> Quite simply, the continued human expertise and organization necessary to manage and sustain such a system is far, far beyond anything we have today.

I get your concern but the differences are significant.

1. Habitats are mobile. If you don't like the neighbours you can up and move, something not possible with geography on Earth;

2. Land area is essentially infinite, not so on Earth.

> We can't even manage to globally reduce CO2

On the contrary, excessive CO2 is, at least in some context, a remarkably simple problem. We can extract CO2 from the atmosphere and make fuel. It just doesn't make any sense to do it because we need to burn fossil fuels to power the process.

So all we really need is a power source that's cheaper than fossil fuels. There are two obvious contenders for this:

1. Solar power. Estimates I've seen are that an orbital collector can be about 7 times as efficient as current Earth-based solar collectors.

2. Fusion power. Personally I'm not yet convinced if hydrogen fusion is viable. There are of course other proposals. We shall see.

You'll note that I don't include fission. It's an unpopular opinion on HN but until we have a good story for fuel and waste processing then this is a nonstarter.

>>1. Habitats are mobile. If you don't like the neighbours you can up and move, something not possible with geography on Earth;

That relies on the assumption that people within a single habitat wouldn't want to separate for whatever reason. Nation within a nation. It already happens on Earth(see: Catalonia, Taiwan, Hong-Kong, Silesia).

Getting my sci-fi hat on here but, it would in theory be easier for them to pool their money together and buy / build their own spaceship. Of course, this assumes that each ship is its own political entity; in practice, we'll probably see the equivalent of countries and states but in space, spanning territories and jurisdictions that span multiple habitats.

Why would separate spheres be any better than counties. One of the things that shot us up is the industrial revolution and that was mostly powered by cheap trade routes by land and ship.

As in trade is very essential for growth. Both of goods and ideas.

>1. Habitats are mobile. If you don't like the neighbours you can up and move, something not possible with geography on Earth;

Mobile? Are we talking O'Neal Cylinders here? While yes, technically they will be mobile, I highly doubt the reaction mass requirements to actually move a constructed space habitat on the scale of maintaining as near to self-sufficiency as possible a city size population would be terribly practical, especially if everyone was doing it wantonly.

Keep in mind the effect as of late with Moore's Law in processors, and realize that the same phenomena is likely to happen with spaveflight in that yes, the technology will scale in capacity, but a great deal of that capacity may be expended in rendering the technology "more accessible" to the less specialized consumer as opposed to remaining in a state where you're actually optimizing for maximum throughput theoretically possible.

Cars/motorcycles would be another example of the same phenomena I'm trying to get across in that we're trading technically superior performance of the motorcycle (maximally efficient, yet relatively hard to control and severe to lose control of) vs. The relative safety and friendliness offered by a car to an less skilled user, even if lugging around all the extra metal eats into the overall efficiency of attaining movement of small packets of material from point A to point B via motion attained through internal combustion processes.

Never mind the political issues. I fail to entertain enough optimism to realistically expect even getting beyond the ISS-like stage of space habitation within my lifetime at the rate we're going, and fully expect climate/ecological breakdowns to start creating too much conflict to really keep us moving forward in a cooperation friendly regime.

I'd love to be proven wrong though.

>> We can't even manage to globally reduce CO2

> On the contrary, excessive CO2 is, at least in some context, a remarkably simple problem.

I would argue that even though we have the technical skill, the fact we do not have the political capacity is a significant problem.

Given where humans came from, I’m sometimes surprised that our political thought processes functions at all on groups as large as cities, never mind nations or the plant as a whole. While I would like to hope that scaling it to the size of a Dyson swarm or larger would be fine, even at the level of one planet we do keep repeating cycles of genocides followed by people saying “never again” followed by more genocides elsewhere.

> but until we have a good story for fuel and waste processing then this is a nonstarter.

Waste processing in space? Just give it a slight push in the direction of the sun (or whatever the right direction is taking in consideration gravity) and forget about it.

> a slight push in the direction of the sun

That's not how orbital dynamics work; a slight push in any direction won't change the orbit enough for that thing to not be a problem anymore.

To make something fall into the sun, one needs quite a bit of delta-vee, which means energy. However, if the thing isn't in any hurry (and I imagine waste isn't), one can simply attach a solar sail with a tiny computer for steering it, and let it brake for the next few thousand years.

(Kerbal Space Program should be part of school curricula)

It's actually cheaper (in delta-V terms) to leave the Solar System than it is to hit the Sun [1].

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5lt50r/why_does...

Pushing something into the sun requires removing most of it's orbital velocity not just a simple push. A small push in an orbit will create something on a very similar orbit to you that absent a nearby body to induce a lot of drag will intersect with your orbit in 2 places (not at the same time you're there fortunately in pretty much every case).

