Version Español
A blinding wind pummels an austere landscape of gently rolling sand, creating dust devils and whirlwinds that would suffocate the unwary. A merciless heat beats down upon the head of the unwary traveler as the sun makes its unconcerned journey across the sky. At the top of a dune, one can look out at a wasteland that stretches out for miles, as a hostile terrain threatens to overwhelm the unprepared. But across the sea of sand is a metallic oasis, a futuristic metropolis capable of defying the erosive forces of the badlands and filled with the best technology money can buy. The city gleams in the distance, but once you enter its asphalt streets, this urban center becomes a maze of indifferent humanity in a chipped, decaying environment, losing not only its physical luster, but its moral core.
While the first paragraph to this entry may sound like the opening to a cyberpunk novel set in the Middle East, in the next ten years, this will become reality. The rulers of Saudi Arabia, like the rulers of the neighboring United Arab Emirates, are fully aware of the fact that oil is a valuable commodity that will not last forever. Like the UAE, it has chosen to invest its lucrative oil profits into projects that will contain to sustain and grow their economy long after peak oil comes and goes. Unlike the UAE, which has chosen to spend its fortunes on converting Dubai and Abu Dhabi into the tourist trap of the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has elected to invest in a series of vast construction projects in the desert, creating advanced cities in defiance of a region famous for its hostility to man.
These Economic Cities, of which four have already begun construction, with one supposed to receive its first wave of new citizens in the coming year, are an extensive effort to diversify the oil dependent Saudi Arabian economy into something capable of prospering in a post-oil 21st century. In a country where more than half the people are under the age of 21, these new cities are seen as essential for both the controlled growth of urban sprawl and the opportunity to create conditions friendly to family lifestyle development. Each of these shining new urban centers will come equipped with hospitals, universities, and sport stadiums, with seaside villas for the wealthy and high-rise apartments for the middle-classed. Each city will be focused on a different essential of the Internet Age, with Knowledge Economic City (KEC) specializing in cutting edge scientific research while King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) will be an industrial center for plastics and aluminum, and so on.
What does this massive project mean? For one, they mean a construction boom in the desert, even during these tough economic times. Companies all over the world are competing for the privilege of supplying these new cities with everything from cell phone service to water supplies. For another, they mean work for hundreds of workers who will be expected to build everything from high-rises to reverse osmosis plants. Thirdly, they represent opportunity for firms all over the world, as the Saudi Arabian government is encouraging Saudi and international firms to build factories and offices to conduct business and bring in jobs. Lastly, they represent a playing field for the tech giants, who get to display toys such technology that creates holographic images at a distance.
The Economic Cities are certainly an impressive effort to meet the desert kingdom’s needs for employment for its younger generation and a stronger, less oil dependent economy. However, there is a reason why I chose to begin this article as a glimpse into a dystopian desert oasis, and that reason is that these Economic Cities will probably end up becoming exactly that. The current global economic morass was a direct result of the merger of ignorance and misplaced enthusiasm in the marble hallways of financiers and their institutions. These well-dressed figures chose to continue dabbling in instruments they did not understand, smug in the mistaken belief that the business cycle was obsolete, that there was a new economic standard of eternal upward expansion. In contrast to these winners, I actually stayed awake in my business classes, so I am well aware that all economies go through a repeating cycle of growth, prosperity, recession, and depression. The eternal upward expansion is the business equivalent of a perpetual motion device: flat-out impossible.
But what do the Economic Cities have to do with the business cycle? Quite a lot, when you apply the business cycle to the so-called Internet Age. As the dotcom bust demonstrated, not every idea with a website will make money. As the current economic crisis demonstrates, no matter how long the growth and prosperity cycles, there is inevitably recession and depression. No matter how much the Internet Age is touted as the future of the globalized economy, no matter how much the inevitable romantics begin to call out that the business cycle is an obsolete theory that no longer applies, the facts will inevitably rear their heads. There is a saturation point where the Internet does not apply a competitive advantage to a national economy. There is a saturation point where goods and services are equivalent, and there is no cheaper foreign production center to produce cheaper versions. During the flirtation with a peak oil scenario in the summer of 2008, industrial jobs began to trickle from China back into the United States because the rising cost of transportation reduced the economies of scale to the point where production in the United States was the more viable alternative.
This is what Saudi Arabia will discover soon enough. The Economic Cities are supposed to bring in the sort of business that places like Bangalore in India do, the so-called “knowledge workers” that bring in even more business. However, the point is that there will be a saturation point where these knowledge works will bring in no additional business in numbers that matter. Furthermore, by encouraging foreign businesses to set up factories and offices in the new metropolises, Saudi Arabia is becoming a part of the globalization craze. Foreign businesses will not only happily build new offices; they will bring in their particular staff and executives, with their families, to these urban oases. These foreigners will bring with them their particular sets of values and cultural mores, and will not take kindly to the sort of religious police that maintain order in Saudi Arabia. Especially in KEC, this will result in a break down of the barriers Saudi Arabia has erected to maintain its particular vision of Islam, since scientists expect, nay, demand, conditions of unlimited access to information and freedom to pursue its endeavors with a minimum of interference. To keep this foreign business, Saudi Arabia will be forced to make exceptions, which will be noticed by its citizenry and resented.
