In an earlier blog I referred my readers to an article I wrote thirty years ago with projections about the creation of new planets.
I was very wrong. I predicted:"...the end of this century: there will be two to five construction satellites in earth orbit with 10,000+ inhabitants on each, building a variety of space objects (such as power facilities and manufacturing stations), including a few planets for solar orbit. One or two of these solar orbiting planets will be functioning with populations of 40,000 or more. Most of these space objects will be oriented toward nation/cultures on Earth and will be affiliated with language groups such as English, Russian, and German, and also possibly Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese."
Why was I so far off?
First.............
First, predictions are usually off; mine and other peoples. There are trends and everything else is contingent. I saw a trend that wasn't there. Many people were interested in building new planets but the technology was not even vaguely possible and still is in the rudimentary stage.
Wrong as I was, I compare my error in technological trends prediction to that of prominent medical experts who in 1982 predicted that we would have an HIV-Aids vaccine in less than ten years. They were not only wrong, they had tens of thousands of researchers working in the field, and $billions to work with and their prediction raised false hopes. Tragically wrong technological trend prediction.
Second, and most importantly, I was thinking like a futurist. I wasn't thinking like the lover of commerce that I became. There was no commercial reason to build a new planet much less many new planets.
All the space work of the time was and still is "backpacking." You take everything with you for a short stay off the earth.
A new planet requires an economically viable logistic channel to take materials into space, to keep exporting it and to maintain the logistic channel.
We don't even have one step on the logistic channel out of several thousand steps required to provide supplies to a location off of the earth.
I was wrong, very wrong. I'm glad I didn't hurt anyone. Now I realize how wrong every other visionary is who forgets that our world is about commerce, first, second, third and last.
Commerce is the source of modernity and technology, forget that and you go on record as an idiot. As I did.