One of these days, Alice.

[Shevek]

How about a self-sustaining, totally sealed, “bio-dome” here on earth. There hasn’t been one successful example of that, yet.

Yeah, Life is full of surprises. One big discovery for planetary pioneers at Biosphere was that concrete continues to absorb oxygen for many months after being poured. They had to break the seals to save the humans.

 

[JudeB]

Yeah, Life is full of surprises. One big discovery for planetary pioneers at Biosphere was that concrete continues to absorb oxygen for many months after being poured. They had to break the seals to save the humans.

In the words of Doctor Ian Malcom, "Life finds a way."

 

[Dagan]

The moon is extremely weird. Those that have thoroughly studied it...you know what I mean.

The primary issue will be having a water supply because it's seemingly not going to come from the moon itself. Secondary will be simply why the moon has so many craters. It's constantly hit by meteors that do not burn up / shrink up in an atmosphere like the Earth has. Whatever is built there will have to withstand ongoing damage. "Build it underground, then?" I don't think so. Again, back to if one has truly, thoroughly studied the moon. There's a lot going on with that sphere that needs answered and way more thoroughly explored.

 

[Shevek]

I think that for the foreseeable future, the only way to establish a self-supporting enterprise off the Earth is to mine Asteroids using robots.

 

[cooljethro]

I always though it was simply because we've already drastically overpopulated this planet and we've run out of room. Infinite growth within a finite space simply isn't possible.

Better results could be achieved by looking in to ethical ways in which we can limit our population growth, and in fact achieve population decline for several generations. Religious nutters don't like that idea though.

The reason why the Earth is overpopulated is not because of a lack of space (the Earth can hold several times the current global population in terms of mere space) - it is the damaging effect that humans have on the environment that is the issue with population growth.

If you look at how many people live in a place like the UK, or Japan, both of which have incredibly small geographical areas relative to their population sizes and then look at the populations and geographical areas of countries such as the US - there is room for billions more people globally, if only humans were smart enough to plan new cities and such in a compact, rather than a stretched out way.

Just imagine how much space would be saved by building high rise buildings and purely having those as dwellings, instead of typical houses, as an example. Or building in places of vast nothingness from scratch, with the aim of creating new areas of mass population.