Paracelsus said:BortimusPrime said:The main advantage of doing an orbital colony or even a moon base for that matter is that if it fails you can still evacuate the colonists.
Well, you can make a rescue faster, certainly, but this is the thing with all offworld colonisation: whether in orbit, lunar, or Martian, if it's much beyond a low-end problem, to borrow a phrase from the upcoming The Martian, in my considered opinion you're fucked. A malfunction on a lunar colony that results in your air running out in 2.5 days has no different result to a Martian colony malfunction where the air runs out in 100 days. At least with Earth-based colonisation if your crops fail you can always eat the fucking grass or shoot a couple of buffalo. (And even then they still failed: Roanoke, Virginia is meant to have descended into cannibalism, to say nothing of what happened to the Greenland colonies the Vikings founded.)
BortimusPrime said:Paracelsus said:BortimusPrime said:The main advantage of doing an orbital colony or even a moon base for that matter is that if it fails you can still evacuate the colonists.
Well, you can make a rescue faster, certainly, but this is the thing with all offworld colonisation: whether in orbit, lunar, or Martian, if it's much beyond a low-end problem, to borrow a phrase from the upcoming The Martian, in my considered opinion you're fucked. A malfunction on a lunar colony that results in your air running out in 2.5 days has no different result to a Martian colony malfunction where the air runs out in 100 days. At least with Earth-based colonisation if your crops fail you can always eat the fucking grass or shoot a couple of buffalo. (And even then they still failed: Roanoke, Virginia is meant to have descended into cannibalism, to say nothing of what happened to the Greenland colonies the Vikings founded.)
Oh yeah, any short term disaster is probably going to kill the crew unless they have their own ship to escape on. But I was thinking more along the line of long term problems sustaining the colony like food shortages or people going crazy and drawing repreated concentric circles on all the interior surfaces with their own feces.