Space cities?

(Christopher) :

Tatooine is a remote system far away from the main economic hub of the
galaxy, a remote and relativly poor planet.

It is make believe - and bad make believe at that. At this rate you will
soon be at the same levels of Brad Guth and John Ordover. Stop trying to use
old SFI-Movies and very old SF to plan the future.

Earl Colby Pottinger
--
I make public email sent to me! Hydrogen Peroxide Rockets, OpenBeos,
SerialTransfer 3.0, RAMDISK, BoatBuilding, DIY TabletPC. What happened to
the time? http://webhome.idirect.com/~earlcp

Robert Casey wrote:

These are fun to picture, but what will the people living there be doing
there that
makes it worthwhile for someone to spend the money to build and fly it?
What's the business model?

The one offered at the time was that they would be building Solar Power
Satellites for sale to Earth. Yeah, I'm sure you can offer some criticisms of
the SPS concept, but to me, it's at least a somewhat more realistic scenario
than cities of 10 million on Mars with nothing to sell to Earth.

But I should comment that manufacture of SPS from space resources was expected
to precede, not follow, permanent habitats of any kind. Well into the SPS
construction project (say after getting into the black) it was thought that
perhaps much smaller 10,000 person habitats might come on-line which might have
some attractive features. The 10,000,000 population habitats were expected to
get built by a space-based civilization a fair bit further into the future.

--


Regards,
Mike Combs
----------------------------------------------------------------------
We should ask, critically and with appeal to the numbers, whether the
best site for a growing advancing industrial society is Earth, the
Moon, Mars, some other planet, or somewhere else entirely.
Surprisingly, the answer will be inescapable - the best site is
"somewhere else entirely."

Gerard O'Neill - "The High Frontier"

In article ,
Mike Combs wrote:
Robert Casey wrote:

These are fun to picture, but what will the people living there be doing
there that
makes it worthwhile for someone to spend the money to build and fly it?
What's the business model?

The one offered at the time was that they would be building Solar Power
Satellites for sale to Earth. Yeah, I'm sure you can offer some criticisms of
the SPS concept, but to me, it's at least a somewhat more realistic scenario
than cities of 10 million on Mars with nothing to sell to Earth.

But I should comment that manufacture of SPS from space resources was expected
to precede, not follow, permanent habitats of any kind. Well into the SPS
construction project (say after getting into the black) it was thought that
perhaps much smaller 10,000 person habitats might come on-line which might have
some attractive features. The 10,000,000 population habitats were expected to
get built by a space-based civilization a fair bit further into the future.

Oddly enough, SPS featured in a panel I just sat through
that could have been titled 'Cool Ideas vs Harsh Economic Reality'
and the general consensus was that for SPS to be competative space
flight would have to be a lot (as in two or three orders of magnitude)
cheaper than at present. Note that the same Space DC 3 that can
put 100 tonnes in low earth orbit can put the same payload into
the Oval Office with with much smaller mass ratio, which may be one
reason cheap space flight initiatives never seem to go anywhere.

However, I can think of a few reasonable business models.
A NEO that might hit the Earth comes along at long intervals but a
rock that could be steered into the Earth is a more common event.
How much is worth to planetary civilizations for the second sort
of NEO to be left alone?


--
It's amazing how the waterdrops form: a ball of water with an air bubble
inside it and inside of that one more bubble of water. It looks so beautiful
[...]. I realized something: the world is interesting for the man who can
be surprised. -Valentin Lebedev-

"Mike Rhino" wrote:
We may reach a point where there are no jobs anywhere doing anything,
because robots will do all the real work.

Pffft. You clearly don't understand the fundamentals of
economics. Nor of human nature. You can't really get
rid of jobs with automation. The economy isn't based on
ore or dollars or oil or microchips, it's founded on
human work. The foundation of the modern market economy
is the basic fact that with a suitably fungible
intermediary (money, gold, whatever) it's possible to
expand bartering and "bartering chains" to arbitrary
scales. But it's still trading labor for labor in some
fashion and the whole idea of the market economy is that
each side balances even though they're not to the same
people (and thus the whole thing balances, even though
in a very complex fashion). So even though the guy on
the assembly line who builds a car may not ever read a
bodice ripping romance novel, the writer of said novel is
still able to purchase a car and thus purchase the
services of that assembly line worker. Because ultimately
there's a connection (though perhaps circuitous) between
the assembly line worker and that novel.

What I'm getting at is that ultimately each individual
puts into the economy the same value that they take out
(with the value of each set by the economy as a whole
and in part by the individual). When you look at it that
way it's obviously self sustaining, even though the
nature of what gets traded and how much may change. For
example, entertainment makes up a much larger portion of
today's economy than it used to, due to efficiency
increases in a lot of those old labor intensive jobs.
But I don't think anyone would say that the economy is
smaller now than it was before those jobs were "lost".

James Nicoll wrote:

and the general consensus was that for SPS to be competative space
flight would have to be a lot (as in two or three orders of magnitude)
cheaper than at present.

I'd be the first to agree that present types of space transportation can't do
the job (and indeed that was far from the assumption which the original
researchers made), but I think 2-3 orders of magnitude is going a bit far. I
think quite a bit more could be done with a single order of magnitude
improvement. I also think 2 orders improvement could be realized with a bit of
serious effort.

However, I can think of a few reasonable business models.
A NEO that might hit the Earth comes along at long intervals but a
rock that could be steered into the Earth is a more common event.
How much is worth to planetary civilizations for the second sort
of NEO to be left alone?

Eeewww... space settlement funded by global extortion?

--


Regards,
Mike Combs
----------------------------------------------------------------------
We should ask, critically and with appeal to the numbers, whether the
best site for a growing advancing industrial society is Earth, the
Moon, Mars, some other planet, or somewhere else entirely.
Surprisingly, the answer will be inescapable - the best site is
"somewhere else entirely."

Gerard O'Neill - "The High Frontier"