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computer parts posted:Does the statistic of people not living more than a hundred miles from where they grew up ring at all with you? There's a reason for that. You were arguing that planes didn't supplant ocean based passenger transportation which is absurd. Transoceanic voyages, while rare for most individuals were and are an important part of global commerce. We used to have to do it by boat and people now do it by plane because its way faster. Its actually rather difficult to catch a passenger boat from say New York to London while 100 years ago there would be at least one leaving every day.
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Sep 24, 2014 21:30
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Trabisnikof posted:You were arguing that planes didn't supplant ocean based passenger transportation which is absurd. Transoceanic voyages, while rare for most individuals were and are an important part of global commerce. We used to have to do it by boat and people now do it by plane because its way faster. What I said was that most travel (in general) was done via non-ship methods, and air travel supplanted more from there than from the ships (which is self evident in somewhere like Europe; you won't take a boat from Germany to Italy but you will take a car/carriage/train and you can now take an airplane too). With regards to ships specifically I said that their primary reason for transport was transporting cargo instead of people, and that's true today (most ship transport has been supplanted by air travel except cruises which are different, but they were never as large of the pie as land based transport).
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Sep 24, 2014 21:33
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Kaal posted:Well fortunately there's a factor that isn't included in these calculations, which is that 52,000 mph is the New Horizons launch speed, not its average speed. As you know, spacecraft are capable of acceleration throughout their journey (limited, of course, by their need to deaccelerate when landing). Planetary slingshots are of course one way of accelerating, which is how NASA's Juno spacecraft now holds the current record of more than 160,000 mph. But the other way is to use nuclear reactors and engines based on controlled fusion explosions (known as inertial confinement fusion engines) to power the vessel. As one can imagine, decades of explosive acceleration yields incredible speeds; a variety of think tank studies have been conducted exploring the concept over the years, including Project Daedalus, Project Longshot, Project Discovery II, Project Orion, and the current study known as Project Icarus. Generally speaking they anticipate average speeds of .04c-.1c, or 30 - 75 million mph. These technologies, while advanced, are considered within our current technological capability, and constitute a vast improvement over the best performance of a single-use chemical rocket, and would allow arrival to Alpha Centauri within 40 - 100 years. 52k mph was after its gravity assist from Jupiter. 40 years to alpha centuri, we're talking around 10% the speed of light. Anyone smarter than me want to do the time dilation calculation?
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Sep 24, 2014 21:41
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EvilGenius posted:40 years to alpha centuri, we're talking around 10% the speed of light. Anyone smarter than me want to do the time dilation calculation? Time dilation is negligible below 0.5c, it's logarithmic.
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Sep 24, 2014 21:46
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SKELETONS posted:Time dilation is negligible below 0.5c, it's logarithmic. Actually it's more like 0.2c, after which you wanna start taking into account the relativistic factor if you want high accuracy.
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Sep 24, 2014 21:50
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computer parts posted:You're assuming prices will stay constant or rise due to increased demand and availability of a substance. quote:Does the statistic of people not living more than a hundred miles from where they grew up ring at all with you? There's a reason for that. quote:It goes up, eventually. Whoa! Do you think that might relate somehow to the continued economic viability of mining?
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Sep 24, 2014 22:18
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LGD posted:No, I am not assuming that at all. If asteroid resource extraction were successfully implemented I would very much expect commodity prices to fall dramatically over time. What on earth have I said or implied that would make you think I thought otherwise? Saying "space mining offers potentially huge economic rewards" does not mean people conceive of those rewards as "X platinum asteroids multiplied by current spot rate." Because you're using a dumb definition of economic rewards. If you got electricity for free, would Bitcoin offer potentially huge economic rewards? Yes. quote:Yes because, among other reasons, long distance overland travel has historically been difficult, expensive, slow and quite dangerous. I don't know what this has to do with anything though since when people did travel prior to the invention of mechanical flight they generally made extensive use of waterways in preference to overland routes. The emergence of rail and automotive transport as preferred alternatives to taking a boat for long distance travel is a fairly recent historical development. The statement "because hardly anyone went across oceans for solely purposes of transport in the past" is absolutely breathtaking in its ignorance/wrongness. Most sea transport was for trade. Most people back in the day didn't travel. These are not mutually exclusive. quote:Whoa! Do you think that might relate somehow to the continued economic viability of mining? Oh, so you want a highly volatile market that's supposed to bring "potentially huge economic rewards"? Good to know.
