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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27864 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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A fundamental problem for SpaceX is that there just isn't all that much demand for space.

This reads to me, respectfully, as:

"A fundamental problem for the Wright Brothers is that there just isn't all that much demand for air travel."

The hope is that with Starship bringing the cost of sending mass to space down to earth (pun intended) that entrepreneurs will jump at finding new ways to monetize low earth orbit and, eventually beyond.

If it doesn't do so, I do fear we might be resigned to remaining a single-planet species

There’s tons of economic use cases for near-earth space exploration. There’s fewer for exploration at remove and the only one for actual space colonization is paying people to go somewhere conveniently far away.

I think the bootstrapping process kind of ramps up naturally, if we are serious about keeping our species alive and happy and people continue to demand a decent standard of living.

Get Geostationary power stations collecting sunlight and beaming energy to the surface.

Repeat this until almost all energy needs for the planet are met. Energy is 'too cheap to meter' for residential uses. Commercial/industrial production is functionally independent of local energy availability.

Notice that the sun gives off a LOT more energy that you could be using.

Expand operations to harness ever more energy, driving need for greater presence in space.

Either start mining the local orbital bodies (possibly including planets) for mass and resources or colonize them as further bases of operations.

Assuming you avoid an AI apocalypse, don't trigger a species-wiping civil war, or some crazy bioengineered plague, seems like there's no reason humans WOULDN'T push out into space as far as they possibly can if the cost of doing so was brought within reason.

seems like there's no reason humans WOULDN'T push out into space as far as they possibly can if the cost of doing so was brought within reason.

As a thought experiment, I'm curious what sort of frame of mind you think would convince people to leave Earth en masse to start a space colony. I grew up watching Star Trek, so I like the idea, I just can't really reasonably picture people of 2024 electing to go live their lives in such confined quarters. What are we missing to make that palatable, or am I just not the target audience? Maybe "fully automated", but we can't even deliver that terrestrially.

The reasons previous generations packed up and left their homelands are pretty well documented: religion, economics, escaping conflicts, and such. I don't see as clean a mapping there into moving into space, but I'm curious to hear ideas. Are we waiting for a cult explicitly based on sending it's followers to live in the Promised Land Sea of Tranquility?

Greatness? Doing hard things? Some people are attracted to that challenge. Add in the potential for economic return…

What potential economic return?

Every economic use case for space relies on either 1) being near earth 2) expeditions to go get stuff and bring it back to earth(asteroid mining and the like) or 3) someone else being willing to fund the giant money pit of creating demand up there. Colonies are very firmly in the third category; somebody has to be willing to lose a lot of money to get them up and running, and in the real world there’s probably not a McGuffin to justify it.

Fundamentally there’s just not any reason to expect a return from it. There’s people that would quite like to go, sure. But a major government has to spend a significant fraction of their budget over a long time horizon setting it up. That’s the kind of resources we’re talking about here.

I'm curious what sort of frame of mind you think would convince people to leave Earth en masse to start a space colony.

Something vaguely similar to what would convince them to crowd aboard a rickety wooden ship to cross the ocean to an untamed wilderness or buy a Conestoga Wagon and head 'west' braving various dangers and risks to stake a dubious claim on some land.

There's some subset of the population who have a different (arguably, defective?) risk calculus/tolerance when it comes to tackling new frontiers. It seems likely that >1% of the population is willing to sign on for such a trip with relatively dubious reward.

The tricky part, from my view, is that we'd need some of the best, brightest, and most adaptable, and they might be in shorter supply.

The cheap and easy answer is to what would motivate such action is to assume we send automated drones ahead to make things habitable and reasonably pleasant before the average biological human travels there.

In my mind, a probable option is the creation of O'Neil cylinders that are very directly optimized for some particularized environment which would make them extremely appealing for long-term habitation. One thing humans have consistently been willing to uproot and relocate for is desirable places to live.

Instead of retiring down to Florida or going on nonstop cruises, for example, I could imagine a dedicated "retirement orbital" which can house millions upon millions of septuagenarians while guaranteeing they all get to live on waterfront property, have sunshine and temperate climate year-round, and have minimal risk of crime or external diseases sweeping in.

You say this is an overly ambitious project which would require an obscene amount of resources and labor to construct, and you're right. I counter by pointing out that mankind has already built The Villages and similar communities across the state of Florida and elsewhere at great economic cost, so really I'm just proposing we scale up a model that has already been proven.

This partially solves the issue of who would be willing to risk it. Older people who have lived their life might not mind a risky trip to the place of endless bliss, even if it does make it nigh-impossible for the grandkids to visit.

My tongue is in cheek when I say this, but my larger point is that starship is a necessary step if we want to figure out what viable business models might be available in space.

Something vaguely similar to what would convince them to crowd aboard a rickety wooden ship to cross the ocean to an untamed wilderness or buy a Conestoga Wagon and head 'west' braving various dangers and risks to stake a dubious claim on some land.

Heading west has lots of risks, but requires few resources (especially, few resources by the standards of people who don't use electricity or plumbing) If it took a million dollars or even $50000 to head West, nobody would have done it.

Yes, but that's why I think it is fair to speculate that Starship bringing launch costs down might be a sufficient catalyst to get people interested in traveling out there.

It seems like some of the precursor missing technologies are obvious, but comparatively few are working on them. I'm thinking small-scale closed-loop habitats: Biosphere 2 was cute, but it mostly failed as an experiment and wasn't even a reasonable size for space colonies. I think we're quite short of the required technology, but it seems a fairly easy experiment to run iteratively on Earth to get there.

Biosphere 2 is not a good model for a planetary colony, which would undoubtedly make use of planetary resources to supply themselves and dispose of waste likewise.

Biosphere 2 is not a good model for a planetary colony

That's probably true, but I think it is a reasonable model for a long-term space station or asteroid colony, which has long seemed to me more appealing than planets, especially in the short term. The bottom of a gravity well seems like one of the least economically useful niches, unless you really can't find enough raw materials on moons and asteroids, or unless you have a serious proposal for terraforming.

More to the point: if you want to build a space colony, starting iteratively on closed-loop environs (assume spin gravity, which I've been told is practical for station designs not much larger than the ISS) seems a low cost, relatively low-risk research effort we could be doing more of today.

Interesting comment -- so you think a BS3 could be made to work if 'import of any resource somewhat easily available on Mars' and 'throw whatever you want out the airlock' were allowed?

Yes, I would think so. You could replenish oxygen and reject CO2, which was the main difficulty as I recall. Maintaining a closed environment is not that hard if you can add and remove gasses, just look at nuclear subs.

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Colonization is very very expensive and the kind of groups that would take that deal are not very popular.

Early pioneers would become historical legends, for one.

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