Happy New Year!
Ok, enough pleasantries, let's get down to business. Obviously, if you're a regular reader of this site, you're familiar with the concepts of "Space Habitats" like Babylon 5 et al. (And if you're not, here's a quick review: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_habitat )
As cool as trips to and colonies on the other planets and moons in our solar system may be, such habitats offer the best and safest hope of actually colonizing space. As much as I enjoy space exploration itself, Colonization is really a vastly more important goal, and the one that will have really long-ranging and profound effects on humanity and human civilization. Unfortunately, no spacefaring nation has ever even vaguely advocated this as a national goal, though the US has done several intensive studies of the idea, and I presume the Soviets did so as well. The most obvious and probably safest area to build one of these beasties would be in one of the LaGrange points ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaGrange_point ), ideally either L4 or L5, as they're the most stable. (L1 is semi-stable, L2 & L3 are stable on only 1 axis)
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