Quote Originally Posted by pendell View Post
On the contrary, I would expect a national consciousness to form due to shared interest; those living in space would face challenges which those on earth simply don't; unique environmental challenges would result in unique culture, unique customs, and would probably result in a demand for self government. To put this in terrestrial terms, it isn't a brilliant idea for civilians living in Anchorage to have all their rules set by people living in Honolulu.
Undeniably true, but this will take a long time to get the permanent numbers up in space. Especially with modern communications, you would expect the people to feel loyalty to their homeland- clearly people living in orbit will need some autonomy. And let me just leave this disclaimer here: "This is all speculation. I don't claim any special insight into the future."

Barring artificial gravity or some other method of allowing humans to permanently transition between orbital space and earth without long-term ill effects, autonomy, probably independence, is all but certain for the people living there. It's just not going to be feasible for a Terran-based government to govern them effectively.
Have you ever heard of spin gravity? Designs for this type of station have existed for a long time, and are still being proposed. Once you get much beyond the ISS level of space station, you can generate artificial gravity via spin, so there's no split between "people who live in gravity" and "people who don't." There's differences, clearly, but not some sort of fundamental bar to immigration from one to the other.

Still, it seems unlikely that the orbital people would submit to any kind of despotism for long. For one thing, the gravity issue means the earth-based government can't govern effectively. For another, both the moon and LEO are on the top of a gravity well. It's easier to drop stuff like rocks down on Earth than it is to lift weapons back up the gravity well without being intercepted.
Okay, everything you said is true, but, you fail to consider two factors.
1. If you are seriously colonizing orbit, you have a way to get stuff and people up there quickly and cost-effectively.
2. The earth is very large.

In space, every single gram counts, and mass is your primary limitation on what you can do. Earth doesn't have that problem. Being on the right side of a gravity well is nice, but it's not the sort of overwhelming advantage that the resource capacity of the Earth is, compared with the orbital infrastructure in the short to medium term. You can mass-driver tungsten rods from orbit, but most of the velocity is coming from the "mass driver" part of that equation, not the "from orbit" part. And earth has a lot more tungsten than you do. (not even counting the human and institutional capital in earth's militaries that orbit won't have for a long time)

So: The earthlings can't effectively govern orbit but can literally strangle orbit with an embargo. The orbitals can conduct terror bombings but they'll never have the ability to *conquer* earth. Again, the gravity would weaken them. Also, they would never, ever have the numbers.

This implies some sort of detente between mutually autonomous states; neither has the power to conquer the other but equally each has something the other needs. This implies periods of peace interspersed with the occasional turf-dispute war and maybe the occasional decades long period when one dominates the other. But ultimately the stable outcome must be mutual interdependence and autonomy between separate peoples. Not unity either through brotherly love or military conquest.
If we accept your premises, (space colonists cannot immigrate to earth, earth cannot govern space) in the long term, the orbital people crush earth. Why? Because in the long term, you don't colonize planets or the orbits of planets. You colonize the Sun. There a two questions you must ask, to weather or not you want to colonize the sun:
1. Do you care at all about capturing more of the sun's output?
2. Can you put 1 mirror in orbit around the sun?

Once you have the capacity to begin producing power satellites, (mirrors direct light to power satellites, satellites produce energy) and have sufficient automation, you can begin the process of capturing 100% of the Sun's output - thermodynamics limiting, of course.

You can use that power to make magnetic fields that can draw the plasma (ionized gas) from the sun and turn that into something useful. You destroy the entirety of Mercury in this process as raw materials, as this is a Big ProjectTM.

This is project that takes centuries, but it is in the nature of life, and humanity, to grow, and expand. If, in the long term there is some sort of fundamental split between people who live on Earth and the people who live in space, I highly doubt that the people in space will meekly stay in their habitats, not growing or expanding or trying to claim the resources that are up there.

The Dyson sphere. I am proposing the Dyson Swarm Variant.

The sun outputs ~10^9 times as much energy as Earth receives. This is the same problem that orbit had trying to fight earth in the previous example, reversed. All that is required is the proper application of overwhelming force.