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Arglebargle III posted:Haha wow. I just asked you to make a basic case for colonizing Mars. You know I really expected something decent. Like if this was talking about tax dollars going to NASA I'd understand your point. If they spend one dollar on astronauts they spend one less dollar on robotic probes. There is a finite specific money pool and they have a specific yearly budget and one dollar taken to do one thing can't do another. But I don't get why I have to back either space X or asteroid mining. Like they compete only in the deepest most abstract "all human endeavors compete". PS4s and iphones both abstractly take the same materials but I don't have to pick one for any reason. I like manned space flight. I like robotic missions. I like space colonies. I like asteroid mining. I like zero g research. If there was one pool of money then yeah, I could talk about ranking them as what they should spend it on. But like, space X is just some company doing a thing and aren't stealing the money from any other project any more than literally any project possible is. If someone else wants to asteroid mine spaceX hasn't made it any harder for them than.
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Sep 13, 2017 23:48
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Bates posted:Well if he can find people who can afford to pay him to ship stuff to them on Mars then that's great. More power to him. I'm just exceedingly skeptical that more than a handful of people can afford and are willing to do that so it's hard to see how it would ever grow into what he visions. It all depends on how real his claims are. He says a ticket is going to be 200,000 a person dropping to 100,000 over the near term. He also isn't a "no return trips" guy, like some mars plans. So if things are what he says it absolutely could be a mix of people living there and people coming for like 5-10 year projects and jobs and fall within the price range that isn't so super crazy.
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Sep 14, 2017 00:32
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Bates posted:At any rate I'm more in Bezos camp - develop infrastructure with utility and value for people on Earth. It may or may not require a human presence in space but I don't see that as a goal in itself. Yeah exactly, this is I think the more level headed approach to space exploitation. Owlofcreamcheese posted:But I don't get why I have to back either space X or asteroid mining. You don't have to get super involved in my opinions or drag Elon into this you know. You seem to take this really personally.
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Sep 14, 2017 04:27
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Arglebargle III posted:Yeah exactly, this is I think the more level headed approach to space exploitation. What value do you think being level headed actually has in the world, exactly?
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Sep 14, 2017 04:47
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I like manned space flight. A few tiny fragments of that list are impractical wastes of money. The remainder is pure science fiction. Just like self driving cars, "artificial intelligence", fusion energy, and space elevators. Fantasies.
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Sep 14, 2017 07:03
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You know how in the first page some poster asked politely if he could bring up manned space colonization, or if it would derail the thread too much? You gave the wrong answer, OP. Better luck next time, live and learn.
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Sep 14, 2017 08:46
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Fister Roboto posted:The main reason is for living space, simple as that. At some point in the future, barring the apocalypse, the Earth just isn't going to be able to support the entire human population. It could be in a hundred years, or a thousand, or a million, but it's going to happen eventually.
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Sep 14, 2017 11:35
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Arglebargle III posted:Yeah exactly, this is I think the more level headed approach to space exploitation. Did you just "u mad" me?
