perfidy

Seth Shostak, SETI researcher and man-about-town, has a nice bit explaining why a sphere is such a inadequate shape for a homeworld. It is not exactly a new idea that we really ought to move off the planet and into the great void, but recently Stephen Hawking's comments have made the news. Hawking recommends new space colonies on the basis of the eggs in a basket rationale - that with life sequestered on just one world, we are vulnerable to a single point of failure - one asteroid, comet, disaster or alien invasion would put paid to the entire species. Fair enough, but Shostak argues that if we look at the tonnage to terrans ratio, the numbers are rather startling. For each of us, there is a trillion tons of earth. That's a lot of mostly inaccessible mantle and red hot magma for each of us. Moving into a more frothy or fractal living space would bring the ration down significantly. The asteroids have about the mass of the earth, but nearly all of it is easily accessible mass (assuming, of course, you have the capability to get to the asteroid belt. That mass could be readily converted to a living space ten thousand times that of earth - just assuming that you built domes on the surface of the rocks. If you actually cut them all up and made habitats out of them, the habitable volume could be millions bigger. Getting the ttt ration down to the order of a thousand or a hundred tons per person would be vastly more efficient. And therefore, we'd be better prepared to fight the giant fighting robots when they inevitably make their bid for domination.