(Will Simmons) wrote in message ...
In article ,
(John Ordover) wrote:

Of course nothing is proven - but I remain solidly unconvinced that
there is revenue stream that can provide the kind of profits that
would be necessary to attract the large investment needed to develop
space travel. I would be happy to be proven wrong by a working
system. But if you think -I- am skeptical, ask someone for 10M
dollars and see how skeptical -they- get.

Even assuming the poster is correct the present factual context, reasonably
predictable changes in the facts would quickly revise those "revenue
streams," e. g., Professor Hawking is quoted as saying "I don't think that
the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into
space." URL:

Even if true, how does that change the revenue stream?


or, if advances come along that make space travel routine, it will
could hasten mankinds destruction by making weapons technology as
routinely available as an airplane that can be crashed into the WTC -
and any place accessible by spacecraft would of course be accessible
to nuclear and biological weapons. in fact, diverting resources to
space travel could just as easily -hasten- mankind's destruction by
pulling resources away from building world where there is less of a
divide between the richest and the poorest.

http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2001%2F10%2F16%2Fnhawk16. xml)

As destructive technology inexorably advances, the need for colonies of
young, healthy reproductive people to be safely removed from biological,
nuclear or other forms of terrorist warfare (or just plain errors), will
assuredly become clearer, from which perception new budgetary calculations
and spending patterns relative to space travel will inevitably emerge.

Where is this safe place in a world with regular space travel?



-- Will --

reasonably likely