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Sep 14, 2017 12:02
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Saladman posted:You know how in the first page some poster asked politely if he could bring up manned space colonization, or if it would derail the thread too much? Well, yes. Hanging on the edge of tomorrow and whatnot, but to continue the discussion despite my best judgement: I honestly think that if musk finds a way to make a cheap mars colony, that's his prerogative, and if he finds a way to make it useful to folks back on earth, even cooler. If we are talking about a small research base. As far as a colony that can hold a significant portion of the human race, or that can hold its own if something bad happened to earth (either one really), your going to need some things. Things like a source of food, water, fuel, electricity, metals (rare earth or otherwise), and various important gasses and other miscellany significant or otherwise I'm forgetting. Polar ice caps got some water, and if we got water and carbon we can probably wing getting food grown, and if we have power we could even try making some water somehow too. The question I have is what does the distribution of metals look like on mars? Some people said it has lots of iron earlier in the thread, but what about all the other stuff? Owl who is somehow originated from creamcheese, as a person who is enthusiastic about mars colonization, can you provide any knowledge on the various mineral distributions of mars? I wouldn't be surprised at all if an evaluation hasn't been made, but I'm not sure where to look. thechosenone fucked around with this message at 12:08 on Sep 14, 2017 |
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Sep 14, 2017 12:02
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thechosenone posted:Owl who is somehow originated from creamcheese, as a person who is enthusiastic about mars colonization, can you provide any knowledge on the various mineral distributions of mars? I wouldn't be surprised at all if an evaluation hasn't been made, but I'm not sure where to look. The farthest my knowledge about mars mineralogy goes is that without much erosion or thick atmosphere mars is covered with intact meteorites. To the point that the rovers in their small areas see quite a few simply sitting around exposed without any digging or anything. So there would be a pretty simple supply of very available iron/nickle/copper/etc that could be gathered without heavy mining. Beyond that looking it up it looks like the missions that really pinpoint mining potentials of mars aren't done yet. The best I can find is that there is a lot of certain types of dead volcanoes that on earth signify geology for the rarer types of mines but no one has tested anything there yet.
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Sep 14, 2017 12:39
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Owl, the anti-camp doesn't hold a clear position. Anytime you make a thought out point, they just say it's too hard and the benefits don't outweigh the cost. Which has literally nothing to do with science. Money is not a target, it's not the end goal. If it was, Einstein and hawkings, Sagan and Tyson would be billionaires. Advancing knowledge and our race is the goal, money is the means. Nobody is presenting facts because they don't have any. There are no anti science facts. There is no reason to not educate ourselves. There is no reason to not explore and learn, to advance ourselves. The naysayers are scared. Our country is built on the exploitation of people and resources. We're constantly told we can't do simple things like teach children the arts and physical education because of money, while we spend 2 TRILLION dollars researching the f35, a jet that will never kill more enemy pilots than the number of pilots who have died testing it. Our country is built on fear and exploitation of its people, and this thread is an excellent representation of our terrible education system combined with a culture of fear.
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Sep 14, 2017 12:46
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I can't say this thread has changed my mind about space colonization. No advantages are mentioned aside from the quasi-religious doomsday stuff and literal comparisons to video games. I do believe in eventual space colonization. But it will never happen before space industry. Manpower will be way too expensive given the risks, difficulties and psychological strain of traveling so far from Earth, as well as the sharp drop in quality of life. Thankfully robotics is advancing faster than the other technologies required for manned space bases. Space tourism can begin for real when robots have already extracted the fuel for the return trip.
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Sep 14, 2017 13:15
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Yeah like, you have it right that we don't really have a specific reason to be against space colonization. Mainly because we aren't against it. Its just that it is hard to talk about technology that will be available in a hundred years even as we are working toward it (no one here is at all against the kind of research that would make space colonization easier since it has other uses that already justify doing it). I'm personally just more interested in the journey rather than the destination, since colonies are a thing that have already happened on earth, so the technologically interesting part of space colonies is in how we get to making them viable. And yeah the guy above me makes a good point. Since we can do alot with robots, we are probably going to have to have a lot of industry in space before we start really being tempted into putting more people up there. That isn't a condemnation of space colonies, just speculation on how they will develop (if they do). You talk alot about Elson Musk and his spacex corporation, so how are they doing with reusable rockets? Last I heard, one of them crashed or something?
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Sep 14, 2017 13:23
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Why am I not surprised the technology thread on SA immediately turned to sex bots and spaceships.
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Sep 14, 2017 13:26
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steinrokkan posted:Why am I not surprised the technology thread on SA immediately turned to sex bots and spaceships. The serious talk about the sex tech was surprisingly civil and interesting for what it was. The space talk seems to be easily misunderstood due to people starting from different points in the conversation, and I think people are taking stuff personally that really isn't mean't to demean them or anything. I really think it would be cool to have some other news to chew on for the thread though.