Cities, no matter when and where they are built, no matter how utopian the vision, are always hives of inequity. There will always be haves and have-nots, and the have-nots will always resent the haves. There will always be those who live on the edge of society, scraping a meager existence out of the leftovers of others. The Internet Age will not create eternal economic expansion, and eventually, economists and politicians around the world will scramble for alternatives when the realization dawns that the first mover advantage that India and China possess results in a lack of opportunity for them to mimic those successes. Oil will eventually peak and ebb, and the economic cities the desert kingdom is building will not be able to offset this enough to prevent a partial collapse of the Saudi Arabian economy. When that happens, the new urban centers will have millions of people, and be flooded with millions more, desperately seeking work and opportunity, only to be relegated to poorly built slums as the rich live in their villas, comfortably above it all. The future will be advanced cities with millions of urban poor scavenging the complex technologies tossed aside in favor of more sophisticated machines and computers, with extraordinary cultural ferment from the combined forces of globalization, foreigner communities, tradition, and Islam. Saudi Arabia’s future will become a troubled future of high tech and low life, ruled more by the corporations that create the economic value of these desert oases than the government itself.
Welcome to the future.
Sources
The Construction Site Called Saudi Arabia
Can the U.S. Bring Jobs Back from China?
Landlocked Saudi economic city to get seaport
Company wins water deal for Saudi mega project
Saudis Look Beyond Oil to New Economy in Desert
A New City in the Saudi Desert
Monday, January 26, 2009
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Bad Laws Never Stop
Version Español
There are times I despair of the intellectual functions of the supposedly enlightened lawmakers of the world. As I live in the United States, you can imagine that this feeling of despair has become something of a constant companion over the last four to eight years. The spate of bad legislation championed by the Bush administration ends soon, much to my relief and the relief of millions of others. However, there is a severely misguided feeling of optimism that with the rise of Obama, the United States will enter into the Promised Land or some such. As a properly well-trained historian, as well as an out-and-out realist, I have an obligation to drag everyone back down to Earth and point out the severe holes in the logic of the people who have discovered a new (or should I say old?) opiate of the masses in the form of excellent oratory. While Obama has promised to provide me with unending torrents of bad laws with horrible logical conclusions, I've decided that, for now, I will criticize only a single one of the bills this man is so eager to sign into law. The severely-flawed bill that promises to be unending heartbreak for future generations is known as the Freedom of Choice Act, hereafter referred to as FOCA.
Before Obamania floods my blog with protest, I will note that the supporters of a politician and their belief he can do no wrong does not render his laws well-thought, just, or even moral. They simply cow those who would speak out. I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican nor a religious fanatic, and I am most certainly not a foaming-at-the-mouth liberal, so you'll get short shrift from me. That warning out of the way, I will now begin to analyze why FOCA is not a good piece of legislation.
FOCA is a reaction against recent movements to regulate and restrict abortion that at the same time is a handy little bit of propaganda. It sounds distinctly wrong to oppose Freedom of Choice, doesn't it? As a reactionary bill, it takes restraint and sound statesmanship and throws it in a pit of fire. The text of the actual document stops just short of making Roe vs Wade appear like a sacred apparition, inviolable, untouchable, and unchallengeable, issued from the mouth of the One True...secularism. I will now address the actual provisions of this would-be law that are so disturbing. Section 4, Subsection b is the meat of the bill, and the biggest problem. Copied verbatim:
(b) Prohibition of Interference- A government may not--
(1) deny or interfere with a woman's right to choose--
(A) to bear a child;
(B) to terminate a pregnancy prior to viability; or
(C) to terminate a pregnancy after viability where termination is necessary to protect the life or health of the woman; or
(2) discriminate against the exercise of the rights set forth in paragraph (1) in the regulation or provision of benefits, facilities, services, or information.
Now combine the above with Section 6:
This Act applies to every Federal, State, and local statute, ordinance, regulation, administrative order, decision, policy, practice, or other action enacted, adopted, or implemented before, on, or after the date of enactment of this Act.
For those who are not fluent in legalese, allow me to translate. Section 4b, for all intents and purposes, permanently ties the hands of government at all levels when it comes to abortion, and removes the right to set restrictions. Before the naysayers begin to trumpet that a government can change law at will, let me observe what I did earlier: how does it sound to oppose the Freedom of Choice Act? With a simple bit of propaganda, you've rendered any efforts to repeal such a law futile and unpopular with a public that happily believes what it is told by the media. So what happens in the future? Very few people will dare speak out, the ones who do will be liberally bashed in the media, and FOCA will be untouchable. While any legislator wants his laws to stay on the books until the end of time, this sort of law moves to take the government's power to legislate and hamstring it.
However, FOCA is only getting warmed up at this point. Section 4 Subsection b Paragraph 1 Clause C is worse. The full text would be “A government may not deny or interfere with a woman's right to choose to terminate after viability where termination is necessary to protect the life or health of the woman”. This part of the law, in deliberately non-confrontational language, explicitly repeals the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. To explain in more detail, “viability” is the language chosen to conceal the fact that any child removed from the uterus at this point is capable of surviving in the real world without the umbilical cord. I deliberately chose the word “child” to describe these helpless infants, because documented cases have proven that four month babies (babies born four months into a pregnancy) can and do beat the odds to survive and grow into normal childhoods.
