<div dir="ltr">Given the audience, I thought a tech description was more desired. If you want poetic...<div><br></div><div>Obviously one 2x2 km cylinder would not represent the entire ecology of the much vaster Earth - but nor would just one accommodate more than a tiny fraction of humanity. If you want variety, you want a fleet.</div><div><br></div><div>Each cylinder would be set up for a different habitat, plus some accommodation for the humans who choose to live there. This one a lush forest, that one a warm desert, this other one more arctic. A few would of course be built-up: urban is a biome too, and some people greatly prefer it. Some might be set aside as wilderness preserves, especially for the less popular (less human friendly) biomes. But don't forget, the main purpose would be to house humans, so there wouldn't be that many preserves.</div><div><br></div><div>It wouldn't be fake dirt or fake plants. It would all be real - managed to some degree, but real. There's no slipperiness of plastic, no whiff of chemicals, none of that. Holes could be cut in decks for the largest of trees to grow and be observed through. (Once they grow that large, of course: for the first several years it'd all be saplings.) Sniff the flowers: your nose doesn't detect anything fake because there is nothing fake. A rose grown in any other place would smell as sweet.</div><div><br></div><div>What's removed is the "nature, red in tooth and claw" aspect. No hurricanes, no earthquakes, no volcanoes, no natural disasters. Rain every so often - maybe on a slightly random schedule, but scheduled so people know when to get out of the rain - because that's the easiest way to wash the sky, but no floods or droughts. Maybe you are fortunate enough to live somewhere where these things do not every so often threaten life and wreck property, but there are a lot of people for whom this alone would be luxury worth calling Heaven.</div><div><br></div><div>Sure, it might get boring living in just one biome all the time. These colonies, for humans, would be close together, linked by mass transit - so if you want to visit another biome, it's a short trip away, and moving to another biome wouldn't be hard. You could even walk to the next biome, if you're in good health.</div><div><br></div><div>Can't see the night sky? Well...I just mentioned links between cylinders, right? Walk out among them - they're radiation shielded too, just transparent to visible light - and gaze out on a more brilliant sky of stars than could ever be seen at the bottom of our atmosphere. Or call up a display from one of the many cameras, like peering through a telescope but more convenient. Also you don't have to wait for night: the sky always there, waiting to be seen.</div><div><br></div><div>The "farmland" - hydroponics - would also be close at hand. Fresh fruit, vegetables, and all manner of animal products (your tongue doesn't care that it's cloned meat so long as it has the right taste and texture) at lower prices (since there's much less distance to transport food). With every cylinder producing food, hunger becomes much less of an issue: disruptions in one cylinder don't endanger the other cylinders.</div><div><br></div><div>And nor would it be just food. You want 100 roses? Sign up to help tend the wilds and you could have a rose garden as part of it. Flowering plants might use drones instead of bees (less out of concern for bees going wild, and more because bees might go extinct by the time this colony got going), but they would still get pollinated. (If there were no bees to be found - well, at least there would be maple syrup.)</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, Aug 26, 2021 at 5:36 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Look down at what you wrote: lots and lots of words about specifications of this and that and tiny bits about plants, vistas, trees and dirt. Hardly any color. So people can tell that you are a tech person and not a poet. Or in other words, the way you wrote would be just about the opposite of what you would want to present to prospects for living there. You want words like 'lush'. What percentage of the ecology of the earth could be represented? Two of everything including microbes? Two kilometers is rather small. The place needs different environments, such as prairie and jungle. Different seasons. </div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,0)">It could be very attractive to me if I had to leave Earth. But it's kind of like Disney World: you know everything is fake in a way. I would still want to visit planets if I was on a habitat. You have to realize that I am difficult to please. Look at what most people are happy with: an 8 x 10 deck to plant a few ferns. I have 100 roses. Maybe I am just a bit claustrophobic. bill w</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, Aug 26, 2021 at 5:24 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">On Thu, Aug 26, 2021 at 2:16 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Vastly better quality of life? Hah. I cannot imagine living in space in some rotating asteroid or totally manmade thing. I am quite sure I would not like it at all. I want to look out the window and see a real sky and dirt and trees and flowers and animals. I don't want a high res image of the sky - I want real sky.</div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I can imagine it. Let me paint you a vision from one of my upcoming works. (Coming out...maybe November, more likely early next year.)</div><div><br></div><div>There exists an alien race (the K'kree, from Traveller) who are substantially more claustrophobic than humans. There are tales (in universe), possibly exaggerated, of some having panic attacks so severe that they tore their way out of spaceships just to be "outside" with no consideration of first donning spacesuits (in fact, viewing them as a form of further confinement), which had predictably fatal consequences. And yet, they wished to conquer the stars. (The setting includes a FTL drive.)</div><div><br></div><div>Some of them got around this by constructing giant arks - mobile O'Neill cylinders (the setting includes a drive that can handle gravity and inertia; a comparable habitat for RL humans wouldn't need to move). These arks are 2 kilometers in length and diameter, with concentric decks each 50 m radius (100 m diameter). The outermost deck is spun to 1 G; each deck inward reduces gravity by 0.05 G, down to a minimum 0.25 G; the space below the 250 m radius is hollow, to afford a 0 G space for industrial efforts and docking. (Independently rotatable docking rings line the central corridor; when a ship wishes to dock, it settles onto one of these rings, which secures the ship then spins up to match the ark's rotation, finally synchronizing position with transit tubes to let crew, passengers, and cargo transfer between ship and ark.)</div><div><br></div><div>On each of the outermost decks (used for habitation; the outer skin is shielded enough that even the outermost deck has about the same radiation exposure as one would get on the surface of a typical planet), habitable structures rarely rise beyond 10 meters tall, very rarely beyond 20, and never beyond 30 unless they mean to link to the deck above. There is about 10 meters of interdeck plating, leaving 40 meters of occupied space. The decks above tend to be covered by cloud-like mist at all times; if and where they are not (which may be "never"), they are covered by plants.</div><div><br></div><div>The horizon may curve up instead of down, but it is a true horizon: one can only see so far along the curve of the world, and if one travels to that point, one can see further in the direction traveled but not so far in the other direction (what used to be in sight, now being beyond the horizon back that way). The horizon may be only along one axis, but on the other horizontal axis (if you are not right next to one of the walls), the ark is long enough that the far distance fades into the blue of air - like how trees on a planetary horizon, when you can see that far, appear more sky colored than green.</div><div><br></div><div>Unless specifically excavated for a building, the "ground" is covered by thick dirt, with trees and flowers and grass. Some arks even have areas with wildlife, monitored so they do not damage ship systems or residents.</div><div><br></div><div>A majority of the internal volume is "wasted" being open air with little function beyond aesthetics, but it is these aesthetics that enable the aliens to permanently live in space. If repurposed for humans, a few million humans could live on one, with ample industrial space with which to maintain it (given sufficient raw materials input, such as from asteroid mining).</div><div><br></div><div>That's a better living situation than some spacefaring volume-optimized apartment brick, no? It does require costs to come down so planners of space structures don't have to be hyperfixated on minimizing mass; getting resources from space and building in space should help with this.</div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,0)">I simply cannot imagine some tech being lost unless it is to a more advanced tech.</div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>It's not that the tech is lost, per se, just that it becomes uneconomical to make in changing circumstances - and thus becomes effectively lost.</div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,0)">I can imagine a future person having the ability to make his own chips or just anything he needs just by pushing buttons.</div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Getting there requires the kind of effort that you need to distribute the cost of over lots of people - billions, maybe more - who would use, benefit from, and fund, or it just doesn't happen. </div></div></div>
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