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Sep 14, 2017 13:30
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Blue Star posted:A few tiny fragments of that list are impractical wastes of money. The remainder is pure science fiction. Just like self driving cars, "artificial intelligence", fusion energy, and space elevators. Fantasies. Let me ruin my own already ruined thread: AI already exists and has for decades. Or rather AI is an arbitrary and meaningless distinction where you randomly assign mystical significance to a random set of computer tasks then throw a fit if the solution to the task ended up not being mystical and throw that item off the list as never AI in the first place. "An AI" is science fantasy because it describes the aesthetic of a computer, not any ability. If siri had a human voice and a robot body and was in some 1960s movie everyone would call her an AI, if we built a god computer that had more task solving ability than all humans who ever lived combined but it just looked like a boring linux cluster and we interacted with it via SQL calls we never would. It's not any specific list of specific tasks, it's only what it looks like when it's doing it. For specific tasks once claimed to be AI we fold them into possibility almost daily.
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Sep 14, 2017 13:38
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Saladman posted:You know how in the first page some poster asked politely if he could bring up manned space colonization, or if it would derail the thread too much? Economically space could be interesting as it's an effectively distinct resource pool from Earth. Downside is that there aren't any good solutions for how to practically get commercial amounts of resources down to Earth. So the biggest driver of that resource exploitation would likely be industries outside Earth, which brings up a nicely circular problem If there was a compelling economic reason to shift some industries into a lower gravity environment then it could maybe start up via private industry. Does anyone know of any industries possibly benefiting or heading in this direction? Edit: Mercrom nailed it; space industry before space colonisation On a different topic we could maybe discuss potential hydrogen transport, in the context of bootstrapping into it via pre-existing natural gas transport infrastructure. On the downside natural gas transport standards were not designed with this more difficult usage in mind so any infrastructure that can incidentally support transporting hydrogen to a degree would need to be tested or upgraded individually It sounds like some places are starting to plan pilot trials on their specific infrastructure to determine how viable this is, such as Australian Gas Networks
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Sep 14, 2017 13:38
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TheWetFish posted:Economically space could be interesting as it's an effectively distinct resource pool from Earth. Downside is that there aren't any good solutions for how to practically get commercial amounts of resources down to Earth. So the biggest driver of that resource exploitation would likely be industries outside Earth, which brings up a nicely circular problem I'm thinking space industry would really benefit from high power electricity powered engines or something like that. If we had those, we could then just herd the resources into a preplanned impact zone to save on fuel and just pick them up and work them on earth. Or perhaps if we had sufficient solar infrastructure on the moon, we could work them on there (this is presuming alot of course, but space industry is pretty speculative at best anyway) and then send them in via a heavy load reentry vehicle. Really though I think it would probably have to start with stuff that is super expensive and high yield that we can't really get on earth, but can somewhere else. Don't think anyones gonna want to get space iron when iron here isn't even a quarter a pound. Also probably what the most important first step in making colonies possible (if that is what people want to focus on) would be in making getting off earth cheaper by an order of 10 or so. thechosenone fucked around with this message at 14:08 on Sep 14, 2017 |
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Sep 14, 2017 14:03
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Mercrom posted:quasi-religious doomsday stuff You mean...climate science?
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Sep 14, 2017 14:15
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steinrokkan posted:Why am I not surprised the technology thread on SA immediately turned to sex bots and spaceships. Unless we figure out some method of instantaneous communication teledildonics between distant space colonies is out, so sex bots it is.
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Sep 14, 2017 14:19
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Potato Salad posted:You mean...climate science? INCEPTION_HORN.wav
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Sep 14, 2017 14:19
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Potato Salad posted:You mean...climate science? Sending a capsule with a handful of people to Mars won't help the people affected by climate change, and it is not an extinction-avoiding measure either because 1) climate change won't make Earth uninhabitable 2) if it makes Earth actually uninhabitable, it will be still easier and of use to a greater number of people to fix Earth's habitats than to create new habitats on Mars. The only reason to want space colonies is curiosity (which ties to the fact that information is about the only commodity that could be economically transferred between planets), which is not a bad reason.