Intact dilation and extraction, the medically dry term for partial-birth abortion, involves pulling out the child, starting with the feet, as far as the neck, and then penetrating the baby’s skull with a sharp object, inserting a tube, and vacuuming the brain and everything else inside the skull. Keep in mind, these are the same living beings that can be felt kicking inside of a mother’s stomach as the pregnancy progresses. Does anyone else see the jarring contrast involved in this? Were this suggested as a method of execution, every liberal group from California to Paris would be out in the streets protesting, yet when performed on a “viable” baby that can survive outside of its mother’s womb, it’s not only mute, but lauded as advancement of women’s rights. For everyone who is in support of this section of the law and partial-birth abortion, I recommend they Google Image the term, and then come back after you’ve gone through the first five pages. Without image filters.
I am well aware that the exact text of the law says “to protect the life or health of the woman.” However, it is strictly wishful thinking to think that this gruesome procedure would be limited to medical emergencies when those same children can just as easily be removed by C-section without execution. Using the word ‘life’ in this section of the bill is deliberately vague language that allows any woman to abort at any time, as the bill can be easily interpreted to mean that the disruption of day-to-day activities caused by a baby would be a ‘threat’ to the woman’s life.
The last section of this bill that needs to be addressed is Section 6, the final hammer blow in a particularly bad law. Simply put, all laws, rules, regulations, and policies regarding abortion that existed before, during, or after this bill is enacted would be null and void. Not just at the federal level, but all the way down to the local hospitals. That means parental notification laws, waiting periods, requirements of full disclosure of the physical and emotional risks inherent in abortion, the partial-birth abortion ban and many other laws meant to protect not only those who bear children, but the actual viable babies themselves, are meaningless. This last section makes the bill itself immune to being struck down, since the last section would have to be nullified before it could be repealed.
How does striking down parental notification laws, requirements of full disclosure of the physical and emotional risks, and flat-out infanticide make this bill in the slightest way just? It’s impossible for a teenager to get into a fender-bender without insurance companies notifying the parents, yet somehow, this bill deems insignificant informing those self-same parents that their underage child is pregnant and is considering an abortion. A person is not considered an adult until eighteen years of age, when they are expected to be able to act like adults in matters such as smoking, volunteering for military service, and criminal acts. How does it follow that a fifteen year old will be better able to make a decision as complicated as aborting a pregnancy alone when people many years older struggle with that same decision? What about the risks of postpartum depression, the anxiety, fear, and self-loathing that come after a birth? Removing a child from the womb triggers the same exact physiological response as giving birth, so abortion does nothing to stave off the biological responses. What about the sense of guilt and shame that arise after an abortion?
One final observation before I wrap up this post. The terrible irony in this so-called “Freedom of Choice” Act is that the people who are expected to carry it out have no choice in refusing to do so. Section 4b2 makes sure that any refusal to perform an abortion is treated as discrimination, with the full weight of the law. Particularly vulnerable are religiously-based hospitals and organizations. These organizations do not perform abortions because it goes contrary to their beliefs, and as such, are particularly vulnerable to lawsuits for discrimination and non-compliance with a federal law. Supposedly, conscience clause laws protect religious organizations from this law, but I now point to two examples that actually demonstrate the impotence of those laws. Firstly, the bill itself unequivocally states that any rule, let alone law, that attempts to regulate abortion is null and void, and in this case, that means that clause of conscience laws are not worth the paper they are written on. Just as important, the California Supreme Court forced the Catholic Charities of Sacramento, an “organ of the Roman Catholic Church”, to comply with a Californian law that requires that most health care plans include contraceptives. The Roman Catholic Church, a religious organization if there never was one, is morally opposed to contraceptives. To quote the lone dissenter in the California Supreme Court, the decision was "an intentional, purposeful intrusion into a religious organization's expression of its religious tenets and sense of mission."
That leaves religious hospitals, organizations, and medical personnel with two options: violate their morals and ethics, or stop practicing medicine to respect those same morals and ethics. A law that stampedes on social convention, that makes abortion free of regulation or restriction, that tramples the rights of religious doctors and organizations, and is untouchable. And Obama wants this to be the very first bill he signs into law. Who said that the bad legislation was gone?
Sources
Freedom of Choice Act
Miracle baby born FOUR months premature weighing just 1lb celebrates her first birthday
Baby Girl Thriving Despite Being Born Four Months Early
What is partial birth abortion?
Confine & Conquer
Barack Obama Promises to Sign FOCA
There are times I despair of the intellectual functions of the supposedly enlightened lawmakers of the world. As I live in the United States, you can imagine that this feeling of despair has become something of a constant companion over the last four to eight years. The spate of bad legislation championed by the Bush administration ends soon, much to my relief and the relief of millions of others. However, there is a severely misguided feeling of optimism that with the rise of Obama, the United States will enter into the Promised Land or some such. As a properly well-trained historian, as well as an out-and-out realist, I have an obligation to drag everyone back down to Earth and point out the severe holes in the logic of the people who have discovered a new (or should I say old?) opiate of the masses in the form of excellent oratory. While Obama has promised to provide me with unending torrents of bad laws with horrible logical conclusions, I've decided that, for now, I will criticize only a single one of the bills this man is so eager to sign into law. The severely-flawed bill that promises to be unending heartbreak for future generations is known as the Freedom of Choice Act, hereafter referred to as FOCA.
