[BRIEF NOTE] What high frontier, again?
Jun. 19th, 2007 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldCharlie Stross' recent blog posting "The High Frontier, Redux" has managed to stir up quite a stir with its critique of the plausiblility of space colonization, as evidenced by some of the 581 comments left at his weblog and the 177 blog links recorded by Technorati. Briefly, Stross argues that several factors--the energy requirements for spaceflight, especially across interstellar distances, sociological problems associated with isolated communities, all manner of economic implausibilities, and the fragility of the human form--will combine to make familiar science-fictional tropes like domed cities on Mars and colonies at Tau Ceti utter mirages barring radical technological developments.
In the past, I've posted a series of meditations on the subject of space colonization, and I came to with Stross. O'Neill habitats orbiting the Earth-Moon LaGrange points, a terraformed Mars, and interstellar probes (manned or otherwise) might well be great fun, but there's just no economically viable reason to do any of this. Even massive subsidies by a pro-space government won't help things catch: note the rapid depopulation of far northern Siberia once Soviet subsidies stopped. As for the space development fanatics who've condemned Stross' alleged lack of imagination with a certain irrational, fervent passion, asking why he has to limit his near-term speculations to the realm of the demonstrably plausible, all I can do is look to Antarctica and note that grand egocentric pushes into the void, while spectacular, tend not to receive much public support after the first few innovative probes.
In the past, I've posted a series of meditations on the subject of space colonization, and I came to with Stross. O'Neill habitats orbiting the Earth-Moon LaGrange points, a terraformed Mars, and interstellar probes (manned or otherwise) might well be great fun, but there's just no economically viable reason to do any of this. Even massive subsidies by a pro-space government won't help things catch: note the rapid depopulation of far northern Siberia once Soviet subsidies stopped. As for the space development fanatics who've condemned Stross' alleged lack of imagination with a certain irrational, fervent passion, asking why he has to limit his near-term speculations to the realm of the demonstrably plausible, all I can do is look to Antarctica and note that grand egocentric pushes into the void, while spectacular, tend not to receive much public support after the first few innovative probes.