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Sep 24, 2014 22:22
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Dumping all of your mined platinum on the market at once would be really silly. You'd have an ideal sale price in mind, and anytime the market price went above your sale price you'd send more platinum to earth. If the market price was below your sale price you'd sit on it in orbit until the market price rose. This is what would keep the market from going crazy, outside of the initial price drop. Also if you were dumb enough to dump all your platinum at once, thousands of companies would buy it at $1/lb and sit on it for years, just waiting to sell it when the price rose eventually. A GIANT PARSNIP fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Sep 24, 2014 |
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Sep 24, 2014 22:38
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computer parts posted:You're ignoring that there's still a (high) fixed cost to acquire these materials in the first place (i.e., get them out of space). Fixed costs don't act as a price floor. If I'm running a hot dog shack and I pay $1,000 for my shack that's a fixed cost. Grilling my first hotdog costs $1000, grilling two hotdogs costs $500 each, and so on and so forth. Businesses with high fixed costs make things cheap by producing as much as possible, because the fixed costs remain fixed regardless of the quantity of product produced. Variable costs increase with production. Mustard is a variable cost because the more hotdogs I sell the more mustard I need to buy, since all God-fearing American patriots put mustard on their hotdogs. Space mining would most likely involve launching infrastructure into space which stays in space. It would have an extremely high barrier to entry, as launching tons of mining infrastructure would be super expensive, but once its up there it becomes a fixed cost.
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Sep 24, 2014 22:54
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computer parts posted:With regards to ships specifically I said that their primary reason for transport was transporting cargo instead of people, and that's true today (most ship transport has been supplanted by air travel except cruises which are different, but they were never as large of the pie as land based transport). That you think "people" and "cargo" are different things in historical context is sort of cute, in a naive way. e: Sea travel was planes and the internet combined in its time. Major cities are built at locations with access to a port for a reason. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Sep 24, 2014 |
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Sep 24, 2014 23:08
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computer parts posted:Because you're using a dumb definition of economic rewards. And no, with access to (apparently limitless) free electricity Bitcoin does not offer potentially huge economic rewards at all. I don't even know why you'd bring it up- it's even more divorced from the original topic than the boat derail. You don't seem to have a particularly firm grasp on how currency differs from economic resources.  quote:Most sea transport was for trade. Most people back in the day didn't travel. These are not mutually exclusive. quote:Oh, so you want a highly volatile market that's supposed to bring "potentially huge economic rewards"? Good to know. LGD fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Sep 24, 2014 |
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Sep 24, 2014 23:19
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:Dumping all of your mined platinum on the market at once would be really silly. You'd have an ideal sale price in mind, and anytime the market price went above your sale price you'd send more platinum to earth. If the market price was below your sale price you'd sit on it in orbit until the market price rose. This is what would keep the market from going crazy, outside of the initial price drop. You're still thinking like the material has retained its original value. Again, aluminum is probably the most accurate historical example here. If you went back to the 1880's and tried to buy up all the cheap aluminum and sit on it until the price went back up, you'd be sitting on lots of cheap aluminum forever. The new reality is aluminum is no longer rarer than gold, and you're going to have to deal with that to make any money. And it turns out, you can make a whole lot more money selling aluminum to every industry imaginable than you can selling it to a handful of kings wanting some fancy utensils to show off at their next dinner party.
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Sep 24, 2014 23:43
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:Also if you were dumb enough to dump all your platinum at once, thousands of companies would buy it at $1/lb and sit on it for years, just waiting to sell it when the price rose eventually. You are ignoring the opportunity cost of sitting on it and tying up your capital in something not doing anything for you. If you had a monopoly on 99% of the available platinum, you'd be better off investing in companies that produce products using platinum and vertically integrating than sitting and waiting, and your second proposal relies on an entire group of investors acting in harmony without communicating their intentions, with none of them acting as confederates and driving prices back down.
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Sep 25, 2014 00:33
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:Dumping all of your mined platinum on the market at once would be really silly. You'd have an ideal sale price in mind, and anytime the market price went above your sale price you'd send more platinum to earth. If the market price was below your sale price you'd sit on it in orbit until the market price rose. This is what would keep the market from going crazy, outside of the initial price drop. I think what you're describing is for the mining company to hold its own futures, thus cornering the market? I'm not a finance expert, but the two reasons that corners don't generally work is 1) people get wind of it, and buy opposing futures positions anticipating the new market glut, and 2) antitrust. To avoid both, you'd have to make your giant platinum stash secret... which is hard to do when in orbit, or de-orbited and kept warehoused (people could figure out the mass of your de-orbited asteroid, there could be leaks, etc). In this case, there's also 3) competition, since you're cornering the market the old-fashioned way of producing and owning the commodity. You'd need to be the monopoly asteroid miner. Does anybody who knows more about finance want to tell me why I'm wrong?