Before Obamania floods my blog with protest, I will note that the supporters of a politician and their belief he can do no wrong does not render his laws well-thought, just, or even moral. They simply cow those who would speak out. I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican nor a religious fanatic, and I am most certainly not a foaming-at-the-mouth liberal, so you'll get short shrift from me. That warning out of the way, I will now begin to analyze why FOCA is not a good piece of legislation.
FOCA is a reaction against recent movements to regulate and restrict abortion that at the same time is a handy little bit of propaganda. It sounds distinctly wrong to oppose Freedom of Choice, doesn't it? As a reactionary bill, it takes restraint and sound statesmanship and throws it in a pit of fire. The text of the actual document stops just short of making Roe vs Wade appear like a sacred apparition, inviolable, untouchable, and unchallengeable, issued from the mouth of the One True...secularism. I will now address the actual provisions of this would-be law that are so disturbing. Section 4, Subsection b is the meat of the bill, and the biggest problem. Copied verbatim:
(b) Prohibition of Interference- A government may not--
(1) deny or interfere with a woman's right to choose--
(A) to bear a child;
(B) to terminate a pregnancy prior to viability; or
(C) to terminate a pregnancy after viability where termination is necessary to protect the life or health of the woman; or
(2) discriminate against the exercise of the rights set forth in paragraph (1) in the regulation or provision of benefits, facilities, services, or information.
Now combine the above with Section 6:
This Act applies to every Federal, State, and local statute, ordinance, regulation, administrative order, decision, policy, practice, or other action enacted, adopted, or implemented before, on, or after the date of enactment of this Act.
For those who are not fluent in legalese, allow me to translate. Section 4b, for all intents and purposes, permanently ties the hands of government at all levels when it comes to abortion, and removes the right to set restrictions. Before the naysayers begin to trumpet that a government can change law at will, let me observe what I did earlier: how does it sound to oppose the Freedom of Choice Act? With a simple bit of propaganda, you've rendered any efforts to repeal such a law futile and unpopular with a public that happily believes what it is told by the media. So what happens in the future? Very few people will dare speak out, the ones who do will be liberally bashed in the media, and FOCA will be untouchable. While any legislator wants his laws to stay on the books until the end of time, this sort of law moves to take the government's power to legislate and hamstring it.
However, FOCA is only getting warmed up at this point. Section 4 Subsection b Paragraph 1 Clause C is worse. The full text would be “A government may not deny or interfere with a woman's right to choose to terminate after viability where termination is necessary to protect the life or health of the woman”. This part of the law, in deliberately non-confrontational language, explicitly repeals the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. To explain in more detail, “viability” is the language chosen to conceal the fact that any child removed from the uterus at this point is capable of surviving in the real world without the umbilical cord. I deliberately chose the word “child” to describe these helpless infants, because documented cases have proven that four month babies (babies born four months into a pregnancy) can and do beat the odds to survive and grow into normal childhoods.
Intact dilation and extraction, the medically dry term for partial-birth abortion, involves pulling out the child, starting with the feet, as far as the neck, and then penetrating the baby’s skull with a sharp object, inserting a tube, and vacuuming the brain and everything else inside the skull. Keep in mind, these are the same living beings that can be felt kicking inside of a mother’s stomach as the pregnancy progresses. Does anyone else see the jarring contrast involved in this? Were this suggested as a method of execution, every liberal group from California to Paris would be out in the streets protesting, yet when performed on a “viable” baby that can survive outside of its mother’s womb, it’s not only mute, but lauded as advancement of women’s rights. For everyone who is in support of this section of the law and partial-birth abortion, I recommend they Google Image the term, and then come back after you’ve gone through the first five pages. Without image filters.
I am well aware that the exact text of the law says “to protect the life or health of the woman.” However, it is strictly wishful thinking to think that this gruesome procedure would be limited to medical emergencies when those same children can just as easily be removed by C-section without execution. Using the word ‘life’ in this section of the bill is deliberately vague language that allows any woman to abort at any time, as the bill can be easily interpreted to mean that the disruption of day-to-day activities caused by a baby would be a ‘threat’ to the woman’s life.
The last section of this bill that needs to be addressed is Section 6, the final hammer blow in a particularly bad law. Simply put, all laws, rules, regulations, and policies regarding abortion that existed before, during, or after this bill is enacted would be null and void. Not just at the federal level, but all the way down to the local hospitals. That means parental notification laws, waiting periods, requirements of full disclosure of the physical and emotional risks inherent in abortion, the partial-birth abortion ban and many other laws meant to protect not only those who bear children, but the actual viable babies themselves, are meaningless. This last section makes the bill itself immune to being struck down, since the last section would have to be nullified before it could be repealed.
