It tells you the view of himself relative to the rest of the universe. Kirk doesn't consider space to be his home, he still thinks that EARTH is his home even though he spends most of his time in space.
An emotional attachment to his home town is understandable.
It's also enough to keep him from permanently emigrating.
Not sure I see what you’re driving at. It already is less hazardous, to the Earth and anyone/thing living there.
But not to the people UP THERE, which is my point.
It is also easier to construct heavy objects in space
No, it's easier to ASSEMBLE heavy structures in space, provided you have already constructed them on the ground and provided those modules are small enough to be placed in orbit on a medium-lift booster.
The thing is, if we were to develop a rocket that could put the entire space station into orbit with just a single launch, what then is the utility of using fifty smaller launches to assemble it piecemeal? (apart from the whole "economy of scale" issue, that's a whole other can of worms).
and since ships are going to operate there anyway …
Just because my car operates mainly on the road is NOT a good reason to build it in the middle of the freeway.
I thought we were trying to figure out if it made sense.
Given the right conditions, ANYTHING makes sense. The question is what
are those conditions?
In a following post you say they do some ship building in space as well as on planets, however those options aren’t the only ones. But if it is so easy to get starships on to and off planets, why do any work, including major refits like TMP, in such a difficult (in your view) environment as open space?
Because a mostly completed vessel with its outer structure and life support systems installed can begin ship-fitting in an orbital facility where those systems can be properly tested and calibrated. From what we've seen, most starships actually become flight ready LONG before all of their systems are fully installed (some dry docks prefer to wait until Tuesday).
Once again I don’t imagine you have any proof they don’t use solar power you are just jumphing to conclusions based on the limited slices of Federation activities we have seen.
It's not much of a jump, considering the conspicuousness of their absence. We've seen several dozen distinct types of space stations in Star Trek and none of them were ever equipped with solar arrays. Until there is evidence of their presence, their ABSENCE is a foregone conclusion.
Fifty million people would rather scurry about in corridors on the moon than enjoy an idilic mountain villiage etc in a space colony?
According to Riker, the lunar cities are large enough to be visible from Earth during daylight hours. These are obviously NOT underground facilities, more than likely they're large domed enclosures that house
conventional cities.
That’s a good point, I can only imagine that she was commissioned by the minority planet dwellers to allow them to get in on the action the space colonies are hogging for themselves. You’d think they would be better off investing in psychotherapy wouldn’t you?
No I wouldn't. Because once again, EVERY colony we have ever seen in Star Trek has always been planet-based. The lack of evidence of city-scale deep space habitation is again conspicuous enough that its absence is a foregone conclusion.
Except the same sorts of things you might do on Earth of course.
Except you can't mine anything, and you can't cultivate plants or animals unless you bring them with you and spend a few generations breeding them. Failing that, it's difficult to justify the expense of an O'Neil cylinder as a location for five thousand customer service call centers.
It must have been a while ago you read those books (me too to be honest) because the initial idea is to use the colonies to build solar power satellites out of lunar material, not from nothing.
The initial idea, IIRC, was to colonize THE MOON as a resource outpost and then expand those operations into orbiting facilities as a way of thinning out the excess population of Earth.
Either way, the connection between O'Neil cylinders and solar power satellites has never been particularly solid since we are perfectly capable of building and launching those kinds of satellites right here on Earth.
The is no effective economic difference between a city in space (a space habitat) processing materials that are nearby or perhaps coming from somewhere else in a pipeline trajectory and a city on Earth importing similar material from somewhere else on Earth (or even in space) and processing those resources.
Until you consider that like everything else, Earth also is a planet in space. What would be the justification for extracting materials from Earth and then sending them to an O'Neil cylinder in orbit for processing? Why would you send your ores into orbit when you could just as easily send them to Pittsburgh?
More to the point: if you have already have a steel industry in Pittsburgh, why would you spend the time and money developing New Pittsburgh in orbit when you could just as easily send those ores down to REAL Pittsburgh for processing?
The answer is simple: it is very expensive to move materials in and out of a huge gravity well, so WE would try to avoid moving those materials until they've been transformed into a finished product with full value already attained. The gravity well ceases to be a factor when you have the ability to artificially manipulate gravity (which the Federation does) or the ability to cheaply send materials to and from the surface in a transporter beam (which the Federation has).
Moreover, 23rd century technology doesn't require an entire city for resource processing. The Cardassians were able to pillage the entire Bajoran system using just the facilities on Terok Nor. Thus, I'm afraid Deep Space Nine (population 450) is the closest thing the Trek universe has to a "space colony."
I'm afraid will always be a few people who, doubtless out of pure perversity, will have different preferences to you.