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Sep 25, 2014 00:36
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OtherworldlyInvader posted:Fixed costs don't act as a price floor. This isn't really pertinent to the discussion. He clearly meant operating expense, specifically the trip to retrieve the asteroid. That cost is "fixed" by virtue of already being spent. To make a profit, the price of metals in the new market after your massive dump has to cover your expense of getting it, not a sure thing. Hodgepodge posted:That you think "people" and "cargo" are different things in historical context is sort of cute, in a naive way. So in this context, space travel might never get cheap enough, the manufacturing process will always be too expensive; barring advances. Femur fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Sep 25, 2014 |
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Sep 25, 2014 02:42
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in other words, the myth of human progress is a myth for a reason. there are some things that will obviously never be possible for humanity to achieve. it could easily be the case that mass living and operating outside of earth is one of them. and the prohibitive costs for the initial investment is pretty strong evidence in favor of that idea e: one thing quickly about the asteroid mining business venture. it probably could be the case that once the glut of resources hits the market, new demand pops up to compensate for the drop in price and give a return on the space mining investment. the problem is there's zero guarantee that this process will happen quickly. In that case, the mining company is left holding a bunch of dirt cheap minerals and faces insolvency due to being unable to recoup on the investment, the big winners are the vultures that buy the assets of the company after bankruptcy. now obviously it's not certain the above will happen, but i think the possibility is enough to dissuade companies for the titanic investment of space mining. A big flaming stink fucked around with this message at 03:58 on Sep 25, 2014 |
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Sep 25, 2014 03:52
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A big flaming stink posted:
I liked the comment earlier about how the company that stands to profit most is one diversified enough to utilize their own materials. It's a sobering thought that the groups most capable of forging progress in this sector are gigantic state-dwarfing megacorps. But it's happening. Watch for the future SpaceX-Planetary Resources merger
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Sep 25, 2014 04:25
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A big flaming stink posted:in other words, the myth of human progress is a myth for a reason. there are some things that will obviously never be possible for humanity to achieve. it could easily be the case that mass living and operating outside of earth is one of them. With advanced robotics and materials science the initial investment gets cheaper every day. And the value of mined materials from space is never going to be in dumping them back to Earth except in the extreme case where Earth suddenly needs X. Mined material has the most value remaining in space in a refined and usable form.
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Sep 25, 2014 12:38
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Sylink posted:With advanced robotics and materials science the initial investment gets cheaper every day. And the value of mined materials from space is never going to be in dumping them back to Earth except in the extreme case where Earth suddenly needs X. What interests me a bit about this stuff is that it seems like billionaires who are willing to lose much of their money. Obviously they hope to make it back in the long term, but the reason why this is 'a bunch of nerdy billionaires' versus 'Rio Tinto' is that they are in fact willing to blow huge amounts of money to try and get the party started. This is not a decision fueled by economics in the typical sense, I think.
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Sep 26, 2014 06:06
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Nessus posted:This is not a decision fueled by economics in the typical sense, I think. Jeff Bezos high school valedictorian speech was about space colonization and O'Neill cylinders, so I think in his case it's driven by pure nerdy passion.
