It's like suggesting people would really want to move to the nearest shopping mall and stay inside it for the rest of their lives.
Introducing Nouvelle at Natick, a luxury condominium community combining the best of urban lifestyle with the comforts of suburban living. Located at Natick Collection – the Metro West’s premier living, dining, and shopping destination
Quote from: William Barton on 05/18/2009 09:10 pmIt's like suggesting people would really want to move to the nearest shopping mall and stay inside it for the rest of their lives. http://www.nouvelleatnatick.com/QuoteIntroducing Nouvelle at Natick, a luxury condominium community combining the best of urban lifestyle with the comforts of suburban living. Located at Natick Collection – the Metro West’s premier living, dining, and shopping destination Cough... that is a condo inside of the Natick Collect, a mall...
It's the same reason almost nobody really wants to live in an undersea city, a tunnel on the Moon, or in Antarctica.
Quote from: kevin-rf on 05/18/2009 10:34 pmQuote from: William Barton on 05/18/2009 09:10 pmIt's like suggesting people would really want to move to the nearest shopping mall and stay inside it for the rest of their lives. http://www.nouvelleatnatick.com/QuoteIntroducing Nouvelle at Natick, a luxury condominium community combining the best of urban lifestyle with the comforts of suburban living. Located at Natick Collection – the Metro West’s premier living, dining, and shopping destination Cough... that is a condo inside of the Natick Collect, a mall...Hard to tell from the pictures -- is that a "grand mall", or more of a "petit mall"?
Hard to tell from the pictures -- is that a "grand mall", or more of a "petit mall"?
They probably won't catch on in the US until they start building O Neil type colonies.There just is plenty of room there to go find a better place to live if you're sick of an urban environment.But even a Standford Torus Colony may be a vast improvement in quality of living for very crowded countries such as Japan.An O'Neil Colony could be a very desirable location over living in the bowels of a mega city just by the fact it was designed with a new clean slate vs being urban sprawl. Of course there are other factors that could end up driving space colonization money from mining or just getting away from earth governments.These were the driving factors behind Europe's colonization of the new world.Many settlers did trade short term comfort and security for freedom and profit.From a species survival stand point space colonies would be collectively more secure then a single planet even though each one is less secure then then a planet.A single dino killer impact or nuclear war probably can wipe out a civilization living on a single planet.But it would take an event like a nearby star going nova to wipe out a civilization that has mastered living in space.
The points been made many times in the past, but it also misses the point. Living in a space colony would probably be an improvement over living in a Tokyo microtel, but those aren't the people who will be going.
The undersea cities comparison is a good one. That idea was popular in science fiction stories in the 50s and 60s, but it never really captured peoples' imagination. Nobody did engineering studies. Space colonies gathered more attention and an activist group.
So long as space travel is not safe, quick, convenient nor economical, it will not "catch on."
Chemical rockets will never give us what we want and need. Never. Doesn't matter if they're SSTO or RLV. They will NEVER be cheap enough for the average Joe to vacation there.
Quote from: GI-Thruster on 05/19/2009 10:37 pmSo long as space travel is not safe, quick, convenient nor economical, it will not "catch on." Neither train travel nor air travel started out safe, quick, convenient, or economical - and both 'caught on' long before those four conditions were satisfied. Some time after, the average Joe started traveling via those methods too...
Quote from: GI-Thruster on 05/19/2009 10:37 pm Chemical rockets will never give us what we want and need. Never. Doesn't matter if they're SSTO or RLV. They will NEVER be cheap enough for the average Joe to vacation there.You have no basis to make such a statement other than your biased agenda. The same thing was said about jet engines and their use for long distance flights.Chemical more than likely will be the only way off the planet.
1.Chemical propulsion will not be used to do more than lift a few scores of professionals giving us a vicarious experience because it cannot be used for more. 2. It is too expensive and you'd see that as an obvious observation were not something driving you to disagree with me. You have made the point yourself that space travel is not cheap and will never be cheap so why disagree with my observation?
In the US, where distances were comparatively huge, the federal government collaborated with private industry to get the rail network in place.