[RE]

You are exactly the kind of parent I had the most trouble with during my years coaching, convinced they know it all and who kept their kids from putting in the time and commitment necessary to do high level gymnastics.  Fortunately, there were enough around without that kind of god complex who gave their kids the latitude to choose how much time they wanted to put in and supported them in their choices.  The control freak parents would always pitch out the argument "She's only 10!  She's not old enough to decide to spend 30 hours a week in the gym!"   Blah blah blah, I heard that shit a million times.

Far as your paranoia regarding a Goobernmint conspiracy, I didn't posit this as a Goobermint project, it was how I would spend my money if I had as much as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos instead of building rockets and going to try setting up a colony on Mars..  Of course the whole thing could be corrupted and sabotaged, but I hardly think you will be left alone to brain raccoons in WV either.  At least the bubble towns are out in international waters and would be pretty hard to get to.

Sorry I didn't grow up with your character building history of going to bed hungry on the nights you couldn't find a raccoon to brain and boil up into granma's secret recipe raccoon stew.  I still don't see this as a prerequisite for living in a floating egg the size of a couple of nuclear powered aircraft carriers and submarines though.

The fact you wouldn't try such an adventure isn't of much matter, since you wouldn't pass the psych eval anyhow.  You don't have the mindset for it.

It's not a whole lot different than the polynesians on Rapa'Nui (Easter Island) who died off leaving only a few monolithic statues behind.  These were the folks who waited too long until all the trees they built their sailing canoes from were gone and they couldn't get off the island when the resources ran out and they starved.    The ones who did survive were the ones who took the last few trees early on and took off into the unknown and a few of the lucky ones found the Big Island of Hawai'i.

On their cat rigged sailing canoes they took along pigs and chickens to breed if they found land and as much food and fresh water as they could fit for the journey.  They didn't know where they were going, only where they had been and how many days it had taken to get there.  Every trip had a point of no return, which once past they could not go back. I'm sure many of them never made landfall and died at sea, but at least one made it to Hawai'i, a whole lot better island than Rapa'nui.

I look at the floating town idea as a modernized version of those seagoing catamarans.  They have to last long enough that the people who stayed behind on land mostly kill each other off and the land and wildlife gradually recovers.  Maybe a century or two.  Since there are no Hawaiis left to sail to now, your point of no return is measured by time, not distance, so you have to last a long time.  A little sailboat just won't cut it, nor will a small group of people.  So you gotta build big.  Like a space station or one of those intergalactic spaceships, just built here on earth.  At least we have an atmosphere and liquid water on this rock.

Anyhow, I wish you good luck in your raccoon hunting.  All that practice with your Louisville Slugger will finally pay off! 

RE

[RE]

Given your lack of experience as a gymnastics coach and teacher, it's no surprise you think you know more as a parent about what is right for your spawn than the professionals do.  This is typical of parents with the god complex, they figure despite not knowing the first thing about children, they are instant experts just because they forgot to wear a rubber one night and popped one out of the oven 9 months later.  Even the ones who actually plan it know little to nothing, which is a big part of the reason we have so many fucked up kids in the schools who turn into fucked up adults who make still more fucked up kids.  We have gone through numerous cycles of this stupidity, leading us to the fucked up society we have today.  As you might expect, I am all in favor of Boarding Schools. lol.

Why did I never propose this idea during the SUN years?  Well, first off I didn't think of it back then, second it's too expensive except for a Billionaire who would put a significant portion of his personal wealth towards doing it.  Unlike building rockets which have the commercial application of putting satellites in orbit, there really is no commercial application for this or profit in it.  The only way you could make money off it is rather than populating it the way I suggest by competitive examination would be by selling spots to the moderately rich.  If a small Bubble Town for 1000 people cost say $5B to build, it would cost $5M/person to buy your spot.  Problem here is any idiot with $5M could buy a spot, so you don't get people with the right skills and abilities populating it.

It would of course need some defensive weaponry,but given its size and the fact it would have around a 5 foot thick basalt reinforced concrete shell it would be quite impervious to even the pirates who go after supertankers.  You would need a battleship with artillery shells to blow a hole through it, and that's only on the surface.  If you submerge it, you would need a submarine with torpedos to blow through it.  In either case, you would likely sink it, so what's the point?  Just to kill the people who live there?  It's not a source of resources.  Anybody still in control of warships capable of sinking it would be living just fine in armored bunkers on land.  Eventually the various countries competing for resources will sink each other's hardware and run out of fuel and ammo for their warships, and this level of threat will diminish.

As you mention, you are never going back to braining raccoons and I will never be boarding a 2000' diameter nuclear powered floating concrete egg, so these are just thought experiments and philosophical arguments.  Similar to arguments about the existence of God, nothing is ever proved other than the fact we  have diametrically opposite differences of opinion on a variety of topics.  That's what makes the world go round.

RE