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Sep 14, 2017 14:20
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steinrokkan posted:Sending a capsule with a handful of people to Mars won't help the people affected by climate change, and it is not an extinction-avoiding measure either because 1) climate change won't make Earth uninhabitable 2) if it makes Earth actually uninhabitable, it will be still easier and of use to a greater number of people to fix Earth's habitats than to create new habitats on Mars. There's also the rich loving off to some other planet after destroying this one, which is less good.
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Sep 14, 2017 14:21
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Polygynous posted:There's also the rich loving off to some other planet after destroying this one, which is less good. They wouldn't be rich for long if they seriously tried to terraform Mars.
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Sep 14, 2017 14:23
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Polygynous posted:There's also the rich loving off to some other planet after destroying this one, which is less good. Eh, if they want to live under a glass dome on a scorched planet, they can do so more easily on the hypothetical ruined Earth.
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Sep 14, 2017 14:25
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steinrokkan posted:The only reason to want space colonies is curiosity (which ties to the fact that information is about the only commodity that could be economically transferred between planets), which is not a bad reason. So if you sent me to Mars, I could pick up a rock, smell it, taste it, not find out very much, piss on it so that it's mine, and unless a poo poo ton of life support systems were sent, die in short order. Not much else. But we can send up a mass spectrometer, multiple spectrum cameras, X-ray diffraction units, fluorescence spectrometers and all sorts of cool poo poo mounted on a self-driving vehicle with a transmitter and find out way more than sending a person. The only reason to send people is because they want to play at Dan Dare or because we somehow feel it's 'not as real' unless a person has done it, which is a people problem, not a technical one.
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Sep 14, 2017 14:31
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Like what is your solution? seize elon musk's money and companies and redirect them? If we are seizing his money or dictating him to only the most important topic why is your thing the most important topic instead of world hunger or building schools or fixing roads or something? If you mean your thing is more profitable then maybe you have yourself a chance to make your own company and get rich. We don't have some guy or counsel or something or with full totally authoritarian communism where there is anyone that gets to rank all the things people could work on and decide we need to finish task one before starting task two. Owlofcreamcheese posted:It's not your tax dollars colonizing mars. It's a private company. You can call them up and ask them to change to asteroid mining of rare earth minerals or something but I don't know what you can do beyond that. You can declare his company is suboptimal, but every single company is that. You can point to nearly every company on earth and declare the resources it uses could be used better, spaceX isn't directly preventing anyone from asteroid mining anymore than sony is or something. The point here is that, for better or for worse, (probably for worse), people like Elon Musk have significant amounts of influence. Policy makers listen to what he has to say and take that into account. So when he pretends to be an expert in something he knows absolutely nothing about (nuking Mars to terraform it, rogue AI destroying humanity) it causes very real harms in the form of misguided policy and misallocated public resources. It's wildly irresponsible to think that he doesn't have some sort of societal obligation given his status. The guy doesn't have the cleanest of intentions either, he was on the Trump bandwagon, and took a depressingly long time to resign from Trump's tech council. We're ending up with exactly what you described, a planned economy, planned by a small cabal of elites who don't know what they're doing. Guavanaut posted:Even for curiosity, sending humans is a