What can we do with "Outer Space"? - Part One

Free Floating Space Colonies

If you think about it, there are several obvious drawbacks to putting your colonial venture on the surface of a large body in space.

1. gravity wells raise launch costs.
2. resource maps are arbitrary.
3. some locations lack value.
4. you don't choose your neighbors.
5. your rivals may locate nearby.
6. the light level and period is fixed.
7. you can't move it around.
8. political toleration is enforced.
9. social experiment is discouraged.
10. local ecology is determined.
11. population limits are inevitable.
12. living space isn't expandable.
13. crime & conflict is unavoidable.
14. terraforming is a challenge.

Just about every one of those problems can be avoided by building a rotating habitat, of which there can be many designs and shapes. It can always be argued that "bigger is better," of course, but that is just a factor of the tensile strength of the material used in construction. If we can learn to manufacture unlimited amounts of graphene sheets and buckytube threads, a cylindrical habitat with a diameter of 1000 kilometers becomes possible, and its length is mostly just a preference. Such a construct would contain a whole continent's worth of territory, to be mapped into land and sea as you will, and be terraformed into whatever ecologies you prefer. It could provide homes for a billion city dwellers, or a million farmers, or even be dedicated to parklands and ecological preserves - or any combination of those.

Of course, you don't have to necessarily build the largest construction possible, and even presently available materials can be used for habitats of respectable size. Steel can make a cylinder 5 or 6 miles across, and 30 miles long, for about 180 square miles of terrain, even if you leave half of it transparent to allow for sunlight. Imagine your own ideal population density. As many people as bees in a hive might not seem overcrowded, and that is enough to avoid any genetic bottleneck. (Note: you would not likely be living up there unless you have a job, which would guarantee your rent, and your eventual retirement.) But steel is not our best material. We could use titanium and kevlar, and make it 5-10 times bigger... and those are currently possible, not extrapolated potential stuff, like graphene and buckytube.

If your objections invoke the "insane" price tag to build such a thing, you might consider that the industrial production of modules for habitat construction may be one of the basic economic foundations of colonies on the Moon and Mars, and drive resource extraction from the asteroids. It will be far less expensive to establish a colony on the  Moon, and give them a few priority purposes, than to launch it all from Earth. And then the space habitats can have other beneficial purposes to profit Earth and the Moon, like solar power, spaceship assembly or materials refining. It quickly becomes less extravagant when you consider the economics of scaling it up by several factors of ten. And the goodwill of the world's citizens can be assumed if you are making it possible for them to participate in a future of abundance and peace.