While out for a walk in the park, I was thinking about the "orbiting space colonies as lifeboats against planetary disaster argument", as one does.

It totally ignores politics, as they do. 1/

Let's say there is an impending planetary disaster in a future soon enough that we're still corporeal humans, something like nation-states exist, but thousands, even a million people live in billionaire-owned private space colonies. 2/

Obviously, at that point, 7,999 million people will have entirely different interest than the 1 million people on those stations. Namely, everyone else wants to be on board too. And has absolutely nothing to lose trying to force that to happen. 3/

If I'm a powerful Earth govt , first thing I do is call billionaire colony boss Jelon Mezsos, and tell him either thousands of my regime elite families get on board too, or I nuke their colonies.

I might even *start* by nuking a colony, to make the point clear 4/

Certainly I and similarly placed govts could cut off whatever Earth access the colonies still need. Kill family members or others valuable to colony leadership who I'm able to get to on Earth, if any. Whole lot of ways we on Earth could make existence difficult for them 5/

And one should never, ever underestimate how many humans are in fact willing to say, "If I go down I'm taking you with me, even if that means our whole society is dead". 6/

So maybe you get massively overcrowded colonies, which might or might not make it, maybe colonies destroyed, maybe a full-fledged Earth war over the colony-lifeboats *and* them. However it goes, it sure won't be calm, rational, or good for the colonies. 7/

One objection might be, "ah, but the space colonies will have their own nukes to drop on Earth!". Fine, there's a whole lot of Earth and colonies are somewhat fragile unless you make them massively more expensive, heavy, and uninviting than the O'Niell vision 8/

I also wonder if Earth govts would let space colonies develop such weapons (they'd violate the OST but that's a small point here)? Lots of incentive to take them out while we still can in that case. 9/

There are a whole lot of other problems with the "backup server" argument, like how quickly would colonies be no-kidding 100% self-sufficient as several replies note. And, what exactly *is* this planetary catastrophe? It not easy to come up with. 10/10