How does striking down parental notification laws, requirements of full disclosure of the physical and emotional risks, and flat-out infanticide make this bill in the slightest way just? It’s impossible for a teenager to get into a fender-bender without insurance companies notifying the parents, yet somehow, this bill deems insignificant informing those self-same parents that their underage child is pregnant and is considering an abortion. A person is not considered an adult until eighteen years of age, when they are expected to be able to act like adults in matters such as smoking, volunteering for military service, and criminal acts. How does it follow that a fifteen year old will be better able to make a decision as complicated as aborting a pregnancy alone when people many years older struggle with that same decision? What about the risks of postpartum depression, the anxiety, fear, and self-loathing that come after a birth? Removing a child from the womb triggers the same exact physiological response as giving birth, so abortion does nothing to stave off the biological responses. What about the sense of guilt and shame that arise after an abortion?
One final observation before I wrap up this post. The terrible irony in this so-called “Freedom of Choice” Act is that the people who are expected to carry it out have no choice in refusing to do so. Section 4b2 makes sure that any refusal to perform an abortion is treated as discrimination, with the full weight of the law. Particularly vulnerable are religiously-based hospitals and organizations. These organizations do not perform abortions because it goes contrary to their beliefs, and as such, are particularly vulnerable to lawsuits for discrimination and non-compliance with a federal law. Supposedly, conscience clause laws protect religious organizations from this law, but I now point to two examples that actually demonstrate the impotence of those laws. Firstly, the bill itself unequivocally states that any rule, let alone law, that attempts to regulate abortion is null and void, and in this case, that means that clause of conscience laws are not worth the paper they are written on. Just as important, the California Supreme Court forced the Catholic Charities of Sacramento, an “organ of the Roman Catholic Church”, to comply with a Californian law that requires that most health care plans include contraceptives. The Roman Catholic Church, a religious organization if there never was one, is morally opposed to contraceptives. To quote the lone dissenter in the California Supreme Court, the decision was "an intentional, purposeful intrusion into a religious organization's expression of its religious tenets and sense of mission."
That leaves religious hospitals, organizations, and medical personnel with two options: violate their morals and ethics, or stop practicing medicine to respect those same morals and ethics. A law that stampedes on social convention, that makes abortion free of regulation or restriction, that tramples the rights of religious doctors and organizations, and is untouchable. And Obama wants this to be the very first bill he signs into law. Who said that the bad legislation was gone?
Sources
Freedom of Choice Act
Miracle baby born FOUR months premature weighing just 1lb celebrates her first birthday
Baby Girl Thriving Despite Being Born Four Months Early
What is partial birth abortion?
Confine & Conquer
Barack Obama Promises to Sign FOCA
Sunday, January 11, 2009
A Delayed Dream in a Sea of Stars
Version Español
In an effort to open my blog on a positive note, and to avoid using controversy as a gimmick to 'sell' the articles I will write, I have decided to use my first post as a birthday present to myself and explore a topic most people rarely consider in their day to day lives, but is near and dear to my heart.
Allow me to paint a picture for you. Imagine a world where people dwell in the inky void of space, where they live and work in artificial environments that hang suspended in a sea of stars. Imagine a world where each of these self-contained wordlets has its own farms, factories, villages, and hundreds of people who live, work, and play under the benevolent supervision of Terra, Luna, and countless glimmers in the sky, a world where shuttles fly from colony to moon to Earth and back in a daily progression of trade and near-harmony.
It sounds fantastically science fiction, doesn't it? What if I told you that the technology for all these fantastic things were theorized and some were proof of concept tested in micro-scale in the late 1970s? An unbelievable claim, isn't it?
Sadly, as will be typical of the things mentioned in this blog, it's all true. During the 1970s, a great deal of intellectual sweat was invested in the idea of creating what common lexicon would call a space station, but scientists correctly identified as a space habitat, as the complex machines put into orbit would not be mere working places, but home to thousands of people. In the spirit of old-time explorers, who recognized their settlements as colonies of their mother nation, I will refer to the space habitats as colonies in recognition that they would be the settlements of humanity in a new frontier.
From here on, the assumption will be that the colony in question will be a Bernal sphere, 500 meters in diameter, and able to support about 10,000 people. To begin simply, an island of humanity in space must first deal with the minimum of human needs in space. The first would be the threats from an obviously hostile environment. The basic threats can be summed up as radiation and meteoroids. The sun is a highly active ball of super-combusted gases that throws out radiation in all directions. The Earth’s atmosphere prevents the majority of that radiation from coming into contact with living organisms, but such natural shielding would be unavailable in an artificial construct such as a colony. The second threat, that of meteoroid impact, are statistically insignificant, but still there for the sake of completeness. A meteoroid that weighs a gram can be expected once every ten years, and a ten kilogram meteoroid is a threat of every one hundred thousand years. Both can be addressed with heavy metallic shielding that resist radiation and have a strong ability to resist impact, which will require millions of tons of metal, and is actually the most economically feasible.
What about basic human needs, such as food, water, air, stress, and, that most ignored of all necessities, gravity? Gravity is arguably the most necessary, as without gravity, human bones rot away, making the bones less sturdy and breakage more likely. Gravity is the most easily addressed, surprisingly, as a rotating environment can be set to produce the necessary 1 G (9 m/s^2) by adjusting its rate of revolutions per minute (RPM). To translate, by making the colony rotate once a minute, a sensation of weight akin to that on Earth is produced. Air is needed to maintain life, as is the pressure present from the air. The ‘air’ we breathe is actually a composite of many gases from which we take in the necessary O2 to exist. However, the air also has to provide enough pressure for human lungs to work adequately, yet prevent losses in the inner chemistry or the growth of hostile bacteria. From there, the creation of a proper atmosphere is actually more like copying the atmosphere available on earth. However, the actual pressure of that atmosphere well below that of Earth’s actual atmosphere.