suboptimal way of doing it. We're pretty poo poo in terms of what conditions we can survive and the quality of our senses. Our saving grace is that we can build poo poo and conceptualize. Yeah. there's a nice quote from Maciej Ceglowski on this: quote:This brings up a delicate point about justifying manned missions with science. In order to make any straight-faced claims about being cost effective, you have to cart an awful lot of science with you into orbit, which in turns means you need to make the experiments as easy to operate as possible. But if the experiments are all automated, you remove the rationale for sending a manned mission in the first place. Apart from question-begging experiments on the physiology of space flight, there is little you can do to resolve this dilemma. In essence, each 'pure science' Shuttle science mission consists of several dozen automated experiments alongside an enormous, irrelevant, repeated experiment in keeping a group of primates alive and healthy outside the atmosphere. archduke.iago fucked around with this message at 15:07 on Sep 14, 2017 |
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Sep 14, 2017 15:03
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TheWetFish posted:On a different topic we could maybe discuss potential hydrogen transport, in the context of bootstrapping into it via pre-existing natural gas transport infrastructure. On the downside natural gas transport standards were not designed with this more difficult usage in mind so any infrastructure that can incidentally support transporting hydrogen to a degree would need to be tested or upgraded individually It is likelier that hydrogen transport would need to be installed completely separately from existing natural gas infrastructure. That article is talking about (1) replacing NG with an NG/H2 blend of only 10% H2, and only at a small scale. NG transport is complex. You can liken it to the challenge of EHV/HV power transmission, where expensive transport stations have to [transform and condition voltage supply] / [sequentially depressurize and regulate gas]. This goes beyond the two gases having totally different behaviours as you gently caress around with their pressure and temperature, with NG being significantly more polarizable and thus easier to liquify and manage as a liquid. You can feasibly transport cryogenic, dense LNG at atmospheric pressure, allowing pipes to transport viable volumes of the stuff to customer regassification stations. Not so with LH2, which iirc needs to be around 30 Kelvin before it will ever consider be coming a liquid, and even then it "simmers" away gas relatively rapidly until like 20 K or the teens. Vacuum jacketing is absolutely required. Bleed-off in a good LH2 cryo tank like that which fed the space shuttle pad is 2% per day. Imagine the bleed from a long pipe system that has more concern with commercial viability (with the US energy industry, this means "as substandard cheapo as possible"). Even then, you don't really gain much efficiency as LH2 isn't very dense. Another big challenge is H2 having ortho and para spin modes that make significant density changes require catalysis to prevent statistical mechanics from bursting your LH2 pipes spontaneously. Yeah, LH2 proton spin species altering available microstates will collude with Pauli to try to kill you. Supplementing NG with a little H2 may make sense, especially in local distribution not requiring liquid transport to be economically viable. Moving to majority LH2 transport will require entirely new infrastructure that is likely to be significantly more complex and costly. In my opinion, it is worth it no matter the cost, but try making a moral, not strictly business, case with rising nationalism in government. And yes, climate change science and climate forecasting/modeling are two separate subjects, with the latter inadvertently spawning doomsday disciples frequently overstepping the rigor of any given published model's forecast.
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Sep 14, 2017 15:23
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Manned or unmanned, I think most of us agree that we should send things into space for research purposes. I think space industry is vital for this. There has to be a limit to the size and type of telescopes we can build on Earth. Space industry could allow us to build arbitrarily large telescopes, which could greatly increase our knowledge of the universe.
