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Oh as for MRE I came up with another intrepation of it. . . .

here goes!

MRE:  Meals Rejected by the Enemy

What about a crew of 20-30?  There needs to be more than 8 people at least as small groups can quickly get very confrontational.  I know this from experience as a city council man at BBS.  There needs to be more varity of people.

Most are considered cranks when they do go into exile.

Taiwan is a little island with few raw materials that is being threatened by the largest (population wise) nation in the world.  If they want to expand, they cannot do so without risking getting nuked.  The two options they have is to go into diplomatic negotaitions and pray for peace or they could expand by developing space.  Better two barns than one.

 
People said rome would never fall, communist russua would last forever, germany for 1000 years.  I am not saying when but I am offering possible scenarios how and why.  Present reality is never constant, but history has quite an tendancy to repeat itself. 

All the descriptions can be used to label historical groups that migrate.  look a little closer at history and many will find the purtians were religious to the degree of culthood.  On of the primary reasons china cut contact with the outlying colonys of her empire was the fear that they would not support their new government in power.  All of them were made possible only by rich and desparate men.

It hardly needs to be said great advances in the fields of material sciences have been made since then.  It is not as if there has been an impetus to make serroius advances as the space race was concluded.  Without impetus there are no advances at all.  A last ditch stand by a group facing anhillation is one hell of an impetus to make seroius advances.

Yes, that is true, but only to an degree.  Many deposits are not mined at all simply because it is too diffucult to even bother with the extraction and transport. 

It might ensure their survival. 

The nations of europe had to colonize the new world and beat their neighbors lest they be destroyed off the map.  Destruction of an establishment is hell for anyone concerned.  Just look at what happened to russia after her revolution, the kulaks, the peasant landowning class was anhillated in collectivation.  Or the catholics of germany during the unification.  My great great great grandfather was one of them who fled to the USA.

Most exiles then carve their own unique niche and gather power to unseat whoever upsurped them. 

Sure.  But last I checked, nuke missles can't catch anyone up there.  Besides, stealth technolgy is cheap if you understand the principles.  the F-117 was developed with a cost of 25 million dollars.  compare that to most development costs, and it will be clear that stealth is easier than it looks and cheaper than what the government is admitting.  The B-2 is really the largest pork barrel I have ever seen, just look at the gigantic list of sub-contractors.

Only desperate exiles.  Who else?

I've read it myself recently too, but I still doubt it is the future of space propulsion, as there are still major shortcomings in the design, most notably in the event a bomb fails to detonate or how to "turn it off" to speak.  The shock absorbers are a little too good. . . .but it is more than worth it to research and go for it espically as its high ISP will facillate asteroid shipping in earth orbit.  Better to explode them there than here (NIMBY) but I am all for it.

Has anyone read Robert Caro's Master of Senate or The Means of Ascent?

Robert Caro is very good at this sort of thing.  I like meaniful verbosity.

How about Truman by david cullulogh?  I thought it was ok.

Sounds unrealistic.  I don't see how it can work.

hmm?  I appreciate your explaination but I still don't understand what I am seeing here.

I was only defending idustrial society compared to primative society.  My arguement was not agianst anarchism nor for it.  read it carefully to see what it is about.  If you are not refering to what I wrote, I'll remove foot from my mouth.

I was protesting against reactionary ideas. 

I believe that America is already anarchist to a degree, for the better of the country.

I don't mean to be an party pooper but how was three mile island a major acident?  no one died as an direct or indirect cause of the accident.

  If one was cherynobl, then what was the other?  I vaguely recall a accident in the 1950s at an miltary experimental reactor.

Nope, but thanks for the suggestion, I'll order it from the library if I can.   

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With idealism, it is oboius that hyprocites are around, but ideals are the highest to adhere to.  Why not shoot after them? 

Without idealism, what is the ultimate goal of man?  His own self gratification?  or his neighboors self gratification?

Ideals must be reconized as impossible, but we must have our ideals or we risk losing our lives as we know it. 

I suppose no ideals would be apt to anarchy. . . .

On the gounds that ideals tend to mobilize and organize man into hierarchys.  And organization is just another word for the sub-establishments.  In the end, there is no absolute ruler, there is only a collection of sub-establishments with ties and a general agreement on how things should be done, thus creating the government aka state.   

As hard as one might, there is no true single ruler.  Even in homogonous cultures there are subsets of the culture in itself, which sow the seeds of the sub-establishment, which is only a consenting member of the establishment at large. 

without fail, every human civilization has had its own sub divisions within the estabishment.  Each one has had different ideals, ideals that set them appart from the establishment at large. 

The establishment goes after these ideals primarily without really regarding other ideals

ex.  special interest groups.

ex.   Nobility.

ex.   religion.

The question is who created the ideals, and who controls this creation?

I am agrueing that it takes some pretty drasic and dismal times to provide the impetus to go into space.  I do not pretend to know exactly what.  Right now, I don't see a event drasic enough to force industrailization.  I am offering a educated guess to what the impetus may be.  In any case, it must be extreme enough to force establishment members to seek a release form the event, whatever it may be. 

             The script I am quoting here comes from Simon Schama's "A History of Britain, VII The Wars of the British, 1603-1776.

