[ExI] Alpha Centauri

[Ben Zaiboc]

Jeff Davis <jrd1415 at gmail.com> added:

> The ship would be a complete society in an of itself, an
> O'Neil
> habitat with propulsion and a vast inventory of extra raw
> materials
> (which would clad the structure and serve as additional
> shielding
> until needed.

etc.

The thing that always makes me chuckle in these kind of conversations is the unstated assumption that the whole point of creating a vast infrastructure devoted to dragging a bunch of people out of a deep gravity well and allowing them to survive long-term (effectively indefinitely) in a space habitat is to travel to another deep gravity well and throw all the poor sophonts down the damn thing again.

WHY?!?!?!

You're in space, ffs!  Halfway to anywhere, as someone (Larry Niven?  Jerry Pournelle?) once put it.  If I could get out of this deep gravity well and survive in space, I sure as hell wouldn't want to go anywhere near another deep gravity well. Those suckers are soooo expensive to escape from! 

Not to mention all the weather, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, and other random and lethal acts of nature.

Give me a large, hollowed-out, spinning asteroid with a robust ecosystem, radiation shielding and *an engine* (!) over a planet anyday.

(Of course, I'd rather be an upload on a humungously massive spaceship the size of a sugarcube, but that's a different topic)

Ben Zaiboc