Food and water would actually be incorporated into the entire system. It’s accepted scientific fact that the atmosphere is maintained through the environment through a complex interaction of animal and plant. That same environment would become a keystone of the actual support system to sustain life. As for the inevitable stress that would result from living inside of a floating metal island, those would be addressed through design aesthetics, such as the aforementioned plants, giving colonists plenty of ability to customize, as well as creating a ‘view’, either through blocking off sections of the colony, and making it easy to look ‘outside’, into the ink well of the void.
Another matter to address is population growth. It is my belief that given the small size of the initial colony, it won’t be filled at the start. It will probably be filled with about half its capacity, to allow for a natural growth and demographic transition. Bernal spheres would be primarily agricultural, able to feed and probably clothe itself, but in need of heavier goods. Obviously, trade with Earth will be a necessity for it to survive and prosper for a long time.
I’ll finish up this particular part of the article with how to build the colony, and then move on to the reasons why it hasn’t been implemented, and my theory on how we’ll finally manage to get into space. Obviously, labor for construction will have to come from Earth, and the initial stage of construction will require that the materials come from Earth as well. But how are we supposed to economically deliver many tons of materials into space, when shuttle launches are a crippling $45,000 per kilogram? As I’m sure you can expect, that problem was also addressed, and even proof of concept tested. A mass drivers is an electromagnetic launcher which accelerates payloads to an incredible speeds to fire it out into space. Obviously, the speeds involved nullify this as a possibility for human transportation, but at least the tools, materials, equipment, and other necessities can be launched into space for a relatively cheap $0.10 a gram.
However, an Earth-based mass driver would only be the first step in creating the first space colony. Another matter that must be considered is having a pseudo-stable work environment. Things in space drift, and without air resistance, potentially never stop moving. It’s possible that the colony being built would drift off from Earth, into the moon, with no way to stop it. Physics has generously provided a solution to that problem with the Lagrange points, points in the orbit of Earth that will stay in place when put into orbit there, which means a stable work environment. There are five Lagrange points, and the closest is the one between Earth and the moon, L1, but the most stable are L4 and L5, which are at equilateral points that are equidistant from Earth and Moon.
Where a colony is built is up to logistics and simplicity of ease, so L4 or L5 are more likely than L2, due to the complexity involved at L2. Regardless, once the mass driver launches materials at incredible speed, something has to catch it, and some sort of mass catcher will be positioned at the most logistically easy point. From there, it’s a simple matter of launch, catch, construct, and repeat, which is not to say that such a major construction project would not require a great deal of time, but in relative terms, would be no complex than the construction of a particularly large aircraft carrier.
Given that all of these concepts are being couched in 1970s technology and 2008 dollars, what’s stopping NASA or some other space-inclined power? The eternal bugbear of science: money. An earth-based mass driver would cost something in the area of $40 billion dollars, more than double NASA’s annual budget. Most of that money would be dedicated toward creating energy capacitors from the 1970s to power the mass driver, as it would only take about $100 million dollars to buy the raw materials and actually build the mass driver. The price tag for launching materials into space I provided also includes the cost of amortization of capital for payload, so those costs were not ignored. However, even in the 1970s, a proposed solution for the energy problem was to make the entire drive coil system of a mass driver superconducting, as well as the coils, so that enough energy could be stored inductively by charging the system with current. Then quench the coil when done, and the costs would be substantially reduced. Colonies themselves are expensive masterpieces, requiring billions of dollars in materials in labor to build.
So, is there hope for a future in space or will it die on the desks of bureaucrats? Current models of sustainability indicate that, at best, Earth can only produce enough food to support 10 billion people. Population projections conservatively project 9 billion people by the year 2050, and this is including the various demographic data that prove the extremely low fertility rates in Europe, North America, Japan and Australia, and China. One has only to look in famine-plagued nations at the results of not having enough to eat: war for food and water. So, will there be a future in space? I think it’s inevitable, even if bureaucrats continue to hatchet the program for the next two generations. Needs must.
Finally, it’s my belief that the nation most likely to launch space colonies first will be an unexpected upstart in the modern world: India. India has a growing population that is already well past 1 billion, and will surpass China’s in the near future. It is rapidly becoming a wealthy nation, with a GDP of $5 trillion that is projected to continue growing. Not only that, Indians produce a large share of engineers, scientists, and the other kind of people necessary to make the space colony dream a reality. It has the impetus of a massive population, along with the intelligence to pull if off. Neither the United States nor Europe, areas already well within Stage IV of demographic transition (death rate is equal to the birth rate), when not in Stage V (death rate exceeds the growth rate) without immigration, have little real reason to want to put up space colonies, as they do not have any particular excess population nor threat of it occurring. Russia is within Stage V, so again, while it has the resources and ability to do so, does not need to, nor will have the need to. Lastly, China, behemoth though it is, will eventually not need space colonies, and that will be sooner rather than later. The One Child Policy artificially puts China in Stage IV, and given that One Child Law in China that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of surplus males without any possibility of finding a mate, the natural process of reproduction will make it less attractive and even necessary. Regardless of which one of the space powers pulls it off, living in space is closer than anyone thinks.