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Sep 26, 2014 08:29
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The first thing we'd want to mine is water ice. Ice is basically very valuable fuel ore and it has near term uses in space. Ice gives you propellant, oxidizer, breathing air and consumable water. It's also relatively easy to mine (drill if needed, melt, pump it up) and "refine" (electrolyze it). Your competition would be propellant launched from Earth. This pegs its value as a few thousand dollars per kilogram. It'll go lower if and when launch costs get lower, but that will also lower the costs of starting and expanding your ice mining venture. The old chicken and egg applies here too in that you gotta hope demand goes up with the availability of water. The amount you could sell right now is somewhat limited. The upside is there's a great many plausible uses for water on orbit. Sell everybody propellant for their Mars or Moon missions, top up upper stages to lob probes anywhere in the solar system, with more propellant for longer missions and more science. Delta-v is very expensive in space right now. With orbital sources of propellant it doesn't have to be. That opens up the solar system, making it far cheaper to go anywhere, for probes, manned science missions, further more elaborate mining operations, etc. Moving stuff around in space would be easy. You'd enable a great big category of things we haven't done before because delta-v is expensive. If the Martian moons have accessible reserves of ice, they make for a very attractive source. Orbital mechanics are a funny thing: As it turns out delta-v to Deimos or Phobos is far less than dV to our own Moon. It takes more time to get there, but an unmanned craft needs no life support. The trip back takes more dV, but even then the full round trip is slightly less than a Lunar mission, and most importantly, with most of the dV being on the return trip you're able to use cheap propellant right from the source for it. Here's a worked example of how a 150 ton craft could bring 50 000 tons of water from the Martian moons to Earth orbit: http://www.neofuel.com/waterships/watership.htm This isn't the only way to go, and there may be better approaches, but it's a fine example. The economics of it are naturally the most speculative part. Elukka fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Sep 26, 2014 |
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Sep 26, 2014 08:38
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I'd be excited and honestly really happy with the bar set a little lower -- unmanned exploration of possible Earthlike worlds in other solar systems. What about the feasibility of sending a probe to somewhere like Gliese, Tau Ceti or Kepler? These systems seem to contain super-earths within the habitable zone, which might either contain water or possibly even be ocean-planets. It would be fascinating (if very very long waiting) to actually have a probe enter one of these systems and look for life.
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Sep 26, 2014 16:34
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Trouble is, as far as anyone knows it would take thousands of years for a probe to reach even the closest stars. The only feasible way to survey exoplanets would be to look at them through telescopes. Like this one.
Kopijeger fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Sep 26, 2014 |
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Sep 26, 2014 16:41
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DrSunshine posted:I'd be excited and honestly really happy with the bar set a little lower -- unmanned exploration of possible Earthlike worlds in other solar systems. What about the feasibility of sending a probe to somewhere like Gliese, Tau Ceti or Kepler? These systems seem to contain super-earths within the habitable zone, which might either contain water or possibly even be ocean-planets. It would be fascinating (if very very long waiting) to actually have a probe enter one of these systems and look for life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-Stage_4-Grid Getting something like the Curiosity up to 410 km/s (assuming your rocket and power source is massless), would require ~7000 kg of fuel (7 times as much as the Curiosity). Going twice as fast, 820 km/s, would require ~50000 kg of fuel. This equation is exponential because the more fuel you bring means the more fuel that has to be accelerated. Even at 820 km/s you are traveling at 0.003c meaning you get to Gliese 581 in around 7000 years with no fuel to slow down (edit: and because the equation is exponential, you can't simply bring twice as much fuel to slow down at the end).
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Sep 26, 2014 16:56
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DrSunshine posted:I'd be excited and honestly really happy with the bar set a little lower -- unmanned exploration of possible Earthlike worlds in other solar systems. What about the feasibility of sending a probe to somewhere like Gliese, Tau Ceti or Kepler? These systems seem to contain super-earths within the habitable zone, which might either contain water or possibly even be ocean-planets. It would be fascinating (if very very long waiting) to actually have a probe enter one of these systems and look for life. Daedalus, if I'm recalling correctly, was a hypothetical interstellar probe aimed at Bernard's star, and with a working* ICFusion engine put a payload in the system in ~80 years. Trouble is, as was mentioned, no slowing down. So 80 years to get there to do a few hours of surveying as it passes through.
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Sep 26, 2014 17:18
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DrSunshine posted:I'd be excited and honestly really happy with the bar set a little lower -- unmanned exploration of possible Earthlike worlds in other solar systems. What about the feasibility of sending a probe to somewhere like Gliese, Tau Ceti or Kepler? These systems seem to contain super-earths within the habitable zone, which might either contain water or possibly even be ocean-planets. It would be fascinating (if very very long waiting) to actually have a probe enter one of these systems and look for life. EDIT: I feel it may be worth adding a sentence or two in summary of what I'm trying to say here, so here it goes: Even if we assume we'll develop the capability (that we currently don't have) to accelerate macroscopic probes to relativistic speeds at some point in the future (which we won't though, by the way), due to the magnitude of the distances involved, it would never be worth it from the point of view of a stationary observer left behind at the probe's point of origin, due to the vast time scales involved. Even if we just assume the existence of that technology as a given for the sake of argument. This is not the case, however, for a traveller on the relativistic rocket itself, because due to time dilation, and depending on the fraction of the speed of light that can be achieved, the experienced subjective travel time could, in principle, be made arbitrarily small. PrBacterio fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Sep 26, 2014 |
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Sep 26, 2014 17:35
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I guess that what I'm getting at is that it would never be possible -- if it turns out that there isn't life on Europa, Enceladus, or Titan -- to find out what sort of life lives on an earthlike planet, without actually going there and taking some up-close pictures or samples of it. It's possible to imagine with current technology that we might perhaps somehow take spectroscopic images of potential habitable planets and find the signifiers of life like methane, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, oxygen gas, and other volatiles, but we would never be able to confirm the presence of life unless we were able to directly image the planets. And we can't do that unless we actually send a probe there to look and see! 
