Full text

What do you want, a giant cord lifted into space to connect the station? If you have any idea how fast the station moves under normal circumstances you'd see it was impossible. Suggesting the cord would keep the station still in relation to earth makes the idea stronger, but the station would need to be accelerated to the exact speed of the orbit of the earth. It's feasible but pointless. Just use solar energy.

You mentioned what to do when flights want to dock and the population of the station grows and solar power is not powerful enough to sustain them. I say conserve! When the flights dock and the food packed into storage, limit rations. Limit cooking. Limit light. And most of all, limit the lopsided power consumption of air-conditioning. Air-conditioning on a space station should be limited to warming through the floors, and not a central air system like down on earth. Most of that energy is wasted by systems which reverse the warming through other ventilation systems, such as the computer systems. Plus, space travelers should be chosen for their resilience to extreme conditions.

We must switch to the metric system. That is a necessity that has been overlooked for years. And our classification of all the underwater animals, the new kinds of jellyfish that beach, dead and gooey for us to examine, and the rare underwater lichen--that must be accelerated. What if we meet an alien race and they observe our knowledge of the croissant to be greater than our own planet? That we're tracking our bellies more than we're tracking the humpback whale? That we care more about hardwood floors than efficient energy systems? That our vast amount of knowledge only contains enough electrons to fill a single strawberry? We would be the animals, not them.