"Quite simply, the continued human expertise and organization necessary to manage and sustain such a system is far, far beyond anything we have today."

You don't need "a system" for doing this. You only need one. 9,999 of 10,000 habitats could be staring into their naval, but the one building more will still be building more. So, I think you ought to flip the intuition around; it's not a question of keeping everyone on board, it's a question of what it takes to extinguish everyone's ability to do this, which, once it gets going, would basically amount to "a local supernova".

"I have even the remotest faith we could manage space habitats politically"

Again, I think maybe you're envisioning a world in which all the space habitats are just peacefully co-existing... but this is not a necessary precondition for them to exist, or propagate. Yes, they'll war, and they'll split, and they'll join into groups, and there will be diversity that makes the current diversity on Earth look like boring homogeneity, because there won't be such a strong force pulling people back towards a single species mean. It doesn't have to be utopia to exist.

You can see my other comment for clarification: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22480827

It's not about habitats coexisting with each other or not, it's about them imploding internally because people develop factions, compete for resources internally, threaten brinkmanship with critical systems, and eventually someone goes too far -- like people do all the time in countries all around the globe today.

Except a company can go bankrupt and a political regime can be replaced without all their employees or citizens dying in the process, because none of them are responsible for maintaining earth's life support.

Yes, some of them will die in civil wars.

But not all of them. And the ones that survive have the opportunity to learn from the ones that didn't.

That's less different from Earth than you may think. We've witnessed entire countries collapsing even in the last few years. If it wasn't for Earth providing free air, reasonably cheap water, and not-that-difficult food even when your local political system collapses, nobody on Earth would even consider switching their country to run on Communism; rather than merely killing dozens of millions of people it would be witnessed as bringing total extinction to anyone who tried it.

Basically, evolution doesn't stop.

I find this comment actually more insightful than the GP.

How often have I talked with people and mentioned, that in terms of social behavior, we make such slow progress, if any. If we could end human greed and other bad things, how easy it woule be for us to go to space. If money did not count and all would work for a great goal of advancing into space, we would be there already.

What many call "human nature" (which I do not believe) is what holds us back.

Slow and painful indeed, but considering we are animals the progress is massive. Just take a look at how brutal nature is, social darwinisn is the standard, decisions made on instincts, putting yourself first.

TIL it was Steve Bannon that killed off Biosphere 2.

You make the case that political issues haven’t changed much isn’t he past 2400 years, but then go on to say you’d like to see us manage things here at home before expanding into space?

Those seem to be in conflict to me. I do agree that human engineering has developed far faster than human politics, but I think we need to just accept that this trend will continue.

The conflict is exactly what I'm pointing out.

It's pretty easy to imagine a minority of administrators on a space habitat decide they'll take some critical system hostage unless they get a bigger share of whatever they want because they think (perhaps legitimately) they've been the victim of some injustice... overplay their hand, critical system fails despite nobody actually intending it, millions of people in the habitat die. Or a million other ways for disaster to happen because of human reasons, not engineering ones.

Here on earth, even when societies devolve into civil war and massacre (e.g. Syria the past few years), at least they don't destroy the earth along with it. But with a space habitat, even a partial breakdown of order easily means everybody can just die.

So let me be clearer: I wouldn't just "like" to see us manage Earth better first. My point is that this may very likely actually prevent space habitats from being viable at all. "Accepting that this trend will continue" doesn't mean we'll make space habitats regardless -- it means accepting space habitats might not ever be thing (no matter how possible the engineering is), unless it ever happens that we first make enough massive progress in our forms of political organization and cooperation as well.

While I see your point, it should be noted that we are perfectly capable of killing everyone on Earth as well. The only reason this hasn't happened is because the whole world came together to be more sensible[1] about nuclear conflicts than we were about less destructive conflicts, and because of a good deal of dumb luck. And killing everyone on Earth will only ever get easier as technology advances. At least a distributed civilisation means one community self-destructing doesn't mean the end of humanity.

[1] Not a high bar, and not by much. Nevertheless, we are still (barely) here.

This is probably where GAI would be really useful.

Wow, I head never heard of Biosphere 2 (or 1 for that matter). That is a very interesting read, thank you! Did not expect to run into Steve Bannon in an article like this lol.

In the current political (capitalistic) climate, a project like this would only be pursued if there was a vested financial interest; they're pursuing visiting asteroids mainly to see if there's a lot of rare / valuable materials in them (e.g. platinum), and making getting into orbit cheaper for financial gains as well (decreasing costs, increasing volume; also, space tourism).