Its heresy in some space circles to say this but what the hell, thats what you read me for, right, folks? So remember you heard it here first -- space is not going to be some different, purer, utopian society where humans will build more peaceful, virtuous communities, leaving behind them the wars and hatreds of earth.

Humans will take themselves with them wherever they go, and humans being the contentious, contradictory, occasionally wonderful and often ghastly creature they are, space societies will be all those things, too.

They are, in fact, likely to resemble Earth a lot more than we might want to admit.

The chief difference, at the outset at least, will be that the sheer, brute hostility of the space environment will place a historically unprecedented premium on technical knowledge and expertise. Your life-support system gets cranky, you better know how to fix it yourself because you are NOT going to be able just to step outside for a breath of fresh air!

This is likely to produce a frontier breed rather different from its predecessors. The frontiersmen and -women of earlier eras needed physical strength and stamina, courage, resourcefulness and obsessive independence. The space frontier is going to require all that and more. Merely in order to survive the space environment and all its manifold hazards, space pioneers will also have to be highly-educated and intensely trained (not to mention intrepid to the point of being nuts). Think Davey Crockett meets Mad Scientist and youll get the idea.

And they are going to drive the earthside authorities bonkers. A bunch of very smart, technically expert risk-takers is emphatically unlikely to take readily to direction from below. Indeed, I grin at the very thought of some earthside bureaucracy trying to steer, regulate and/or control them. The response is likely to sound a lot like, "Hey, we hauled our tails up to orbit here without a LOT of help from you groundhogs, and YOU are trying to tell US what to do??"

So for a generation or so, until the machinery and technology necessary for survival and expansion are up and running, this is likely to be a weird, wild and woolly society. For just a brief moment in history, the engineers and technocrats will actually get a chance to run things. I just hope they enjoy it because it wont last long. In time, all that apparatus will become largely transparent to later inhabitants. The lawyers will move in and the life-support technicians will start charging double for nighttime calls.

None of this is going to happen, though, unless and until we get the cost-per-pound-to-orbit down to a level where you dont need the deep pockets of some governmental bureaucracy to get up to orbit to try out something risky, zany and interesting. The cold fact is that governments anywhere have no incentive to open the space frontier. Governments, by definition, are into control. Making the space frontier accessible to all automatically loosens their ability to control access to, and activities on, orbit. We may confidently expect them to yield that control only with reluctance.

You wanna know who I think is going to break that cost-per-pound-to-orbit barrier? Some crazy billionaire who made his/her dough in something undignified (pork bellies, maybe) and who now wants some respect. He/she hires a bunch of seriously brilliant aerospace engineers who are terminally frustrated by government programs that never seem to come to fruition. Then he/she goes after the X-Prize -- just for the bragging rights and the celebrity status.

Like I said earlier, remember you heard it here first.

Meanwhile, I amuse myself by envisioning the space frontierswoman of the future. Boy is she some tough broad. Shes go a clutch of PhDs. Shes a skilled zero-g handywoman with a special zero-g tool for every need. She has a healthy respect for small objects traveling at orbital speed but none at all for bureaucrats. She likes her men smart and sexy, but they are strongly advised not to try to tell here what to do. Her kids took their first steps inside a spacesuit. And she does not suffer fools gladly -- she had her fill of those on Earth.

Id really like to meet her. Hell, Id like to BE her!

©1996 Brenda Forman

(Brenda Foremans e-mail address is drbforman@aol.com) If you write it, she will answer.