Remember, the overall EARTH PLUS concept's purpose is to enable a great expansion of human civilization while removing much of the load on the earthsurface ecosystem, thus enabling earth's restoration.
"GOH" stands for a "Geosynchronous Orbiting Habitat" ... a goh.
First habitats to be built of materials from earthsurface, and most of later structures built of lunar and asteroidal raw materials. Most of habitat structures are built by robotic processes, from lunar ore mining, ore metals extraction, materials conveyance to GEO, structural panel manufacture, habitat shell assembly, robotically prepared ready for initial interior outfitting by humans.
Outfitting the interior of the space habitats to include as many earth-normal features as possible. Tests out agricultural systems, condominium homes on the interior slopes, and creative stable harmonious social system...and millions of the other necessary things needing to be tested out there too. Each colonist effectively has 26 fish, 6.2 chickens, 2.8 rabbits,and 1/7 of a cow, and the plant diet for these animals is grown on the habitat in lunar soil about 1 foot deep. Housing of the colonists is on terraced condominiums along the sides slopes inside the rotating wheel habitat, including 45 square yards per person for residential and community life, 5 square yards per person for mechanical and life support systems, and 21 square yards per person for agriculture and food processing. (This general type of complete space habitat structure can be found in detail in NASA SP-413 "Space Settlements: A Design Study", and also in "The High Frontier" by Gerard K. O'Neill.
There were some artists' depictions of similar space habitats, painted in the mid 1970's, thinking to build them in the Lagrange points L4 and L5, 240,000 miles from the earth. The design and construction of the initial habitats in the GEO site 22,300 miles above the earth's equator, might well begin by using the research and envisioning done on those habitats, insofar as applicable. Some web links to those artist's renditions .
For example, A portion of the rim of a toroidal habitat with a cutaway showing the interior (gif size is 324K)
Preservation of ecosystem data is high priority at the present time. This includes preservation of functional samples of complete ecosystems around the world, in their natural state. If I recall correctly, this requires a minimum population of about one thousand reproducing individuals of every species. The fabled ark's one female and one male of each species is better than nothing, of course.
Of habitats that are perishing, save as much as possible for later reproduction. This means genetically viable populations of every occupant of the ecosystem, plant, animal, fish, bird, insect, microbe. Documentation of seasonal weather cycles, solar influx, precipitation, wind. Documentation of minerals present, and original boundaries of the ecosystem.
Of species that have gone extinct or are inevitably to go extinct before the Earth Plus project can be implemented to the stage of restoring the earthsurface ecosystems, save all possible genetic samples, seeds, frozen embryos, DNA samples, whatever can be found and preserved, hoping for future scientific improvement enough to use this material to reconstitute them; descriptions of each species' habitats be recorded for later efforts to simulate when the associated ecosystem is being restored.
IBIHF = Increasing Balanced Individual Human Functionality ... ibihf.
GOHRC = the Geosynchronous Orbiting Habitat Ring Civilization ... the Gohrc.
KESTS = Kinetic Energy Supported Transportation Structures ... kests.
EMCOMS = ElectroMechanically Coupled Orbital Mass Stream ... emcoms.
REE = Restored Earthsurface Ecosystem And please contribute any comments you feel might be useful to the concept e-mail to me at jedcline@earthlink.net.
Author and maintainer of this pagesite: James E. D. Cline. Recentmost page construction upgrade was on 19960630. Copyright © 1996 J E D Cline, right to copy freely given to all, provided that credit is given to the author.