It's not a matter of preference, actually. There's a fantastic number of people who would jump at a chance to go into space if anyone was offering a seat. These are not, however, the MAJORITY of people. The simple fact that space exploration is not and has never been a huge budgetary priority bears this out (NASA's budget has never exceeded more than 3% of the Federal). People (for the most part) simply care more about where they
are than anything else (hence the Department of Defense budget has never been lower than 45%).
The funny thing is, Starfleet isn't just an exploratory organization, it's a defensive one too. Which means that even if it takes in the 20% of people who want to go into space just for the hell of it, it also gets the other 30% who do it because they want to defend their home world. For those who DO go into space on their own accord, finding a habitable planet to call your own is a high priority. It is in, fact, SO high that the Federation has fought several major wars over possession of those planets, and the Maquis specifically formed strictly to contest Cardassian control of their planetary settlements. A space habitat can be moved, of course, but groundhogs don't fight for anything other than soil.
Here we seem to have a difference of opinion (in terms of what’s possible anyway).
The possibility of discovering another Earthlike planet in the solar system is zero.
I am not assuming that at all. There may be relatively few people engaged in the actual mining and processing of material but as with any activity, supporting services spring up and then the town’s size increase, as it might on Earth or elsewhere. If the colony was on a nearby planet I suppose you would not have a problem with that, but because its in a space habitat its ridiculous or unworkable?
Unworkable, because most of the population would prefer to live ON THE PLANET.
It has occurred to me that you are probably overlooking the fact that for 23rd century Earth--not to mention the rest of the Federation races--ORBITAL space is no longer the final frontier, or ANY kind of frontier for that matter. Currently we're not exactly busting at the seems with people who want to go and work on offshore oil rigs, for example. A giant platform in the middle of the Atlantic specifically for drilling oil would have generated a lot of excitement for the original readers of, say, Jules Verne or H.G. Wells. Nowadays, though, the novelty has worn off.
Most of them probably wouldn’t want to join the "military" (I mean, a peace-keeping armada!) anyway, just live in space.
The thing is nobody wants to merely LIVE in space. People who want to go into space just to be going into space are called "tourists." People who want to go there and never come back want to WORK there as well as live there.
For humans, all the best space jobs are in Starfleet and the Cargo Service, with a handful of scientific missions in exotic locations/industries.
Neither does a town not established in a useful area of a planet.
ALL towns are established in useful areas. This only changes when the thing that originally made them useful ceases to exist, at which point the community either diversifies to survive, or they abandon it and it becomes a ghost town.
That of course, is incorrect. The lunar material I mentioned above is lunched from the moon’s surface by sun powered linear accelerators (electric canons) as you know from reading those books.
And the one thing they really drove me nuts about these books was that it was never adequately explained why moving those materials to an O'Neil cylinder was in ANY WAY preferable to processing them ON THE MOON and then sending them directly to end-consumers on the Earth. Adding the O'Neill cylinders as a middle man strikes me as a dubious sci-fi excuse to insert "look at my cool space habitat concept!" into the middle of an otherwise sensible model. The biggest problem with the theory is that you'd be expecting people to make a capital investment of hundreds of billions of dollars building the habitat, hundreds of billions more setting up the mining operation and the mass driver, and then asking hundreds if not thousands of people to take the risk of emigrating into that habitat, and do all of this before you begin to make even a PENNY of profit from the mining.
That's a bit like saying that in 1823 America built the entire city of Chicago--complete with skyscrapers, mass transit, two airports and enough homes for three million people--just to have a convenient place to trade with Indians. Fact of the matter is, Chicago grew up around Fort Dearborn, which was located purely for convenience. O'Neill cylinders may be cool, but they are NOT convenient.
And I'll remind you again we're talking about Star Trek, where linear accelerators are hopelessly obsolete and replaceable by shuttlecraft, freighters or transporters.
You are using a very narrow definition of space and not one most people would agree with but I take your meaning. That said, establishing a space colony is probably not much, if any, more difficult or expensive than establishing any other sort of colony
It is exactly the same expense as building a terrestial colony, but with two major differences:
1) You have to bring ALL of your supplies with you, where as a ground-based colony you can live off the land
2) Not only do you have to build the dwellings and infrastructure, you also have to build and sustain the environment in which those dwellings and infrastructure sit.
In other words, you don't just have to build a town, you first have to build an artificial planet in which the town sits.
What’s the difference between resources that are under you feet (not to mention sometimes half way around a planet) and those a few kilometres away in space?
One can be accessed with a $5 shovel. The other can only be accessed with a $5 shovel, a $250,000 space suit, and a $560,000 space craft.
Of course a significant advantage of space colonies is that you can settle systems that don’t have habitable planets.
). The only two actual books I have on the subject are both non-fiction. One by Gerard K O’Neill himself "The High Frontier" and the other by T T Heppenhiemer " Colonies in Space". I recommend both.