Sources
Space Settlements: A Design Study
International Data Base
Ten Billion Mouths To Feed
Mass Driver Update
In an effort to open my blog on a positive note, and to avoid using controversy as a gimmick to 'sell' the articles I will write, I have decided to use my first post as a birthday present to myself and explore a topic most people rarely consider in their day to day lives, but is near and dear to my heart.
Allow me to paint a picture for you. Imagine a world where people dwell in the inky void of space, where they live and work in artificial environments that hang suspended in a sea of stars. Imagine a world where each of these self-contained wordlets has its own farms, factories, villages, and hundreds of people who live, work, and play under the benevolent supervision of Terra, Luna, and countless glimmers in the sky, a world where shuttles fly from colony to moon to Earth and back in a daily progression of trade and near-harmony.
It sounds fantastically science fiction, doesn't it? What if I told you that the technology for all these fantastic things were theorized and some were proof of concept tested in micro-scale in the late 1970s? An unbelievable claim, isn't it?
Sadly, as will be typical of the things mentioned in this blog, it's all true. During the 1970s, a great deal of intellectual sweat was invested in the idea of creating what common lexicon would call a space station, but scientists correctly identified as a space habitat, as the complex machines put into orbit would not be mere working places, but home to thousands of people. In the spirit of old-time explorers, who recognized their settlements as colonies of their mother nation, I will refer to the space habitats as colonies in recognition that they would be the settlements of humanity in a new frontier.
From here on, the assumption will be that the colony in question will be a Bernal sphere, 500 meters in diameter, and able to support about 10,000 people. To begin simply, an island of humanity in space must first deal with the minimum of human needs in space. The first would be the threats from an obviously hostile environment. The basic threats can be summed up as radiation and meteoroids. The sun is a highly active ball of super-combusted gases that throws out radiation in all directions. The Earth’s atmosphere prevents the majority of that radiation from coming into contact with living organisms, but such natural shielding would be unavailable in an artificial construct such as a colony. The second threat, that of meteoroid impact, are statistically insignificant, but still there for the sake of completeness. A meteoroid that weighs a gram can be expected once every ten years, and a ten kilogram meteoroid is a threat of every one hundred thousand years. Both can be addressed with heavy metallic shielding that resist radiation and have a strong ability to resist impact, which will require millions of tons of metal, and is actually the most economically feasible.
What about basic human needs, such as food, water, air, stress, and, that most ignored of all necessities, gravity? Gravity is arguably the most necessary, as without gravity, human bones rot away, making the bones less sturdy and breakage more likely. Gravity is the most easily addressed, surprisingly, as a rotating environment can be set to produce the necessary 1 G (9 m/s^2) by adjusting its rate of revolutions per minute (RPM). To translate, by making the colony rotate once a minute, a sensation of weight akin to that on Earth is produced. Air is needed to maintain life, as is the pressure present from the air. The ‘air’ we breathe is actually a composite of many gases from which we take in the necessary O2 to exist. However, the air also has to provide enough pressure for human lungs to work adequately, yet prevent losses in the inner chemistry or the growth of hostile bacteria. From there, the creation of a proper atmosphere is actually more like copying the atmosphere available on earth. However, the actual pressure of that atmosphere well below that of Earth’s actual atmosphere.
Food and water would actually be incorporated into the entire system. It’s accepted scientific fact that the atmosphere is maintained through the environment through a complex interaction of animal and plant. That same environment would become a keystone of the actual support system to sustain life. As for the inevitable stress that would result from living inside of a floating metal island, those would be addressed through design aesthetics, such as the aforementioned plants, giving colonists plenty of ability to customize, as well as creating a ‘view’, either through blocking off sections of the colony, and making it easy to look ‘outside’, into the ink well of the void.
Another matter to address is population growth. It is my belief that given the small size of the initial colony, it won’t be filled at the start. It will probably be filled with about half its capacity, to allow for a natural growth and demographic transition. Bernal spheres would be primarily agricultural, able to feed and probably clothe itself, but in need of heavier goods. Obviously, trade with Earth will be a necessity for it to survive and prosper for a long time.
I’ll finish up this particular part of the article with how to build the colony, and then move on to the reasons why it hasn’t been implemented, and my theory on how we’ll finally manage to get into space. Obviously, labor for construction will have to come from Earth, and the initial stage of construction will require that the materials come from Earth as well. But how are we supposed to economically deliver many tons of materials into space, when shuttle launches are a crippling $45,000 per kilogram? As I’m sure you can expect, that problem was also addressed, and even proof of concept tested. A mass drivers is an electromagnetic launcher which accelerates payloads to an incredible speeds to fire it out into space. Obviously, the speeds involved nullify this as a possibility for human transportation, but at least the tools, materials, equipment, and other necessities can be launched into space for a relatively cheap $0.10 a gram.
