https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder
Send a mission to a comet that uses the comet itself as reaction mass to move a massive hydrogen and oxygen source into an orbit near earth. Launching people from earth would be expensive but it's a one time expense.
This takes the problems of land disputes and property ownership and turns them into simple matters of manufacturing. Armies kill each other for land because only one side can have the land at a time. Armies dont kill each other for manufactured goods. It's always easier to just build more manufactured goods then fight a war.
Dispute over O'Neil cylinder ownership? Just build two new ones and split them like Solomon.
Refugee crisis? Just build more O'Neil cylinders
Hunger crisis? More O'Neil cylinders will do the trick!
This "does space stuff" but I'm not sure it's either necessary or a good solution for the problems you address. There's not really any shortage of land here on earth. Maybe there's a shortage of fertile land, or areas with nice climate to next oceans, and so forth, but if those are what you're looking for the moon isn't a very good place to find them.
Build a mass driver on the moon to serve as your source of iron, carbon, oxygen and silicon.
What do you mean by this? The gravity advantage would make it relatively easy to fire materials from the moon into an ocean drop, but in your scenario you want those materials on the moon. I'm not sure whether Earth-to-space cargo transport via mass driver is practical within the 1970s technology limitation. There are proposals to do it,
Star Tram for example, but that's 2001. Most of the earlier projects appear to be gas based, and mostly for launching weapon projectile to terrestrial targets, not for putting stuff into space. And even most of those are 1980s or later. There is a
1960s project that apparently managed to accelerate a 400 pound projectile at 32% the delta- required for low earth orbit, but that seems many orders of magnitude less than what you'd need to be useful at all. And that used chemical propulsion, not an EM coil. I'm not seeing any coil gun projects within the 1970s timeframe.
Once the population is living in space and war is a thing of the past, you can strap nuclear power plants onto some of the O'Neil cylinders and send them off into space as starships.
Sure, but artificial gravity doesn't really solve the relevant problems. Yes, by all means use rotating cylinders to make your people more comfortable in transit, but you still need to get those cylinders wherever you're going. I'm pretty sure saturn 5 style rockets could probably get you to Mars and Venus. ...in fact, yes, apparently
there were proposals to do just that. 5 launches worth of material into orbit, assemble your craft in space and then fly it to Mars. "No more war" so using former defense budgets to colonize space would probably be plenty to most of the problems simply by throwing money at them until they went away. Even at its peak during the Apollo program
NASA's budget has never been even 5% of the federal budget, and it's hovered around 1% for most of NASA's lifetime.
Wow,
Project Empire. Proposed 1971
manned Mars/Venus flyby. 396 day mission, 6 man crew, craft would pass within 5000 miles of Venus and within 3000 miles of Mars. No landings, but still, those proposed manned flybys are things we still haven't even attempted today, and we could have done it before most of us reading this post were even born.
Stuff like this is why I started this thread. There's a lot of talk about upcoming technology ushering in a golden era, but I really think we're had the ability to do a lot of these things for a
long time. We just chose not to for some reason. President Nixon was trying to get a US basic income program in place
back in the 70s, because even then there were concerns that technology was making the "work for money to live" model obsolete. Even in the 60s Apollo era, there
were serious proposals to build a moon colony. Projects
Daedalus and
Orion, also in the 60s were both attempts at serious interstellar craft.
All of this stuff is from before I was even born. Probably most of us. Yet none of it's happened in the
fifty years since.
What happened? Why did we lose our collective will?
We could have had Star Trek. Instead we have facebook and american idol.
How did we go so wrong?