Hi Elinor, thanks for your response and I hope you do not take my critiques of the conceptual ideas in play here as anything like a personal criticism of your father, who, from what I heard in this program and from what little digging I did, sounded like he was a wonderful man. I also thank you for providing more details from the book which, again, I confess I have not read. I’ll go through your points one by one, followed by a few more of my thoughts.

1) “Cosmic shielding is an integral design of the habitats’ hulls”

I’m interested by this, as I was under the impression that NASA had still failed to crack any kind of shielding that would keep individuals outside of the magnetosphere safe within acceptable limits of exposure. There was a competition recently held for students around the country to propose ideas (with prize money!), and I believe a partnership is underway with MIT and CIT to research this and other long-term space habitation issues further, but as far as I know, nothing has yet achieved the standards required. Was there another concept that Mr O’Neill had some forty years prior that NASA is unaware of?

(link 1) http://www.nasa.gov/press/2015/april/nasa-awards-radiation-challenge-winners-launches-next-round-to-seek-ideas-for

(link 2) http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-establishes-institute-to-explore-new-ways-to-protect-astronauts

2) “Artificial gravity is provided via rotation (ever seen 2001? it doesn’t even need to be all that large a circumference for this to work)”

I have no disagreement with the use of centrifugal force to simulate gravity, but I do question the size dynamics at play. According to an article I read in Popular Mechanics, at a size of anything less than a football field, the long term effects on the human body would appear to be unpleasant at best. Yes, the ISS is currently about that big, but it is mostly solar panels, the modules themselves are quite small (this feeds into a later point I’ll have about scale/energy).

(link) http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a8965/why-dont-we-have-artificial-gravity-15425569/

3) Food is grown in farming pods or sectors or whatever, depending on which habitat design is built

Again, I’m not going to disagree that with hydroponics it is possible to grow food in space (and indeed this has been done on the ISS, even with the limitations of microgravity), but I also have to stress the scale and energy requirements needed if this is to be truly self-sufficient for a massive space station, as they are positively gargantuan. You need to constantly provide water, heat, humidity, light and nutrients, as well as control for healthy microbial activity, (molds are a problem even in space). This is all potentially do-able, but I don’t think it’s as simple as just building “farming pods or sectors or whatever” and once more I have to stress the enormous cost of materials and energy that would be required to make this truly self-sustaining. That 75% free stuff thing we get from Earth is no joke, it takes an insane amount of money and energy to keep even four or so people alive in LEO as we currently do. The costs are truly staggering once you start talking about THOUSANDS of people.

(link) http://science.howstuffworks.com/space-farming.htm

“4) Resources are plentiful in space… there are already companies such as Planetary Resources working on retrieving those that aren’t sitting pretty on the moon (where mass drivers can do it cheaply).”

OK, now we’re really getting into the meat of the issues here. From everything I’ve seen and read, it seems to me that space mining is a ludicrously cost-prohibitive exercise. Yes, technically resources are “plentiful” in space, but there is something even more abundant in space, and that is nothing. In other words, you need to expend crazy amounts of energy to get anything up into space to begin with, even more to send your mining robot (I assume we’re talking robots here) out to an asteroid, more again to capture the rock and still more to process it (or maybe they just collect stuff there and take that back, either way, the costs are insane).

The vast majority of asteroids in our solar system (that aren’t ice, which is most of them) are highly homogeneous and are not ore-rich in anything like the densities required to be economically viable. This also doesn’t address how you then extract and process these materials in space to be used as construction materials without going bankrupt (are we talking about oceans of construction bots, or space construction workers? Either way, the scale required is fantastic, in the true meaning of the word).

Yes, PR is looking at some hunks of platinum, but even then the current cost of platinum is far less that what you would need to break even on a space mining operation, not to mention if they did get massive quantities of the stuff it would naturally depress the cost, which would make it even more infeasible.

The idea of resources “sitting pretty on the moon” is also a somewhat dubious proposition to me. You’re still looking at massive costs for getting the materials up to the moon establishing a mining colony and massive costs for keeping the builders/miners alive (or having functional robots doing their stuff up there, forty years after these proposals and we still lose robots in space all the time and they are extremely expensive to replace.) All in all, I’m pretty dubious about us mining much but water on the moon (maybe a solution for that particular space station issue!).

(link 1) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-sten-odenwald/the-myth-of-space-mining_b_8415992.html

(link 2) http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/economics/theres-a-very-slight-problem-with-asteroid-mining

(link 3) http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-problem-with-asteroid-mining

(link 4) http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/stranded-resources/

(link 5) http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucfbiac/Lunar_resources_review_preprint_accepted_manuscript.pdf

“5) And finally, solar power is certainly feasible on a space habitat. There isn’t even a need for much storage because the sun is aways shining on you, undiluted by atmosphere.”

