Space colony

“ Captain Strong and the cadets swung around to face the governor, who rose and looked at each of them steadily before speaking.
"Commander Walters stressed the fact that this was an important project," he said finally. "No one can say how important it will be for the future. It might mean [Pg 16] the beginning of an entirely new era in the development of mankind." He paused again. "The Solar Alliance has decided to establish a new colony," he announced. "The first colony of its kind outside the solar system in deep space!" ”

“ He knew that unless the defect in the force fields was corrected soon, the outer-space colony would have to be abandoned to the deadly methane ammonia atmosphere. And to Strong, who had seen the dead satellite before the Solar Guard had discovered crystal there, it was like seeing an old friend sick with a deadly disease. In addition, the hundreds of thousands of colonists would have to be relocated if the force fields could not be repaired and the effect on the economy of the whole Solar Alliance would be disastrous.
Walters and Strong were met at the air lock by Captain Howard. ”

“ We've touched at every inhabited world in this sector, Lee, and not one surviving colony has developed space travel on its own. The Hymenops had a hundred years to condition their human slaves to ignorance of everything beyond their immediate environment—the motives behind that conditioning usually escape us, but that's beside the point—and they did a thorough job of it. The colonists have had no more than a century of freedom since the Bees pulled out, and four generations simply isn't enough time for any subjugated culture to climb from slavery to interstellar flight. ”

“ He considered the fact that no reports had come through to the Academy from the colony at all. Not merely from the Space Cadets, but from the expedition itself. Only the sketchiest details had been audioed back during the trip and absolutely nothing since their scheduled arrival on the satellite. A sudden cold wave of fear gripped the space officer. He wondered if they had arrived safely!
He shook off the horrible thought. There must be a simple, logical explanation for it all. Establishing a star colony was no easy matter. Communications could be easily disrupted for any number of reasons. ”

“ Instantly the silvery film was formed again behind it and another shape developed on the film's surface.
Only seconds before, these people and these objects had been on another planet in another island universe, across unthinkable parsecs of space. Now they were here. Bales and bundles and parcels of merchandise. Huge containers of foodstuffs—the colony on Terranova was still not completely self-sustaining—and drums of fuel for the space-ships busy mapping the new galaxy for the use of men, and more people, and a huge tank of viscous, opalescent plastic. ”

“ The space suit that Fletcher Monk had been assigned before the descent on Mars was a little tight-fitting for his comfort. He wondered what life would be like in this eternal bulky costume. But he was comforted by the picture of the Mars Colony he had received back on Earth; a labyrinth of airtight interiors, burrowing their way over and into the planet, served by gigantic oxygen tanks. The network of buildings had been expanding every year, until now it covered some hundred miles of the planet's surface. ”

“ In the end we won. Sixteen men and their wives, with half a dozen children, were wild to leave.
That summer blazed up into fall, winter came, spring, and summer again, while we made ready. Our last year on Harbor. And I had never realized how much I loved the planet. Almost, I gave up.
But space, free space, the open universe and the ship come alive again—!
We left the colony a complete set of plans, in the unlikely event that they should ever want to build a starship of their own, and a couple of spaceboats and duplicates of all the important automatic machinery carried by the Traveler. ”

“ Patience, sir? Look, sir, I took this sedentary duty until I'd had it up to here, and then I began to pry into the question of why we have a Space Force, complete with spacecraft, and still do so little space traveling. I found out. We're limited to a maximum range of seventeen light-years to the point of no return. Even a trip to Eden, Tau Ceti, our nearest colony, is eleven-point-eight light-years, and that takes prodigious power. ”

“ There was the misty golden ribbon in space. It was assuredly beyond the technical capacity of cities suffering from an isolation syndrome. He'd guessed at hydroponic gardens underground. There was surely no surface city near the landing grid, and the city entrance they'd just left was in the face of a cliff. Such items pointed to a limited technical capacity. Both, also, suggested mining as the original purpose of the human colony or colonies here.
Only mining would make a colony self-supporting in an arctic climate. This world could have been colonized to secure rare metals from it. ”

“ Those natives had never left their world, and even with the technological impetus we were giving them in exchange for their metals they weren't ever likely to, the pressures they needed to live were too great. They weren't from Sol, or even some colony world—not only were the remains totally unlike our equipment, but the news of a planet like Harbor, almost a duplicate of Earth but without a native intelligent race, would have brought settlers here in swarms. So—somewhere in the Galaxy, someone else had mastered the hvperdrive and was exploring space. ”

“ It seemed to be the solution to their problem of survival. Small, trial colonies were established. Communication with the space ships from home was achieved.
The experiment was a success.
The trouble was that each colony's existence depended on the life of the host. When the animal died, the colony died.
Life on the planet was savage. New colonies would, of course, be passed from individual to individual and generation to generation of the host species. But the inevitable toll of attrition from the violent deaths of the animals appalled this gentle race. ”

“ He was stopped by Tom's hand clamped across his mouth.
Governor Hardy looked at Roger and smiled. "Yes, Wolf 359 is pretty far away, especially for a colony. But preliminary expeditions have investigated and found the satellite suitable for habitation, with fertile soil and an atmosphere similar to our own. With the aid of a few atmosphere booster stations, it should be as easy for a colonist to live there as he would on Venus—or any tropical planet."
"Where are you going to get the colonists, sir?" asked Strong. ”