         "In the years after Glencoe, both Scotlands (but especially the south) endured the misery of what became known as the 'ill years'.  For several summers in a row the sun refused to appear.  Torrential rain deluged the country and continued into the autumn, turning the stunted crops of barley and wheat into sodden slurry and making any kind of harvest impossible.    Occasional years of respite suffered from the seed deficts of their predecessors.  Cattle and sheep developed murrain and footrot.  The first (and mercifully last) great famine in living memory dug its talons into Scotland.  At least 5 per cent of Scotland's one and a quarter million population died of hunger.  Patrick Walker, a pedlar in the Highlands, claimed to have seen women in ditress after all the meal had been sold, 'clapping their hands and tearing the clothes off their heads crying, "How shall we go home and see our children die in hunger?"'  Sir Robert Sibbald, the first Professor of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh and author of Provision for the Poor in the Time of Death and Scarcity (1699) catalouged the wild herbs and grasses that might be digestable and recommended that cats be eaten if there were no other kinds of meat.  The highways were full of destitute, disbanded soldiers, vagrants of all kinds.  Plainly, it was a time to steal or starve. 
        In all this darkness, though, there were some Scots who believed they could see the light.  It shone from a plan they were convinced woould raise Scotland virtually overnight from impotence and misery into a global power, rich beyond the dreams of any Glasgow counting-house.  A New Caledonia was to be planted across the Atlantic athwart the trading routes of the world at the isthmus of Darien, just south of Panama.  There amid the palms, fortunes would be made that would seed a Scottish prosperity the like of which had never been seen.
         The scheme was not as lunatic as it might at first sound.  The 'free port' was to be crested about 150 miles (240 km) away from where the Panama Canal now cuts between the Pacific and the Atlantic, with very much the same commerical logic behind it.  Its most eloquent advocate, William Peterson, a Scot who had made money in the West Indies and had been a founder of the Bank of England, agrued persuasively that what was holding back the expansion of Asian-European trade was the ruinously lenghty and dangerous choice of journeys, around either the African Cape of Good Hope, or the South American Cape Horn.  If the Company of Scotland could realize its dream, all this would change.  Ships from China and Japan could sail east at New Edinburgh exchange cargoes with ships sailing west from Europe.  With freight costs slashed, the goods thus shipped would become more cheaply availble in their respective domestic markets.  Demand would soar correspondingly, and the volume of trade increase exponentially.  And sitting on top of the worlds newest and most prosperous exchange and mart would the Scots, taking portage, marketing and banking charges off the top and waiting for the next great fleets to sail in from the Pacific and the Atlantic.
        The Darien projectors were not, in fact, proposing anything more outlandish than the kinds of services that had been offered for centuries in Amsterdam.  This may, indeed, have been the very reason why the circle of Dutch money men around William III felt so threatened by the scheme.  But the project also struck at the reigning economic othodoxy of the time, which concieved of international trade as a zero-sum game, playing for the shares of a fixed amount of goods and gold.  To maximize that share meant using the power of the state -- miltarily if necessary -- to lock up exculsive sources of colonial supply, and to enforce a monopoly of shipment and marketing for the home country's vessels and ports.  Pepper, tea, or silk were to be carried only in the ships of offically licensed and chartered companies.
        But Paterson's 'Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies' was something else again: a shameless commercial maverick disrupting orderly procedures of mercantilsim.  Its first - its only - great project would be the creation of a tropical free zone, where sellers and buyers from who knows where could come together on the little neck of ocean to haggle and clinch deals at mutually agreed prices.  No wonder everyone in London - other than Paterson's circles of Scots and well wishers like Daniel Defoe - wanted it to fail.  Lobbying hard against it in the English Parliment, the Royal African Company predicted that if this unregulated monstrosity were allowed to establish itself, there would be a mass migration of England's merchants and seamen across the Tweed and 'our commerance will be utterly lost.'  In one week the stock of the other pillar of English colonial trade, the East India Company, fell from 72 to 50 pence. 
          If the reaction in London to a Scottish American hypermart verged on the hysterical, the Scots themselves made no secret of the fact that they thought of the Darien venture as a break-out from the economic stranglehold of English power.  "
script from pgs 330-333, Simon Schama's "A History of Britain"  VII The Wars of the British.

Here is the edvidence that times will be dire during the industrialization of space.  Times of prosperity tend to have the investors focus on easy, safe investments, where as in drastic times, drastic and dangerous investments occur. 

As for the scots colony, it never got anywhere.

It was feasiable, people were absolutly willing to take the risk, but in the end, the problem was that the establishment of britain made it fail.

That is why I believe only members of the establishment that are in dire straits will commit the act of industrialization, to continue their own power.

I admit there is no dire straits right now, but you believe that china will be impetus enough to build a moon base. 

We will just have to wait and see, the people in charge do not want threats, and only if the establishment splinters do I see a window to space industrization.

Only those interested, like exiles.  Plenty of people died of malaria in the new world, but it did not stop many from coming. . . . . .don't forget many also had to fight wars with their neighboring colonies, too.  The motive has to be very dire in order to convince people to get moving.

There is not a utopia that can be built, I am not advocating a utopia, and utopias are for fools.  Space will bring most of the problems of man with him, and I will speculate not on which ones will follow.

Economic benefit is a side effect of the exiles work if they chose it to be so.  Heavy industry can grow exponantly if it focuses on itself, and once it reaches breakeven point it can focus on trade with sources outside of itself.  These people will leave because they are desperate, not to make money.  They want a way out, then they can worry about profit.

They already have.  Note that a lot of unregulated fishing goes on.  Also note that there are bases of all sorts and a  tourism industry.economy of the south pole

        As for specifics on asteroid mining, go to Asteroid Mining

Let us cross the rubricron. . . . . . . . .and damn the poltics.

Hopelessly optimistic, Nate W.

This is true with mars itself.  However, it does not apply to asteroid mining were the lack of gravity is a boon, not a drag on operations.  Last I saw, the asteroids have better ores that are easier to mine than deposits on earth when it comes to transportation and extraction.  And, as I said, transportation and extraction are the most absolute difficult part of raw materials fabrication.  Nothing else remotely comes close to the difficultys faced here, and a lack of gravity makes it infinately easier.