surprises we can’t predict, matrioshka brains have a clear and decisive competitive advantage over using resources for large self-sustaining human habs in a micro-gravity vacuum environment. The idea of re-building the complex delicate physical ecosystem humans need is…less than realistic. But hey, I wish anyone who wants to try it luck. Just not with my tax dollars.
