An Unhinged Conspiracy Theory of Space Settlement

I recently read A City on Mars, which was enjoyable and really drove home the near impossibility of permanent settlement on the Moon, Mars or anywhere even more exotic. Some of the book dwells on the legal aspects of it which, if I'm being honest, seem like the most trivial parts of the overall challenge. Not to mention that law is whatever you can enforce in the end. If anyone reads my posts here they will know my rather dim view of the Supreme Court and problems with uneven enforcement.

Anyway, a lot of the book addresses the technical challenges of a self-sustaining settlement off-Earth and basically comes to the conclusion that it's not happening anytime soon. But as the mountains of evidence and rationale start to pile up against the proposal, you start to wonder WHY the heck anyone believes in this plan? So here's my crazy idea:

THEY are getting humanity ready for a reality of living in sealed-off cities a la Logan's Run.

Probably without murder bots hunting escapees, so maybe just Biosphere 3 x 1000. No, I don't know who "they" are. But consider:

- The same sort of approaches people throw out for living on Mars could easily be adapted for domed cities like in the Biosphere. The biosphere experiment is actually discussed in A City on Mars but more as an example of just how difficult it is to have a self-sustaining settlement.

  • The planet is heading toward a tipping point. But what if "THEY" know it's going to be even worse than what has been published so far?

  • How would you solve the problem of keeping humanity alive? If you are researching how to keep the vacuum and radiation of Space at bay, then keeping intensely polluted air out of the dome is comparatively easier but just as applicable. You need enough genetic diversity to sustain a population, probably a means of population control... the list goes on and on.

Some of the tangential topics would probably make for an interesting series of mini articles that I'll probably never write.

  • We know that some - maybe most - countries are unsustainable at their current population levels without external trade. Are there any nations that COULD be self-sustainable? Consider the basics like food, water, energy but then move to unrefined metals and on to advanced machining, semiconductor manufacturing, etc.

  • If you were a prepper, how much underground space do you think you would need to sustain yourself and say 3 other people after your canned goods all ran out? Are you going to have animals in there? How do you plan on making clothes? How will you repair objects or systems within your closed space?

Regardless, we aren't settling the Moon anytime soon. Might as well try to make things suck less on Earth.

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