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SpaceX Brownsville Space Port Opposed By Texas Environmentalists
MarkWhittington writes "The proposed SpaceX space port in Brownsville, Texas, has run into opposition from an environmental group. Environment Texas is conducting a petition drive to stop the project. According to a news release by the group, the proposed space port, which would include a launch pad and control and spacecraft processing facilities, would be 'almost surrounded' by a park and wildlife refuge. Environment Texas claims the launching of rockets would 'scare the heck' out of every creature in the area and would 'spray noxious chemicals all over the place.' The petition will demand SpaceX build the space port elsewhere." I suspect a lot of people in Brownsville are instead looking forward to the jobs, tourists and excitement that a spaceport would bring.
We have pretty good amount of space here on earth too. We can colonise the sea for instance, or build down instead of up. There is lots of space available before we even come up with crazy plans to build O'Neil colonies in space.
Building into the ocean is much harder than it looks. It would be seriously cheaper to build at L-5 than to build a floating platform in the Gulf of Mexico (where the climate is at least fairly agreeable). If you could seastead in a fairly economical manner, it would be done in a serious way right now.
Antarctica is often suggested as a place you can go that is more hospitable to life than Mars, and I'd have to agree. The problem with Antarctica is that politically you can't do anything there because of the various treaties and a very real concern that a major colonization effort in Antarctica would result in a major world conflict like World War II over who owns what on that continent. Treating the place as a playground by scientists is one way to diffuse the issue and kick the can down the road for another century or more, where hopefully resources from space will make anything that can be obtained from Antarctica irrelevant.
Digging down is just plain stupid. Again, it would be done much more than it is if it was so easy. Most of the time people are digging up into the sky, which is something that has been happening for a couple of centuries and the last century in particular. While the very tall skyscrapers have all of the headlines, there are a great many smaller buildings that still go over a dozen stories and include both residential, commercial, and industrial facilities. Digging up into the sky does cost money and is only done in urban centers where it makes sense.
I might agree that an archology could be built that could house up to a million people in a relatively small footprint of land and be able to be self-sufficient. These do require a substantial supply of raw materials and in order to get built require the urban services of a large metro area to at least get started until self-sufficiency is attained. For myself though, I think it will take building stuff like an O'Neill colony and learning how to manage resources effectively in space to be able to build proper archologies on the Earth. Furthermore, it will be from space where the raw materials to build stuff like that will come from rather than from digging stuff out of the ground here on the Earth.
Space is huge. So mingbogglingly huge that you can't possibly imagine just how much room you have to expand in space. The future of humanity is up there, not on this rock... which can be turned into an ecological reserve in due time. The only other end game if we stay here on the Earth is to do some sort of Malthusian genocide as the current growth of mankind can't survive on limited resources. In space there are more galaxies than people, and more stars in this galaxy than people. It will also take a long, long time before it can even be remotely considered to be crowded in this Solar System alone.