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Sep 27, 2014 02:46
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On the topic of the speed of light being a barrier- I've seen all sorts of speculation, but never any about whether or not the rules that would break causality if something were to travel faster than light actually still hold up once you're past that limit. Of course, that would be a silly thing to assume. At the same time, we've just spent a century or so exploring the revelation that when things are bigger, faster, colder, hotter, etc, than the state at which Newtonian physics pertain then the rules of physics work completely differently. So I'm surprised that sci-fi always messes with wormholes and poo poo instead of saying "whelp, turns out going faster than light is easier than going at the same speed as it" or something. Or is this actually one of the many weird assumptions that make up string theory?
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Sep 27, 2014 05:29
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Hodgepodge posted:So I'm surprised that sci-fi always messes with wormholes and poo poo instead of saying "whelp, turns out going faster than light is easier than going at the same speed as it" or something. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Sky (Long story short, the singularity happens, and a basically omnipotent AI kills anyone that attempts to exploit non-causality within its light cone)
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Sep 27, 2014 05:40
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I was more thinking that there's no particular reason that the rules don't change again once you hit that limit in a way which preserves causality. Einstein considered the possibility that causality might just not be a thing at a certain point and decided it was unlikely and too bizarre to assume, but as far as I know, didn't wonder if his equations might reflect assumptions that no longer apply past that speed. (He might not have because there is no particular reason to assume that, of course). I may be confused though- isn't there a gap in theory between special/general relativity and Newtonian physics that can't be resolved using the tools we presently have, and so we kind of have to go "we're not sure why but at this point the rules change"? Certainly, the popular understanding of the "theory of everything" is an account of the underlying rules for how the four fundamental forces work, rather than "electromagnetism doesn't work like the nuclear forces because that's what we've observed so we're working with what we have." e: As I understand it, this sort of development out of left field is the stuff scientists live for. Like how, last I checked, the Higgs Boson appears to work more or less how we thought it would, leading to the researchers be disappointed because they were hoping that we would be wrong in an interesting way. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 06:02 on Sep 27, 2014 |
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Sep 27, 2014 05:50
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Hodgepodge posted:On the topic of the speed of light being a barrier- I've seen all sorts of speculation, but never any about whether or not the rules that would break causality if something were to travel faster than light actually still hold up once you're past that limit. Of course, that would be a silly thing to assume. At the same time, we've just spent a century or so exploring the revelation that when things are bigger, faster, colder, hotter, etc, than the state at which Newtonian physics pertain then the rules of physics work completely differently. So I'm surprised that sci-fi always messes with wormholes and poo poo instead of saying "whelp, turns out going faster than light is easier than going at the same speed as it" or something. It's probably because we've accelerated (small) things to near the speed of light and that takes a large amount of energy to do so, plus wormholes are easier to stomach because it's proven that you can bend space to make an overall shorter distance (though that usually requires large amounts of gravity to do, but it's been observed at least).
