Free A Step Farther Out by Jerry Pournelle Page B

fundamental decisions to make.
    We can either build O'Neill colonies or stay with planets and Moons. I suspect we'll do both. While one group starts constructing flying city-states at the Earth-Moon Trojan Points, another will decide to make do with Mars.
    Mars and Venus aren't terribly comfortable places; in fact, you probably won't want to land on Venus at all until it has been terraformed. Between Mars and Venus, Venus is the easier to make into a shirt-sleeves-inhabitable world. It requires only biological packages and some fertilizers and nutrients, and can be done from Moonbase or, in a pinch, from Earth itself Still, though Venus may be the simpler job, Mars is likely to come first, simply because you can live there before terraforming; there will be dome colonies on the Red Planet.
    I wrote a story ("Birth of Fire") describing one Mars-terraforming project: melt the polar caps and activate a number of Martian volcanoes to get an atmosphere built up. Isaac Asimov described the final step many years ago: get your ice from Out There, at Jupiter or Saturn, and fling it downhill to Mars. Freeman Dyson points out that there's enough ice on Enceladus (a Saturnian moon) to keep the Martian climate warm for 10,000 years. The deserts of Mars can become gardens in less than a century.
    Dyson's scheme didn't even involve human activity on Enceladus; robots and modern computers could probably accomplish the job. They've only to construct some big catapults on the surface of Enceladus, and build some solar sails. Dyson suggests robots because the project as described would take a long time, and human supervisors might not care for the work; but I suspect we could get plenty of volunteers if we needed them. Why not? No one could complain that the work was trivial, and you couldn't ask for an apartment with a better view than Saturn's Rings!
    Moonbases. Lunar cities. Mining communities in the asteroid belt. Domed colonies on Mars, with prospects for terraforming the planet and turning it into a paradise. An advanced engineering project headquarters on Enceladus. Pollution controlled on Earth, because most polluting activities would go on in space. Near-Earth space factories. Several to hundreds of city-states at the Trojan Points of the Earth-Moon system. A space population of millions, with manned and unmanned ships stitching all the space habitats together. This is not a dream world; this is a world we could make in a hundred years!
    In 1872 a number of Kiowa and Comanche chiefs were taken to Washington by Quakers in an attempt to show the Indians just what they were facing. When they returned to talk about the huge cities, and "a stone tipi so large that all the Kiowa could sit under it," they were not believed. One suspects that if the Quaker schoolmasters had been magically transported to the Washington of 1979 and then returned to their own time, they would not be believed either. A nation of over 200 million people? Millions of tons of concrete poured into gigantic highways? Aircraft larger than the biggest sailing ships? City streets brightly lit at night? Millions of tons of steel, farmlands from Kansas to California. . .
    Building a space civilization in the next hundred years will be simpler than getting where we are from 1879. We already know how to do it. We probably don't know how we will do it; certainly the very act of space exploration will generate new ideas and techniques as alien to us as nuclear energy would have been to Lord Rutherford or Benjamin Franklin; but we already know how we could do it. No basic new discoveries necessary.
    In the 1940's I did a class report on space travel. I drew heavily from Astounding, from Heinlein's Future History, from Willy Ley's books on rockets and space travel (and certainly never thought I would someday be science columnist in the same magazine as Willy). My teachers were tolerant. They let me do it. They didn't believe in suppressing their pupils. Afterwards, though, the