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herewiss13In an effort to get out of my own life, I've been thinking about Outer Space, lately...and not just Columbia. So for tonight's ramble: "What would an asteroid based society look like?"
For starters, would there ever be one? What could possibly possess people to go life on a bunch of stony rocks floating around between Mars and Jupiter?
In one word: metals.
And sunlight, zero-gee and space.
I'm not going to quote the whole doctrine, but I do like one figure I've heard. The Earth consumes, on average, one cubic mile of metal each year. There are about 400,000 asteroidal bodies of that size.
And it's damn hard to strip-mine an asteroid. Or really easy, depending on how you look at it.
Add water-ice and volatiles and you've got a really compelling reason to visit, and maybe even stay. Build domes on the surface or honeycomb the entire rock. Hollow it out, spin it and you've got your own ready-made O'Neil style space colony, complete with ready-made gravity.
So, assuming we ever _reach_ the asteroid belt, chances are people will live there, and not just visit, ala oil rigs (though that'd probably be how it starts). But how will people live there?
The classic SF trope is Asteroid Belt=old west/gold rush, with claims, claim jumpers and an entirely miner-centric attitude. Crazy prospectors in their one-man ships, looking for that big-strike. Bars and Bordellos on Ceres (the largest asteroid) and everything else just drifting rock mines and lonely old men.
But what rarely gets conveyed in SF is that the asteroid belt is big. REALLY big. And rocks are far apart. A spaceship chase through an asteroid belt isn't going to be like a pinball game. You aren't going to trick your attacker into crashing into a looking rock, no matter what Hollywood tells you. There's a lot of space out there.
So I'm wondering if a Polynesian model doesn't make more sense? Each island is a separate, if related, culture. Each culture is constrained by the materials at hand (i.e. some islands had forests or volcanic rocks for tools, others were barely more than sandy spits).
Each rock isn't just a mine, funneling back to Earth, but a colony, using the metals and volatiles for its own benefit. It reminds me of a quote from Mao that I once used in a debate case on free speech: "Let a hundred flowers blossom, let a thousand schools of thought contend."
But since the Belt is soooo big, it's more like a thousand different schools of thought, if not more. And so far removed from each other as to make any large-scale confederation or tyranny nearly impossible (or so I'd hope).
Maybe the Greek city states would be a better model than Polynesia. Travel is lengthy, but information could still travel quickly and easily. So culture might be more unified, even if force projection and travel are not.
It's really interesting to think of a hundred thousand high-tech societies, each on it's own rock, each doing its own thing, each asteroid unique in its composition and in the design of the habitat (domes, honeycomb, hollow core), all drifting in the void, connected yet isolated.
There'd be commerce, sure (ice for steel, crops for machinery, etc.) but nothing large scale. We're talking about a sea of stony icebergs, arranged in a loop larger than the Earth's orbit. And, travelling at an astronomical clip, the Earth takes one year to travel its, smaller, circle. Circumnavigation of the Belt would be for the rich elite...who had nothing better to do for the next half-decade.
So...gold rush, Polynesia, Grecian City States or something else entirely? Probably the latter...or a hybrid of some sort. But why on earth does everyone keep writing about human diversity among the stars when it'd be so easy to write about it here in our own back yard?
It's things like these that gnaw at me and frustrate.
For starters, would there ever be one? What could possibly possess people to go life on a bunch of stony rocks floating around between Mars and Jupiter?
In one word: metals.
And sunlight, zero-gee and space.
I'm not going to quote the whole doctrine, but I do like one figure I've heard. The Earth consumes, on average, one cubic mile of metal each year. There are about 400,000 asteroidal bodies of that size.
And it's damn hard to strip-mine an asteroid. Or really easy, depending on how you look at it.
Add water-ice and volatiles and you've got a really compelling reason to visit, and maybe even stay. Build domes on the surface or honeycomb the entire rock. Hollow it out, spin it and you've got your own ready-made O'Neil style space colony, complete with ready-made gravity.
So, assuming we ever _reach_ the asteroid belt, chances are people will live there, and not just visit, ala oil rigs (though that'd probably be how it starts). But how will people live there?
The classic SF trope is Asteroid Belt=old west/gold rush, with claims, claim jumpers and an entirely miner-centric attitude. Crazy prospectors in their one-man ships, looking for that big-strike. Bars and Bordellos on Ceres (the largest asteroid) and everything else just drifting rock mines and lonely old men.
But what rarely gets conveyed in SF is that the asteroid belt is big. REALLY big. And rocks are far apart. A spaceship chase through an asteroid belt isn't going to be like a pinball game. You aren't going to trick your attacker into crashing into a looking rock, no matter what Hollywood tells you. There's a lot of space out there.
So I'm wondering if a Polynesian model doesn't make more sense? Each island is a separate, if related, culture. Each culture is constrained by the materials at hand (i.e. some islands had forests or volcanic rocks for tools, others were barely more than sandy spits).
Each rock isn't just a mine, funneling back to Earth, but a colony, using the metals and volatiles for its own benefit. It reminds me of a quote from Mao that I once used in a debate case on free speech: "Let a hundred flowers blossom, let a thousand schools of thought contend."
But since the Belt is soooo big, it's more like a thousand different schools of thought, if not more. And so far removed from each other as to make any large-scale confederation or tyranny nearly impossible (or so I'd hope).
Maybe the Greek city states would be a better model than Polynesia. Travel is lengthy, but information could still travel quickly and easily. So culture might be more unified, even if force projection and travel are not.
It's really interesting to think of a hundred thousand high-tech societies, each on it's own rock, each doing its own thing, each asteroid unique in its composition and in the design of the habitat (domes, honeycomb, hollow core), all drifting in the void, connected yet isolated.
There'd be commerce, sure (ice for steel, crops for machinery, etc.) but nothing large scale. We're talking about a sea of stony icebergs, arranged in a loop larger than the Earth's orbit. And, travelling at an astronomical clip, the Earth takes one year to travel its, smaller, circle. Circumnavigation of the Belt would be for the rich elite...who had nothing better to do for the next half-decade.
So...gold rush, Polynesia, Grecian City States or something else entirely? Probably the latter...or a hybrid of some sort. But why on earth does everyone keep writing about human diversity among the stars when it'd be so easy to write about it here in our own back yard?
It's things like these that gnaw at me and frustrate.
