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Conquering the LaGrange Points?
3laws_safe writes "For decades, people have dreamed about building colonies at the five LaGrange points, intersections in space where gravitational and centrifugal forces balance out to provide orbital stability. But now, the official magazine of the U.S. Space Command advocates seizing control of the LaGrange points before other nations do it. From the article: 'We face the need to control the chokepoints of the solar system.' Arthur C. Clarke, who depicted a LaGrange colony in his classic 1961 novel A Fall of Moondust, is not very happy about this. He argues we should not 'export national rivalries beyond the atmosphere.' Is he right? Or should we prepare for the fact that such rivalries are inevitable, even in space?"
While Clark sentiments are noble, they're equivalent to saying that we shouldn't even be having these rivalries here on the ground. He is correct, but wishing does not make reality so.
Space colonization is going to be like any other form of colonization in history, only with less killing of the natives. It's going to be a chance for each country's "Way of Life" to be exported abroad and for each country to seize resources for themselves so that they can dominate their rivals close to home. The fact that it's in space instead of across the sea is irrelevant.
This is history. Prepare to repeat it.
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Clearly. I would rather the US control those points than someone frankly and overtly evil.
Even if the conflicts in space are just the diplomatic/political kind (ie - we built a base here first - this section of Mars/Moon/Space is ours), and not the military kind - they are inevitable. The only reason they haven't happened is because there is no reason to claim territory in space - yet. But once it starts, every nation that can will start planting flags... its not a matter of if - its when.
Seems it'd be best for the US if WalMart owned one of the lagrange points, just like WalMart owns much of manufacturing in China and Exxon owns much of the oil in the mideast. If it's siezed as a military base it'll just sit there with lots of cost and little benefit to anyone; but if it's purchased as a commercial facility, it'll be a tax on everyone going into space. To rephrase the distinction in more concrete terms; China is WalMart's biggest ally, but China is also the US military's largest competitor for space domination.
I agree that the US corporations should race to control commercially the Lagrange points (as we do buying up oil in the mideast); but I think it'd be stupid if we decided to occupy them at great cost to ourselves (as we do to certain countries in the mideast).
Obviously, you're not thinking either. Where are we going to get enough hydrogen if all the consumers are using it up? It's not like there's huge reservoirs of H just lying around and falling from the sky.
Because one general in an obscure military journal tossed out the idea doesn't mean that the US supports this position, is working towards achieving this goal, or really much else.
Colonizing, or capturing, or whatever exactly the military wants to do with the LaGrange points is decades if not centuries away, and decades if not centuries away from being militarily significant. It is in no way feasable right now, given the ballooning US budget deficit. Our current national debt could not take the strain that the financial burden of such an endeavor would entail. This is nothing more than one soldier's wet dream.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
No it's not, asshole.
After all, I am strangely colored.
"Humans in space are still humans just like the one on this blue ball."
Actually, I'm not too sure of that. Numerous astronauts report that the trip into space changes a man - and I think I can understand that, sort of.
It's a radical change of perspective. Viewed from down here, our earth seems rather huge, and if you try to get the "big picture", the only way to do so is via maps. Conveniently, all those maps come equipped with fat, red, obvious national borders, making it easy to divide the earth in "us" and "them".
From space, it's totally different. Not only will you suddenly have a very hard time pinpointing your hometown, let alone your country. Also, it becomes hard to think of the planet as "big" when you buzz around it in less than two hour's time (the orbital period of the ISS is ~90min) and when the atmosphere is just a sliver over the sphere's mass. Or when you watch the earth shrink to the size of a ping-pong ball when making the minutest of celestial excursions, for example to our moon.
I find it very understandable that humans will act less crazy and childish in such an environment, and it's this hope for the betterment of mankind which made me an enthusiast of manned space travel.
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
Who says anyone must hold absolute control of the LaGrange points?
I mean, the same argument could be said for Antarctica -- if we don't turn it into a U.S. controlled territory, the Chinese will! Well, maybe if they were trying to monopolize access to Antarctica, we would care enough to do it first. In the meantime, many countries can conduct their own business on Antarctica and there are no problems.
Why treat space differently? Why would you, in anticipation of a conflict in the future, create one now? If you treat control of LaGrange as a binary choice -- either us or the Chinese have 100% control with no access at all for the other -- then you will bring that situation about. If you say that we will fight over LaGrange and thus we must claim it now and prevent the Chinese from doing so, then you only give them an incentive to take it for themselves, whether before or after we do.
I am fully aware that with history as our guide we can predict conflicts in space. Why assume that all such conflicts are unavoidable and that the only choice is preemptive action? History doesn't bear that out at all. History does say that when one side believes war is innevitable, then it is.
We don't have to go to war with China, over the LaGrange points or anything else. We don't. And only by believing that this is the case will it ever be possible.
So I say we treat it like Antarctica. Nobody claims it, nobody prevents others from accesing it, everybody benefits. If this model of peaceful coexistence breaks down, well hopefully we're not fools and are prepared. But let's not go creating conflicts where none exist yet, okay?
The enemies of Democracy are
L1 and L2 are unstable on the timescale of 23 days.
L3 is unstable on a timescale of 150 years. That is, it's pretty stable for satellites, just not for planetary bodies. Of course, it also happens to be a friggin' useless orbit, as it never has line of sight visibility with Earth.
L4 and L5 are stable, so long as the mass of the larger object is greater than 24.96 times the mass of the smaller object. (Yes, it's really that odd number: it's actually 25*((1+sqrt(1-4/625))/2) ).
L4 and L5 are actually strange. They don't act like classical stability points, like most people think. If you push something away from L4/L5, it doesn't come back to L4/L5. It does, however, begin to orbit L4/L5, and those orbits are stable.