Practical for a civilian to build a space suit?

[sshai45]

Actually I have tried to respond to each of your points. I'm not saying that everything would be peachy in those cities, but that it wouldn't be quite as doom and gloom as you believe. Pestilence, contagious disease, food shortage, earthquakes, widespread depression, power plant breakdowns, failing technologies are all possible, and perhaps some cities would become ghost towns. But you can't convince me that the problems related to an almost closed ecosystem are necessarily insurmountable, even in five years. I'd put my money on the survival of the human species for a few generations at minimum, and possibly much longer, if anyone was taking those bets.

I'd be interested in the opinions of others on this question.

Nobody's saying the problems are insurmountable, just not so _in 5 years_. I suspect that people want to see your novel and they want to see it *good*, and making it good also means making it reasonably plausible (or at least not so implausible as to defy all suspension of disbelief). I really like the idea; it sounds very cool. 5 years just isn't very plausible. As was mentioned, with the Manhattan project analogy: it was just applying an already-existent field of science. In this case, you are talking about bringing fields up to maturity, from infancy. Infancy is the state in which our artificial-ecosystem knowledge is at. A TON of research is required. A better comparison would not be to the Manhattan project proper, but all the previous developments in nuclear science and in physics. While our scientific developments over the last century have been amazing, fields still take decades to develop. Even with massive expenditure, I'd still imagine it'd take decades. Thus, why I suggested 50 years instead of 5.

Remember that: *nobody is saying it's impossible, just that it can't be done in 5 years*.

 

[CCWilson]

I'm also curious and can't wait for the book. I'll bet they pull it off!

That black hole will be here in five years. Do we all just lie down and accept our fate? I think not. The US government, so ineffectual up until now, grows a collective pair and gathers the best minds together to work out a design. Some of the scientists say we aren't 100% certain that we'll be able to figure out all the details in time; others are fairly confident that they can.

Remember, people did live safely in Biosphere 2 for a couple of years - probably could have gone on considerably longer - and their mild physical problems were mostly related to falling oxygen levels and a low calorie diet. I don't think it would be that difficult to monitor and maintain good air quality, temperature, and pressure in the cities. And that complex was primitive compared to what the best scientific minds could accomplish in five years of feverish work. I suspect that we are overstating the challenges.

I will continue my research, though.

 

[onomatomanic]

I'd be interested in the opinions of others on this question.

I certainly agree with Ryan on one thing: If anyone thing goes seriously wrong in a closed ecosystem, once the outside world has become uninhabitable, the results won't be like those of the man-made or natural disaster we are used to. The result will quite simply be that everybody dies.

Thus, building a flawed ecosystem isn't much of an improvement over not doing anything at all.

As a suggestion, if the reason for your insistence on the five-year time limit is that you don't want the setting to become too futuristic, you could instead set this in an alternate timeline in which the Black Hole was detected in 1970 and will arrive in 2020. That gives you the development timeframe which others consider more reasonable, and technology in areas not directly related to preparing for the catastrophe would still be more or less where it is today in this timeline. Probably less, in some case, because resources have been diverted.