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Sep 14, 2017 15:34
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I think we got derailed into a little hole regarding Elon Musk and the colonization of Mars. Oops!  I did not mean for that at all. For myself, I think I lean more on the side of the guy with the Kerbal Space Program avatar, actually. There's much more efficient things we can do with space, and much more useful activities, such as the construction of O'Neill Cylinders! I've started reading The High Frontier, a nonfiction book by Gerard K. O'Neill (the physicist who came up with this idea), where he outlines in a lot of plain engineering detail how an O'Neill Cylinder would work as a space colony. It's a really fascinating book because he goes about it in a very serious and realistic way, and since it was written in like the late 70s or early 80s, it doesn't require any real groundbreaking technology. I think it's worth trying to track down a copy at the local library or used book store to get a good perspective on this whole issue. The part where Elon Musk and SpaceX comes in, for me, is just the vast cost-saving measures created by their reusable rocket design. That's an excellent technological breakthrough that would really help make space colonies and space industry a reality. I also want to second the idea that space industry is kind of a funny loop that's hard to 'kick start'. For example, asteroid capture. The way it could justify itself is with procuring vast amounts of mineral resources. However, it takes a lot of resources to get those, and once you bring down a giant platinum asteroid, it lowers the price of platinum to unprofitable levels. The same goes for most other economic space endeavors: it seems like it makes sense if you look at the accounting from the perspective of output, but not necessarily from the perspective of profit. Ironically, this seems to lead one to conclude that exploiting space resources makes sense for a post-scarcity society. This means that space research and exploration efforts will have to be funded in the meanwhile by government and non-profit concerns. Only agencies that are not looking to make a quick buck can really afford to be in it for the long haul. Meanwhile, on earth, we need to push for things like a Universal Basic Income, progressive income taxes, a 4-hr work day, and a global wealth/rent tax in order to make a post-scarcity economy a reality. We should keep pushing for automation, as well as ensuring that the dividends from automation are equally distributed. Finally, personally, my argument for long-term investment in space colonization is not an apocalypse insurance scenario. It's a bit more long-term than that: basically, it gets down to what are we protecting the environment for? For the existence of life itself. We know that in a few hundred million or billion years, the Earth itself will become uninhabitable to life, due to the changes in our sun's solar output that will cause a runaway greenhouse effect. Even if we die out, or even if we build some kind of solar shade, the Earth is ultimately doomed when the Sun engulfs it as a red giant about 2 or 3 billion years from now. That's only a tiny fraction of life's potential lifespan in the universe! If we assume for now that this is the only planet with multicellular life on it, I think we ourselves, as intelligent forms of that life, are its best hope at surviving far into the distant future. Take for example, red dwarf stars. Their expected lifespan is something on the order of 100 trillion years. Imagine if in the future, humans could colonize space and send outposts of life to orbit such stars. That means we could help fulfill life's potential to exist for a hundred thousand times as long as it would "normally" have! I think it's an important long-term goal, because complex multicellular life is unique, beautiful and valuable. EDIT: Wow! What a megapost! To lighten things, I want to share a couple of my favorite channels on Youtube. Kurzgesagt: In A Nutshell I love this channel, because it seems like they believe the same things I do, and make really wonderful little educational videos with beautiful, adorable graphics. SciShow This is a bit more of a short tidbits and interesting science news show, but anything by Hank Green is pretty well thought out and interesting! Computerphile and Numberphile Just a bunch of mathematicians and computer scientists talking about interesting problems, mathematical oddities, and other things. Check out the Numberphile videos with Cliff Stoll in them, he's adorable and loves Klein Bottles. 
DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 15:48 on Sep 14, 2017 |
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Sep 14, 2017 15:37
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When the US was attempting to go to the moon, were there an equal number of whiny, miserable naysayers telling them they shouldn't? When it comes to science and technological advancement, we don't need hard and fast reasons. Let's just do a bunch of poo poo, and hope some of it works out and provides us with foreseen or unforeseen benefits.
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Sep 14, 2017 15:38
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DrSunshine posted:I think it's an important long-term goal, because complex multicellular life is unique, beautiful and valuable. I hope the first super advanced civilization that discovers us thinks so too and puts us in a zoo.
