First, let us step back to the time of the American Revolution. When General Sir William Howe's troops arrived in the rebellious colonies, options for attacking a city were limited by the distributed life support systems of the day.

Howe could not order his men to blow up a power station, water main, sewage treatment plant, pipeline, or to cut a cable to end communication with the outside world.

Why? Because the American of the day was provided with light from homemade or locally produced candles, heated with wood cut from their own land or nearby, got water from a nearby well, relied upon a backyard sewage treatment system, fueled their transportation system with locally grown feed, and depended upon word of mouth to send a message. None of the multi-billion dollar, centralized systems on which we rely for such things existed.

Americans of 226 years ago enjoyed a kind of independence, which we have lost. The military option to turn 1777 New York into a postwar-Baghdad - no power, no water, sewage backing up, no telephones, no gasoline - did not exist.

Moving back to the present, consider not only what a few smart bombs can do to our civilizing life support systems, but what simple human negligence, poorly thought out government regulation, malicious computer hackers, Mother Nature, and yes, anti-western jihadists, can do to turn us into people trapped on the 30th floor of a skyscraper unable to flush the toilets because the power to run the elevators and operate the automatic flush sensor has been cut off.

Consider a few of the failures of the centralized approach.

On April 26, 1986 the worst nuclear accident occurred when the Chernobyl reactor melted down, spewing radiation over thousands of acres of prime Ukrainian farmland. While the other Chernobyl reactors have been closed, 13 similar reactors continue to operate.

In 1999, two workers at a reprocessing plant north of Tokyo set off an uncontrolled nuclear reaction while they were mixing uranium in buckets instead of in mechanized tanks. The radiation leak forced 161 people to evacuate their homes, another 310,000 to stay indoors, 439 people were exposed to radiation, and the two workers died. Tokyo narrowly escaped massive power outages. Still the central government of Japan intends to build 11 more nuclear power plants by 2010.

The August 14, 2003 blackout plunged 53 million people into the nineteenth century. The exact cause is still under investigation, but evidence seems to point to an aging and undersized electric grid. As reported in The Washington Post, "... disruptions in electricity flow along the aging grid -- from blackouts to "brownouts" to power surges -- cost businesses an estimated $100 billion a year, according to the Electric Power Research Institute. That figure, the group estimates, is roughly the cost of modernizing the grid over the next 10 years."

Sparked by the January, 2003 shutdown of the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued an alert to nuclear plants about the vulnerability of their servers to infection by a computer worm. The Slammer worm infection resulted in the plant's Safety Parameter Display System and plant process computer being unavailable for several hours. Some speculate that worm infections were in part possible for the Northeast power outage

These examples illustrate how fragile and vulnerable our way of life support system is. Houston, we have a problem!

These massive centralized systems are the result of a technological and economic progression that literally capitalized upon economies of scale. So long as the occasional storm was the main threat, they made perfect sense.

Today we find ourselves more dependent than ever on systems where failure is not an option, yet human beings remain as fallible as ever. We face the threat of Luddites who can attack these systems and their exposed distribution networks. We have the stark choice of living with the threat or severely restricting civil liberties in order to protect against it.

It is time to look at providing power, water, waste disposal, transportation fuel, and even food by distributed local systems. We all need to get off the grid. Not by returning to eighteenth century technologies, but by developing household size systems using all the scientific understanding and the technological advances of the past half century.

So what has this to do with space exploration? Well, space stations, and bases on the Moon or Mars are off the grid homesteads.

NASA has worked on how to provide a small number of people with power, clean air, and potable water from recycled waste. It has been a sideline effort, not a focus. Orbiting space stations are too easy to supply at taxpayer expense to require the level of closed life support that a lunar or Martian base would require. An emphasis on working and living in space beyond Earth orbit would require a primary focus on this problem.

The current systems set the standard that must be met. Today an integrated oil company can go through all the steps to produce a gallon of gasoline, then sell it with a significant tax tacked on, for less than the cost of bottled water. Can we duplicate that with a local fuel production system without all the points where disaster can strike? A Martian or lunar rover will have the characteristics of the kind of independent transportation system I am suggesting. Can we make it an economic alternative to Big Oil?

Is it necessary to go to the Moon and Mars to develop these new technologies? Well no, but how else to overcome the inertia of over a hundred years of addressing these issues as we have? It is too easy to continue doing things the same old way. And it is too easy to rely upon Earth's biosphere to absorb our mistakes. Without actual terrorist attacks on these systems the fact of their vulnerability is treated with little concern except by a small coterie of survivalists huddled in their Montana bomb shelters.

The risks are too dangerous to stay the current course. We cannot go back, we must plot a new direction. In space, beyond Earth orbit; and on Earth away from the centralized, towards secure, reliable, ecologically benign, economical, distributed systems. Do we want to spend a hundred billion dollars to upgrade the grid or a hundred billion dollars to free ourselves from it?

China, India, Africa, much of South and Central America are all starting down the path we pioneered over a hundred years ago towards mega power, water, waste treatment, and fuel projects. The time to pioneer a new path is now. Somewhere above Earth orbit is the place to begin.

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