John Ordover wrote:

(pete) wrote in message ...
on 04 Oct 2003 01:28:41 GMT, ORDOVER sez:

[Wish you would set your margins for a reasonable line length.
72 characters is usenet standard. Quotes of your text are
thus ragged and crappy to read.]

` Humanity has always progressed by expanding its range using technology

` Not really - it has occassionally, but the vast majority of the human
` colonization of the earth was done by people who set up housekeeping
` just down
` the road from where they came from - then generation after generation
` did just
` the same thing.
` The vast majority of the human inhabited surface of the earth was
` settled in
` paleo- and neo-lithic times by people who just walked there. It's
` comparatively recently that ships of any kind were employed.

` My answer to the Fermi paradox is quite simple - space travel is
` economically
` unsustainable - it always costs more in resources than it brings in.
` So no
` species anywhere in the galaxy can afford it over the long haul.

A stupendously anthropocentric viewpoint on the priorities of
ET species economies. It is no strain to imagine, perhaps on
a planet where multiple intelligent species evolved, or where
competition for reproductive success, and/or new territory for
one's offspring became a very powerful instinctive drive, a
technological species whose need to spread their descendants
onto every available solid surface in the universe became as
strong as the sex drive is in humans. What is possible in an
economy is all about priorities.

If you prioritize space travel over food and medical care, you don't
survive.

If those are your choices, yes. For someone else, space flight, even
interstellar, may become sufficently trivial that it doesn't impact
whatever their basic necessities are. (and supplying them may also have
become relatively trivial)

I expect a few unbenighted souls, when someone meets the X-Prize
requirements, to bitch about how 'we' should be spending those resources
on something else, not realizing that no government money went into
that, and it's just an unusual form of privately built experimental
aircraft....

If their reproductive drive is that strong, it will lead
them to destruction, not successful colonization. Just wanting to go
to space really really badly won't make space travel economically
sustainable, call it sex drive or call it anything else. If the
physics isn't there, it isn't there.

Newton's third law still works. It's not the physics, it's the the
economics. As the technology matures, the level of justification
steadily drops. Somewhere, even interstellar flight may have reached the
private expedition or 'hobby' stage. At which point, an 'economic
return' isn't required at all. (Which doesn't mean there will never be
one.)