[ExI] Thoughts on Space based solar power (Clinic Seed & a diverse future)

[hkhenson]

At 10:52 PM 11/22/2008, Paul wrote:
>hkhenson wrote:
>>My ex-wife and I wrote the original study of agriculture in a space 
>>colony.  Why would you have pests?  Where would they come from?
>
>Just a few missed insect eggs could multiply. In practice, all 
>ecologies have pests. No habitat can be that perfect in quarantine 
>if habitats exchange people.

They don't need to be, though taking a bath and laundering clothes 
before going up would probably keep out virtually every insect you didn't want.

In any case, farming modules heat up like autoclaves if you just shut 
off the heat sink.  That deals with any pest that I can think of.

snip

>But come on, isn't someone in the "better than life" simulation 
>going to read about the L5 society and just start building real 
>hardware because they could? Again, the "physical" world might have 
>a special meaning to people, whether that is "sacred" or "prized" or 
>"nostalgia" or something else.

Possibly.  It depends on social enjoyment.  Dealing with the physical 
world is almost certainly going to be less rewarding than a simulated 
one.  It's slow and more limited.  I have not been paying much 
attention.  Has anything leaked out of Second Life or World of War 
craft to become a real world product?  Or do the objects in there 
depend too much on the local "physics" rules?  It seems that at least 
costumes could be instantiated.

snip

>>>Anyway, to the extent you put your solar space satellite plans 
>>>under free and open source licenses, people can collaborate on improving them
>>Following the logic and math through the wiki pages seems to be 
>>harder than what most people are willing to do.  Or perhaps a 
>>social group has not yet formed around the concepts where people 
>>get support from each other the way they do on open source projects.
>
>One contributor to project success is indeed to get people together 
>who care about it. :-) One possibility is to integrate a wiki and a 
>face to face meeting (as in, get people together at a workshop, and 
>people work together on it). There certainly have been a lot of 
>people interested in SPS based on previous SSI conferences. Maybe 
>they don't know of it?

Possibly.  Do you still have contacts with them?  Could you let them 
know the web pages exist?

>>You mentioned Clay Shirky. Do you happen to know him?
>
>I was referencing that document by Clay Shirky based on the previous 
>discussions on this list about that work.

I have been trying without much luck to get in contact with him.

Keith