That brings to mind another advantage of orbital settlements. The populations will be much smaller, from a couple hundred to a few tens of thousands, so modern sound bite politics will prove less effective while its hard to con neighbors who saw you grow up. Another is that the high tech economy they are part of would require both higher levels of education and a need to be more rational. And not much room for parasites. One could have hope that those factors would lead to better governance. But then frontier communities do tend to have a better sense of what is important and what is noise.

Thomas, I have a two step process for fixing that.

Step 1: Experience a modern CME.

Step 2: Suddenly, we become very interested in hardening human civilization to withstand a modern CME. And we fix the problem.

This process would hold for any disaster either on Earth or in space.

The open designs of the drawings of the O’Neill colonies is pure fantasy. Real Orbital Settlements will need to be well shielded from radiation since people will be spending their entire lives on them. The additional protection needed for CME, even on the scale of the Carrington Event, will not add much to the overall cost will be built into the base line design specs. Its easy to build a Faraday Shield about an enclosed structure like an orbital settlement. By contrast it would be very difficult to harden human civilization to withstand a modern CME on the scale of that 1859 flare.

In addition, some of them will be behind something solid.

I’m getting back on my hobby-horse again, but … suppose there’s another solar mass ejection on the scale of the enormous one observed in 1859? It will fry all the transistors aboard every space habitat that doesn’t have massive shielding, and it seems unlikely the people aboard are going to be able to go on with their lives when all their machines are broken. Possibly a habitat could be built with thick, massy shielding to withstand an EMP blast, but unfortunately human beings don’t usually build to anticipate disasters until such a disaster has occurred and caused lots of death and destruction.

(Incidentally, an 1859-style event will also fry all the transistors on Earth, disabling our communications and our automobiles, along with destroying the big transformers that enable all our electrical power grids to deliver electricity … so the world would be left with a 21st century population and a technological infrastructure from about 1900, except without the human skills that people in 1900 had for coping, and the most important machines that would still work would be guns … so I’m afraid it would end modern technological civilization. At least this thought puts the possibility of a mere city-busting asteroid collision in perspective.)

In terms of failure modes, yes new ones will be found as orbital settlements multiple, plus one of the standards, human over confidence and bad decision making will find many new ways to express itself. But ask yourself, where is your life expectancy likely to be higher, in a subsistence level village or a modern city? Where are the risks to your survival likely to be lower? And why should space settlements, with even more control over the human environment, be an exception to this trend that goes back to the first discovery of fire and human tool making?

See vitamin D for a cure.

Yes, there will be lethal failures in space habitats. Some of them will kill everyone aboard. And we can’t know all the possible modes of failure ahead of time. However, there are two points here worth mentioning. There will be more than one habitat, and it is vanishingly unlikely that they will all fail at the same time – if only because they will not all be constructed at the same time. They are also unlikely all to be constructed to the same design.

The same applies to buildings, and to ships, and to airliners. And what have we done in those cases? We learn from the failure, and each failure makes it less likely that failure by the same path will happen again.

Catastrophic failures have not stopped us from building ships, aircraft and buildings. Nor should they stop us from building habitats.

I and others have said this before: Yes, people will die on the High Frontier, and die in large numbers. But many people died on the American frontier too – and if the early Americans had shrunk from that there wouldn’t be an America.

If we get on with the job and colonise space, two hundred years from now the vast majority of humans will never have set foot on Earth. And barring some vast cosmic catastrophe, the Universe will never be rid of us.