“ Ades rated just three lines of type—its space-coördinates, the spectral type of its sun, a climate-atmosphere symbol which indicated that three-fourths of its surface experienced sub-Arctic conditions, and the memo:
"Its borderline habitability caused it to be chosen as a penal colony at a very early date. Landing upon it is forbidden under all circumstances. A patrol-ship is on guard." ”

“ In the case of an Earth type planet having intelligent life, they would——
They would do just what my damned "meteor" had done.
They would home in on an individual, "explode," penetrate—and set up heavy housekeeping on a permanent basis. They did. Lovely. Oh, joy!
Well. We would all like to see the Garden of Eden; but being it is something quite else again.
Me, a colony!
My—uh—population had no idea where they were in relation to their original home, or how long they had traveled through space. ”

“ Planet In Danger!
There was trouble brewing on Mars—bad trouble. Two giant industrial empires fought for control there, and their struggle imperiled the whole Mars colony. Civil war—atomic civil war—could break out any second, leaving Earth's only foothold in Space a mass of radio-active rubble.
But both antagonists were too politically powerful for the Colonization Board to take a direct hand. One man was needed to take charge—one man who could act fast and decisively, brutally if he had to.
Ralph Graham got the job. ”

“ If a ship landed on a former planet of the empire, the crew would be lynched and murdered. Under ven Klaeden, the ships of the Third Fleet were going to seek out an alleged colony in Ursa, to sell ships, tools, and services to a minor technology that was approaching its own space-going day, in return for immigration and nationalization rights—a young civilization full of chaotic expansion.
"There is much you could not understand, Letha," he told her. "Our cultures are different. ”

“ In one strategy, the next step would be to build a base. Over many missions, a small colony of habitats would be assembled, and explorers would begin to live there for many months, conducting scientific studies and prospecting for resources that could be used as fuel. ”

“ He had only the vague directions from the scrap of map Rip had uncovered. To the west—he had no idea how far away—there stretched a length of coastline, far enough from the radiation blasted area to allow small settlements. For generations the population of Terra, decimated by the atomic wars, and then drained by first system and then Galactic exploration and colonization, had been decreasing. But within the past hundred years it was again on the upswing. Men retiring from space were returning to their native planet to live out their remaining years. ”

“ Populated by humans and their robots, colonies extended from the voids above Mercury and Venus through the Asteroids, the satellites of the gas planets, to Planet Pluto.
As colonies multiplied and spread across the vast interplanetary realm the solar community became impatient with time consumed in normal point-to-point space communications and transport. The excessive transmission and portage time was especially irritating in communications, shipment of priority cargo, and human travel across distances from bodies orbiting along on opposite sides of the Sun. ”

“ Upon reaching some new solar system or other convenient source of raw materials, these mobile habitats would reproduce themselves with the human passengers redistributed among the offspring colonies. The original space habitats would serve as extraterrestrial refuges for humanity and for other terrestrial lifeforms that man might choose to bring along. ”

“ Bureaucrats representing the central government on Earth were isolated from the affairs of the colonies they administered. The indigenous populace ignored their authority, their credentials were challenged, and they were invited to return to their home planet — with no options.
The central government on Earth, weakened by shortages and distracted by agitators at home and in space, was neither vigilant nor prepared.
Early in the second millennium of the Interplanetary Era, several colonies in the Outer Region declared their independence of the original United Planetary System and of each other. ”

“ According to the fiction tapes, the colonized worlds of the galaxy vary wildly from each other. In cold and unromantic fact, it isn't so. Space travel is too cheap and sol-type solar systems too numerous to justify the settlement of hostile worlds. There's no point in trying to live where one has to put on special equipment every time he goes outdoors. There's no reason to settle on a world where one can't grow the kind of vegetation one's ancestors adapted themselves to some tens of thousands of generations ago. ”

“ Self-replicating homes, O'Neill-style space colonies, or great domed cities on the surfaces of other worlds would allow a niche diversification of such grand proportions as never before experienced by the human species. ”

“ From Mars, Titan, Ganymede, Luna City, Venus, the Asteroid Colonies, and as far away as the uranium mines of Pluto, the colonists arrived, to be quartered at Space Academy. Excited, and anxious to begin their new life, they assembled for their antibiotic shots and the last medical check by the Solar Guard doctors. There were crystal miners from Titan, farmers from Venus, Mars, and Earth, prospectors from the New Sahara desert of Mars, engineers from the atmosphere booster stations on Ganymede, and just plain citizens who wanted a new life on the distant satellite of Wolf 359. ”

“ After less than two weeks, this scout team had beamed back to Earth the message that the planet was suitable for colonization, so suitable that they would like to give it the name of Elysium, if there was no objection.
There would be none, Earth had replied, so long as the pioneers bore in mind the fact that six other planets had previously been given that name, and a human colony currently existed on only one of those. No need to worry about a conflict of nomenclature, however, because the name of that other planet Elysium had subsequently been changed by unanimous vote of settlers to Hades. ”

“ To understand the events which led to The War, it is best that we briefly review the history of space travel by Earthians. In the year 2002, the six remaining nations of the Earth formed the Federation to abolish war and to enable the people of your planet to put forth a united effort to discover the secret of interplanetary travel. This endeavour, in itself, was considered by our leaders to be most creditable. But the entire pattern of your development, observed for many centuries, instilled seeds of doubt in our minds. ”

“ If space offers any solution to this contradiction between the "good life" and our innate breeding proclivities, it probably will involve the establishment of orbital human colonies. To be practical, these habitats must approach replicating factories in the range of goods and services which they produce. ”