Of course, solar power is technically feasible, but the size of the array required to meet the needs of the enormous space station you would need to:

a) Be big enough for artificial gravity to work, (with the habitable ring of the station at least larger than a football field)

b) Mitigate all the costs required to keep hundreds or thousands of people on board alive

As I mentioned in my first point, the ISS is currently the largest station we have in orbit and it is MOSTLY solar panels and needs all of them to keep a positively minuscule number of people alive (and their food is primarily packaged stuff, not farmed, and they live in hideously cramped conditions, no luxuries for these guys/gals, a far cry from the pretty ring illustrations). Solar energy is awesome, but it is also highly diffuse and so to collect enough energy to power the kinds of scales of activity and habitations discussed here is an extremely expensive proposition. You would need to get tons and tons of silicon, glass and rare earth metals up in space to power it, (or take it from asteroids and process them I suppose? There’s that cost thing again). None of these resources are free, and with the economics required I think we are beginning to approach the domain of utter infeasibility. I’d actually buy it more if the thing was nuclear powered, and even then I would have serious questions about the costs involved.

“As for rich vs poor, I couldn’t say what’ll happen since that’s likely to be tied up in political factors, but though dad wanted space to be open to all (as do I),”

This is kind of the crux of it, though, isn’t it? Everything is politics. The human race is not a platonic ideal. We can’t even get our act together on dealing with the global climate, or stop ourselves from obliterating swathes of the planet’s biomass and, as this program itself implied, pretty much the only people looking at going en-masse into space these days are plutocrats. There are also already deep legal issues brewing as to the “ownership” of space. Nobody is seriously talking these days about it being “open to all” and, really, how could it be? The costs required to get even a kilo into space are prohibitive, let alone keeping a human being alive up there, so of course only governments or the ultra-rich are going to be over-represented, we’re hardly going to be building ghettos in space anytime soon. I mean, technically, Antarctica (which is far more economical/habitable than space) is kind of “open to all”, but you don’t see swathes of lower-income people setting up shop there either, and you probably never will, barring a potentially human-species-killing shift in the climate.

(link 1) http://news.nationalpost.com/news/who-owns-the-moon-space-lawyers-increasingly-needed-for-legal-issues-beyond-earths-atmosphere

(link 2) http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2130/1

“Nice as the Earth is, it’s a very vulnerable basket into which to be holding all our eggs. We could be wiped out by a massive asteroid (or nuclear/bio war) all too soon. In my view, we’ve got to spread off this planet or our days are likely numbered. (Neal Stephenson’s novel Seveneves tells a pretty interesting story of what might happen if we aren’t ready when that day arrives.)”

Well, much as we may like it or not, our days as a species are numbered regardless in the long run and here, finally, is my deepest point, which I will reiterate and expand on from my previous post.

Our species’ theatrical narrative of infinite space travel and expansion is by and large, on the real world we live on right now, not in a science fiction book or movie, a fantasy. We are tied to this planet, by biology, by ecology, by economics, by politics, by who we are as a species and what this universe is like. We have allowed ourselves to be blinded by an obsession with technological miracles at the cost of the only large scale habitat we have, or will ever have, for the foreseeable future at least. Our evolutionary drive to expand like a virus, to grow infinitely, is now meeting the petri-dish limits of our planet. Every year we consume more and more non-replaceable resources quicker and quicker, we burn millions of years worth of stored sunlight, we tap into aquifers that will take millenia to replace, we acidify our oceans, we drive thousands of species to extinction, we deplete the limited reserves of phosphorus, fossil fuels, helium etc we have available to us, we poison our rivers and treat our atmosphere like a sewer. We’re now essentially locked into oceans rising, mass biodiversity collapse, Florida becoming uninhabitable salt-marsh, continent-wide droughts, just to name a few of the consequences of our species-wide stupidity. None of these points are scientifically controversial. And the engine of all of this is our pathological hunger to grow more, bigger, wider, larger, deeper, infinitely, on a finite planet, which is the only world in our solar system we have ever evolved to survive on (and even then, large swathes are uninhabitable, no need to go to space for that!). The caves-to-the-stars meme is the purest expression of this hunger, when faced with the reality of the mess we have made, it seems all this thinking can come up with is “let’s just run away to space and not change at all!” I hope I’ve enumerated just a couple of the deep problems with this line of thought. Entertaining fantasies of space colonies free of the realities of politics, economics or who we are as a species, in the end functions in a similar way to a cult and stops people from truly grappling with what we have to deal with on this planet, instead encouraging them to look up to the heavens where they will all find their supposed salvation, not looking around and grappling with this world of crude matter and banality and sacrifice and compromise and humanity, which is the only real world we have.

I suppose, at the heart of it all, my points of contention are purely about grappling with the world and our species as they are, not as we wish they would be. Yes, it is perhaps technically possible to do the stuff mentioned in this program, but it’s also technically possible for us to build a giant statue of a duck the size of Iceland made of aluminum. It’s not a matter for the technical requirements, it’s about economics, politics, and all those other boring but necessary components of the human experience.

I know I probably won’t convince you, and I hope I have not offended you with my criticisms. I only hope that some people reading this might take a second or two to think about this conversation and ask some deeper questions beyond the science fiction dreams on offer in this particular program. I care deeply for our species (as dumb as we are) and this planet, we both seem to agree on that, we only disagree on the realistic course of action available to us.

Finally, I want add that I enjoy the fact we can have a dialogue about these things, as honest non-partisan discussions about space travel/habitation and its promises/realities are surprisingly rare online.

A few final links for the curious:

(link 1) http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/

(link 2) http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.ca/2013/09/which-way-to-heaven.html

(link 3) http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html

(link 4) http://boingboing.net/2015/11/16/our-generation-ships-will-sink.html