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Am I A Space Cadet?
Nov. 1st, 2011 10:16 amI like the science fiction of Charles Stross. However, he is notoriously pessimistic about the possibility of near-term space colonization. His mind is made up, and he asked recently What is it about the whole space colonization meme that causes its followers to personally identify with it so vehemently, despite the lack of scope for near-term actualization?
I don't think I'm vehement about space colonization. Living in space is hard, and there's both stuff we don't know how to do and stuff we don't know we don't know how to do (Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns"). Colonization will be slow and dotted with disasters.
Having said that, a large obstacle to even finding out if colonization is possible are launch costs. So, things like Tobias Buckell's useful survey of private spaceflight initiatives cause hope to fill the hearts of the "space cadets." The bottom line of Buckell's post is that with 13 companies and 4 nations (US, Russia, China and India) working on manned spaceflight, the odds of somebody cracking the launch cost nut seems pretty high.
I don't think I'm vehement about space colonization. Living in space is hard, and there's both stuff we don't know how to do and stuff we don't know we don't know how to do (Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns"). Colonization will be slow and dotted with disasters.
Having said that, a large obstacle to even finding out if colonization is possible are launch costs. So, things like Tobias Buckell's useful survey of private spaceflight initiatives cause hope to fill the hearts of the "space cadets." The bottom line of Buckell's post is that with 13 companies and 4 nations (US, Russia, China and India) working on manned spaceflight, the odds of somebody cracking the launch cost nut seems pretty high.
