From: rwallace@unix1.tcd.ie (russell wallace)
Subject: Re: The Moat around God's Eye
Organization: Trinity College, Dublin
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1992 12:31:14 GMT

In <xbmmnkc.dani@netcom.com> dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig) writes:

>rwallace@unix1.tcd.ie (russell wallace):
>>(The real flaw in the book was that the Moties would actually have built
>>space habitats; the resources for doing this are essentially unlimited.
>>Furthermore, a fusion-powered space habitat automatically doubles as an
>>STL spaceship with virtually unlimited range. So what if it took 1000
>>years to cover the 35 light years to the nearest planetary system to
>>Mote Prime?)

>Don't take our most optimistic ideas about space as gospel.  Fusion
>may translate to cheap energy, but the rest of the resources that such
>a habitat would require would still be a significant economic burden.
>(We're talking about a system where all the iron that can be mined
>has been mined, for instance.  There are no 'unlimited' quantities
>of asteroidal iron to be had.)

So use materials from somewhere else. You don't really need iron in
large quantity - use carbon fiber or something for the shell of the
habitats, plastic or ceramics as much as possible for machinery and so
on (an engineer could probably be more specific about what could be
done). These only require light elements, which can come from the
millions or billions of cometary nuclei in the Oort cloud (each one on
average several billion or trillion tons in mass), disassembling the
moons of the gas giant planets (detonate a sufficiently large fusion
bomb, and mine the debris), or disassembling the other planets of the
system themselves (diassemble small terrestrial planets by the same
method, disassemble the gas giants by building mining stations to float
in the upper atmosphere, constructing packages of materials and
launching them into orbit, also constructing other mining stations and
populating them with the natural population increase).

>Here's where Motie psychology comes in:  You're talking about an
>undertaking that is practical if enough of the planet gets behind
>it and helps to shoulder the economic burden.  But since such a
>project -- at best -- exports the cycles to another world without
>providing any benefit for those who stay behind, those who aren't
>going wouldn't be willing to divert the resources and speed up the
>cycle.

Ah, but the Moties of a particular city/nation/asteroid or whatever
would certainly be interested in building one or two habitats to
accomodate their population increase, and give increased resources and
power to their faction. You don't need a planet-wide decision. Even if
only one habitat is ever built, its inhabitants will build more (and
since there were civilizations on the asteroids, this condition was
already met - so why didn't they build more living space, instead of
just filling up what Nature had already created?)

>There's also another problem:  No Motie habitat can last a thousand
>years.  Even if almost everyone is in suspended animation, and the
>skeleton crew freezes most of its offspring, they'd still outbreed
>their habitat's holding capacity long before the millenium was up.

BUT - a habitat is small enough for a central government to control, and
to enforce use of sterilization after 2 or 3 children, or infanticide
(to which the population would accede, provided it was done with a
reasonable degree of fairness, since everyone would see that it was in
everyone's interest).

And the wonderful thing is, there would be no universe of cycles! This
is for the simple reason that only those Moties who learned to control
their breeding by one means or another (which is possible on a habitat)
are going to survive to reach the stars. The others will overload the
resources of their habitat, collapse into barbarism, and all die when
there is nobody to maintain the ecology and the fusion reactor.

--
"To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem"
Russell Wallace, Trinity College, Dublin
rwallace@unix1.tcd.ie