Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

HOMES ON LEGRANGE

GALACTIC ARCHIVES:

The original idea for the L5 space-cities had emerged from Professor Gerard O'Neill and a group of his students at Princeton in 1968. The motion was so radical that it took over five years to get it into print, in Physics Today, in 1973.

Professor O'Neill had simply asked his students a rather basic question-one which occurs inevitably on every planet which evolves beyond the boom-and-bust cycle of planetside life. O'Neill asked:

Is the surface of a planet the right place for an expanding technological civilization?

Once the question had been asked, the correct answer was, of course, inescapable.

Among the symptoms indicating that Closed System planetary industry would have to be transformed into Open System planetary-and-extraplanetary industry were the following:

Rapid exhaustion of the fossil fuels on Terra, leading to a desperate search for new energy sources; The virtually limitless solar energy in space;

Rising population and increasing longevity, leading to an inevitable new period of swarming;

Growing pollution and ecological imbalance, caused by the attempt to provide energy from terrestrial sources for this increasing primate population;

The Revolution of Rising Expectations-a sociological phenomenon brought on by the scientific-technological advances of the previous two centuries-which caused the majority of primates to claim they had the right to a decent standard of living;

The failure of the Revolution of Lowered Expectations, after the smarter primates realized that lowered expectations meant starvation for the majority of the planet;

The Hunger Project started by a circuit-five primate named Erhard, who encouraged people to believe starvation could be eliminated;

The continuous influence of a circuit-six primate named R. Buckminster ("Bucky") Fuller, who insisted the primate brain was designed "for total success in Universe";

And, finally, the debacle of terrestrial-based nuclear energy plants, which continually caused havoc in their environments, and which eventually prompted some of the primates to remember that a science-fiction writer, Robert Anson Heinlein, had foreseen all this in a 1940s story, "Blow-ups Happen," and provided the solution- moving the nuclear plants into space.

By 1984 over a third of Terra's industrial plants had been moved, as O'Neill foresaw, into the L5 area-Legrange point 5, where the gravity fields of earth and moon are balanced. The colonists even had a theme song, invented by another science-fiction writer, Robert Anson Wilson, in a book called The Universe Next Door. The song was "HOMEs on Legrange."