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Sep 27, 2014 06:06
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Hodgepodge posted:On the topic of the speed of light being a barrier- I've seen all sorts of speculation, but never any about whether or not the rules that would break causality if something were to travel faster than light actually still hold up once you're past that limit. Of course, that would be a silly thing to assume. At the same time, we've just spent a century or so exploring the revelation that when things are bigger, faster, colder, hotter, etc, than the state at which Newtonian physics pertain then the rules of physics work completely differently. So I'm surprised that sci-fi always messes with wormholes and poo poo instead of saying "whelp, turns out going faster than light is easier than going at the same speed as it" or something. For clarification, things commonly travel faster than the speed of light in the universe, and the primary culprit is the cosmological constant. Warp field interferometers are what NASA is currently researching to see if cosmic inflation engines are viable. Job Truniht fucked around with this message at 06:21 on Sep 27, 2014 |
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Sep 27, 2014 06:18
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Job Truniht posted:For clarification, things commonly travel faster than the speed of light in the universe, and the primary culprit is the cosmological constant. Warp field interferometers are what NASA is currently researching to see if cosmic inflation engines are viable. I had heard about this in relation to cosmic inflation, but I wasn't aware that a Star Trek style warp drive was a thing we could seriously research at the moment. I suppose thinking just in terms of speed, when space, time, and velocity are all variables, is a little shortsighted. Of course, there's still a lot of questions about what exactly makes up the vacuum (or "space" or however one wants to put it) and produces a cosmological constant in the first place, as I understand it.
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Sep 27, 2014 08:34
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Hodgepodge posted:I suppose thinking just in terms of speed, when space, time, and velocity are all variables, is a little shortsighted. A little! It'd mean that cause-and-effect is a lie we tell ourselves around the camp-fire, time travel is real, and shortly chaos will reign the universe as we gently caress with everything for lulz.
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Sep 27, 2014 10:07
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Nessus posted:The problem there is I suppose that you might get someone saying "So what good is all that refined material up there for us, exactly, if all we're supposed to use it for is stuff up there - and then we use that stuff, to make more stuff up there... When does it engage with the actual Earth again?" There are dozens of available worlds to explore just in our solar system. If you are going to space you can start to consider leaving Earth behind. More people than you would think would be willing to endure some harsh submarine like conditions, perhaps permanently, to have the chance to walk on another world.
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Sep 27, 2014 15:51
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Ratoslov posted:A little! It'd mean that cause-and-effect is a lie we tell ourselves around the camp-fire, time travel is real, and shortly chaos will reign the universe as we gently caress with everything for lulz. I don't know if this is even a relevant question, but is causality considered an Ordinal or Cardinal thing? That is, if causality is "ordinal" I am imagining that it is just that events must proceed linearly from one to another. Simple cause->effect. But if causality is "cardinal" then not only does the ordering matter but also the specific amount of time each event occupies.
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Sep 27, 2014 20:55
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Sylink posted:There are dozens of available worlds to explore just in our solar system. If you are going to space you can start to consider leaving Earth behind. To be clear, I am 110% for space exploration, resource extraction, and colonization and I'm quite glad these billionaires are choosing to throw the dice, even if it's sad that it's billionaires and not the public interest.
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Sep 27, 2014 22:48
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Nessus posted:To be clear, I am 110% for space exploration, resource extraction, and colonization and I'm quite glad these billionaires are choosing to throw the dice, even if it's sad that it's billionaires and not the public interest. One advantage of capitalism is that it occasionally produces philanthropists. Sometimes the interests of the general public and the very wealthy can align. Hopefully this is one of those times.
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Sep 28, 2014 00:23
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Nessus posted:"But why bother ever sending a person up there when robots can be so much cheaper, why bother sending any material from space back, etc. etc." - I just think at some point space exploitation, if it's going to be industrial rather than just a way to do long term studies using asteroid materials, has to do SOMETHING which is materially useful for Earth, under our present economic system. The interlocking nests of statements on space exploration sometimes seem to become syllogistic, which I think is a bit dangerous rhetorically. "Only by conquering space can we fulfill our destiny of conquering space," to paraphrase the Supreme Commanbear. The advances in energy production/efficiency needed to easily traverse the solar system have direct applications on Earth. And you can't even begin to consider shipping resources to Earth until you are self sufficient on site and can produce a surplus. Honestly, dropping whatever material you want back to Earth is trivial compared to setting up the infrastructure to allow it. And the public is quite interested in space, but they think the budget is much larger than it is, at least in the United States.
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Sep 28, 2014 22:38
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Sylink posted:
Back this up please, with anything, seriously, space travel is not something the average person really cares about and I think people in this thread tend to overestimate how much their passions are shared with others. Edit: I don't mean to come across as an rear end in a top hat and really, I have a great interest in space, but everything I have learnt about places nearby to earth just remind me about how hostile the rest of the solar system really is to humans and I think living off of earth is something more appealing to a pretty small number of enthusiastic geeks than anyone else. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 23:28 on Sep 28, 2014 |
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Sep 28, 2014 23:16
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