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Sep 14, 2017 15:49
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PT6A posted:When the US was attempting to go to the moon, were there an equal number of whiny, miserable naysayers telling them they shouldn't? edit: Like I'd be fine with a $14 billion a year pure research program to build a huge rear end box on Earth that had Mars-like ground and Mars-like atmosphere, and then build a self sustaining colony inside the huge rear end box on Earth. Once you've built the colony on Earth, sending it to actual Mars doesn't accomplish anything for science or humanity. twodot fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Sep 14, 2017 |
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Sep 14, 2017 15:56
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In my mind the economics of asteroid minings seem just binary. If the earth has endless abundant resources then we will never need to asteroid mine, if the earth runs out of something we will need to astroid mine no matter what beyond the concept of dollars. Like if it's 3000 years from now and we still are doing pretty okay finding the necessary deposits of rubidium or whatever to build the hoverdogs we need there probably will never be a time it's cheaper to get it from space than out of the ground. But if we get to a point we have used up the majority of the accessible uranium and just don't have useful access to uranium anymore but there is some in space then absolutely we would go get it if it's all possible. Like I mean I guess you could say the free market would decide libertarianally that if there was no uranium on earth space uranium would be worth infinity dollars or whatever so it would be economical. I think that sort of thing would go beyond economics, if we simply depleted some resource but knew where to get more we'd probably go get it and make the costs work out. By hook or by crook, even if they really didn't.
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Sep 14, 2017 16:26
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:In my mind the economics of asteroid minings seem just binary. If the earth has endless abundant resources then we will never need to asteroid mine, if the earth runs out of something we will need to astroid mine no matter what beyond the concept of dollars. You can't run out of something, Earth is a closed system. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Sep 14, 2017 |
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Sep 14, 2017 16:28
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steinrokkan posted:You can't run out of something, Earth is a closed system. That doesn't mean you don't run out. If you have 10 kids and 9 pencils you've run out of pencils. Like we mine about 25 tons of rhodium a year and that is about it. We could certainly ramp that up some but there kinda is just a certain amount accessible on the planet. Eventually we will dig that majority of it up. After that we can get more from soil or seawater a few ounces at a time but at some point we will just have all the rhodium we ever will have. There won't ever be significant new amounts on earth. If it turns out rhodium is needed to build hover dogs or whatever hot future tech then we will just have X amount and no more really ever. If it turns out you need X tons +1 of rhodium to build a hoverdog then humans just don't get to have hoverdogs. etc. We can 'run out' while still having an amount, we don't get infinite everything. We can probably mine iron forever for the next million years but eventually we dig up all the sources of gold and any additional gold is just small scale reclamation from small sources.
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Sep 14, 2017 16:50
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:In my mind the economics of asteroid minings seem just binary. If the earth has endless abundant resources then we will never need to asteroid mine, if the earth runs out of something we will need to astroid mine no matter what beyond the concept of dollars. The most compelling reason to extract resources in space is to use those resources in space without having to first lift them out of Earth's gravity. Pretty much everything to do with human colonization or exploitation of space has this same kind of chicken and egg problem. Once there's real infrastructure in space it'll make economic sense to do things in space, but there's nothing of economic value to do in space so there's no reason to build infrastructure. The only way I can really see this changing is with rich as gently caress people like Elon Musk using their wealth get the ball rolling just because it's a thing they want to do. steinrokkan posted:You can't run out of something, Earth is a closed system. You can "run out" of plenty of stuff in the sense that a particular thing you're looking for is now too costly to extract or exists in a form that's uneconomical to process back into a useful state. It's also possible that our needs for [thing] will at some point exceed what we can reasonably extract on Earth.
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Sep 14, 2017 16:52
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No economics of any kind is "binary" and nothing would ever get infinite value. Why are we having this discussion.
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Sep 14, 2017 16:57
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steinrokkan posted:You can't run out of something, Earth is a closed system. Owlofcreamcheese posted:That doesn't mean you don't run out. If you have 10 kids and 9 pencils you've run out of pencils.
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Sep 14, 2017 16:59
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PT6A posted:When the US was attempting to go to the moon, were there an equal number of whiny, miserable naysayers telling them they shouldn't? I disagree--it is important to be responsible regarding research spending, kind of like how it is important to be responsible regarding funding of startup companies. There is a lot of bad research and there are a lot of silly startup companies out there. Funding both more heavily just creates more low quality 'me-too' work.
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Sep 14, 2017 17:18
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