However, an Earth-based mass driver would only be the first step in creating the first space colony. Another matter that must be considered is having a pseudo-stable work environment. Things in space drift, and without air resistance, potentially never stop moving. It’s possible that the colony being built would drift off from Earth, into the moon, with no way to stop it. Physics has generously provided a solution to that problem with the Lagrange points, points in the orbit of Earth that will stay in place when put into orbit there, which means a stable work environment. There are five Lagrange points, and the closest is the one between Earth and the moon, L1, but the most stable are L4 and L5, which are at equilateral points that are equidistant from Earth and Moon.
Where a colony is built is up to logistics and simplicity of ease, so L4 or L5 are more likely than L2, due to the complexity involved at L2. Regardless, once the mass driver launches materials at incredible speed, something has to catch it, and some sort of mass catcher will be positioned at the most logistically easy point. From there, it’s a simple matter of launch, catch, construct, and repeat, which is not to say that such a major construction project would not require a great deal of time, but in relative terms, would be no complex than the construction of a particularly large aircraft carrier.
Given that all of these concepts are being couched in 1970s technology and 2008 dollars, what’s stopping NASA or some other space-inclined power? The eternal bugbear of science: money. An earth-based mass driver would cost something in the area of $40 billion dollars, more than double NASA’s annual budget. Most of that money would be dedicated toward creating energy capacitors from the 1970s to power the mass driver, as it would only take about $100 million dollars to buy the raw materials and actually build the mass driver. The price tag for launching materials into space I provided also includes the cost of amortization of capital for payload, so those costs were not ignored. However, even in the 1970s, a proposed solution for the energy problem was to make the entire drive coil system of a mass driver superconducting, as well as the coils, so that enough energy could be stored inductively by charging the system with current. Then quench the coil when done, and the costs would be substantially reduced. Colonies themselves are expensive masterpieces, requiring billions of dollars in materials in labor to build.
So, is there hope for a future in space or will it die on the desks of bureaucrats? Current models of sustainability indicate that, at best, Earth can only produce enough food to support 10 billion people. Population projections conservatively project 9 billion people by the year 2050, and this is including the various demographic data that prove the extremely low fertility rates in Europe, North America, Japan and Australia, and China. One has only to look in famine-plagued nations at the results of not having enough to eat: war for food and water. So, will there be a future in space? I think it’s inevitable, even if bureaucrats continue to hatchet the program for the next two generations. Needs must.
Finally, it’s my belief that the nation most likely to launch space colonies first will be an unexpected upstart in the modern world: India. India has a growing population that is already well past 1 billion, and will surpass China’s in the near future. It is rapidly becoming a wealthy nation, with a GDP of $5 trillion that is projected to continue growing. Not only that, Indians produce a large share of engineers, scientists, and the other kind of people necessary to make the space colony dream a reality. It has the impetus of a massive population, along with the intelligence to pull if off. Neither the United States nor Europe, areas already well within Stage IV of demographic transition (death rate is equal to the birth rate), when not in Stage V (death rate exceeds the growth rate) without immigration, have little real reason to want to put up space colonies, as they do not have any particular excess population nor threat of it occurring. Russia is within Stage V, so again, while it has the resources and ability to do so, does not need to, nor will have the need to. Lastly, China, behemoth though it is, will eventually not need space colonies, and that will be sooner rather than later. The One Child Policy artificially puts China in Stage IV, and given that One Child Law in China that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of surplus males without any possibility of finding a mate, the natural process of reproduction will make it less attractive and even necessary. Regardless of which one of the space powers pulls it off, living in space is closer than anyone thinks.
Sources
Space Settlements: A Design Study
International Data Base
Ten Billion Mouths To Feed
Mass Driver Update
Welcome! Bienvenido!
Hello, and welcome to my blog. My nom de plume is Zehava, and first I wanted to thank you for gracing my humble corner of the internet. I opened this blog after much thoughtful consideration and analysis of the modern media outlets. One thing all media is guilty of is bias, but the greater sin, I believe, is the lack of depth in the news. At best, it superficially delivers information twisted to fulfill the ideological objective of the media provider. At worst, it downright ignores major events across the world as unimportant. As a well-informed, multi-lingual individual, I have access to more varied founts of information, as well as a spontaneous network of international contacts and friends who are happy to trade the interesting things they learn.
After due consideration, I decided I should attempt to meet the gap unexpectedly present in the way most people acquire their knowledge of the outside world. I will endeavor to cover topics informatively and fairly, applying logical progression and reasoned persuasion to help the reader reach the larger world, as well as provide my opinion on what the future will bring. I also want to make this blog accessible to more than just Anglophones, so I will do my best to provide translations in Spanish and, eventually, French. With this introduction, I wish to issue my final thank you and proceed to share my thoughts and opinions.
http://zehava-espanol.blogspot.com/
Hola, y bienvenido a mi blog. Mi nom de plume es Zehava, y primero quise agradecerle por honrar mi esquina humilde del Internet. Comenze este blog después de mucha consideración y análisis pensativo de los medios de comunicación modernos. Una cosa que todos los medios son culpables de es diagonal, pero yo creo el mayor pecado, es la carencia de la profundidad en las noticias. En el mejor de los casos, entregan información superficial, torcido para satisfacer el objetivo ideológico
Después de la consideración debida, decide que debo intentar resolver el boquete inesperado presentado en la manera que la mayoría de la gente adquiere su conocimiento
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
