That’s quite a stretch. I don’t see it getting that cheap given the likelihood of diminishing resources (energy and otherwise). We’ll be lucky to have a 20th century standard of living in 100 years.
They have like… twenty percent!
That’s 2000 times what the ‘average’ human has, and I’m guessing an order of magnitude more than that than the median. Then when you take into account ‘resources beyond what’s needed for survival’ it gets even more abusive, since when you’re near the poverty line you can’t spend much extra wealth influencing anything.
That’s exactly the opposite of the point I made. It’s not the ‘top 15%’ , it’s not even the top 1% (if we’re talking earned income and not investment income, of course), it’s the top .05% and greater (ish)
I don’t think the progressives are the ones would be most impacted by this, but even so it’d be fair…so who could complain?
Or we could knock the estate tax over 90% for anything over say 5M after deductions (would only inmpact trust fund babies), knock capital gains taxes (i.e. income for not working) up to a similar level for people in the top .1% or so, and actually solve some problems if we use that for actual safety nets for the rest of the population and investing in our economy and infrastructure.
We’re way past the point where poverty should be a thing in this country.
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You’re definitely entitled to your opinion, but the thing I outlined wasn’t a stretch - it was an extrapolation from the current trajectory. Not a stretch of it. Simply connecting A to B to C. So are you saying there is a stopping point at which prices for getting to space will not decrease any further? If so, why? (support it).
We have limited hydrocarbons, if you don’t count the methane trapped under the oceans, and are vaguely aware of it. We’ve already begun use of solar power to move electrons. Who is to say in 100 years that we won’t be moving all those electrons with massive arrays of solar panels sitting in the deserts and unused areas of the planet? We discuss that specific topic here on the BBS regularly. With more use of solar, we might be able to move electrons economically, and therefore also economically create the liquid fuels that we need for escape velocity. Take SpaceX 100 years into the future. With reusable, economically refuelable rockets…doesn’t that suggest a sub $100,000 per head price tag? I’m just putting two and two together. This isn’t sci-fi. I’m still talking about chemical burns. But with the fuel and delivery getting cheaper, as is the current trend since the 1950’s.
Sci-fi would be me talking about fusion rockets or Em drives or something like that that doesn’t exist.
So if you think that fuel and rocketry won’t get cheaper, then why?
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Because we’re going to run out of easy energy and be fighting resource wars as we undergo climate collapse and massive refugee migrations. Hell, given climate change, we may not even be able to grow enough food or have access to clean water. Going to space is not a priority in that world.
Solar isn’t free. It has a cost to be made and the panels wear out. Fossil fuels are becoming more and more inaccessible and are finite as well. What chemicals are your rockets burning? Where do they come from? How is the infrastructure built to process them? Who does that work?
You think that we’ll take a limited resource and spend it to go into space? If so, why? (support it).
Sorry to sound catty but you just throw out “of course we can do it” without any real evidence based support and then want evidence based refutation?
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You’ve actually stepped into a fairly crowded market there.
In addition to permanent installations(a must for any beltway entity looking to demonstrate that it is cool enough for paranoia); you can get SCIFs in ‘modular’, ‘containerized’, and ‘portable’ flavors.
Our own Commander in Chief has a tent version for dealing with those especially sensitive phone calls when on the road.(oddly, either whoever specced it has atrocious taste in carpet, or somebody forgot to include the floor in the design, which means that team USA is radiating merrily to anyone on lower levels of the building…)
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But if we take do a big hit, bouncing back is going to be hard. We’ve already harvested most of the easy to get at resources. I would be far happier knowing there were 100,000 asteroid miners out there with the raw materials to kickstart civilization. 
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Well, we can have that automated in the near future.
The point at which we’ve managed to hack our biology to survive in space is WAY earlier than the point at which we could actually create a human-survivable colony in our own solar system by all appearances, after all. Why doom a bunch of children to suffer such awful lives?
Besides, bouncing back would be easier than it seems because we’d have a huge population reduction (the big historical benefit of war). We’re not exactly super-efficient with our resource usage currently and a reset button actually might work well for us.
Remember, that whole ‘civilizations use up all their resources’ bit is generally proposed as an explanation for the ‘Fermi Paradox’, which is NOT a paradox. Sure, we’re low on super-available fossil fuels, but we haven’t used up all the nuclear options and that (and renewable, and other) energy can be used to produce stored energy in a number of ways…including recreating fossil fuels molecularly.
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No, I’m not arguing that way. I did get a lot of questions back, but not too much in the way of support, so that’s a start. The main propellant I am thinking of is hydrogen. Not a fossil fuel, and in basically unlimited supply. So scarcity of the actual fuel is never going to be an issue, as you suggested it would be.
Scarcity of the electrons needed to produce it is the issue, so our difference boils down to that. You think there is going to be some kind of collapse in the next 100 years that will cripple people’s ability to move electrons. I am saying that the collapse won’t happen, because we will just go around the problem like we do with every other major problem. Likely making bigger problems, but still acting as a “solution” of sorts to the first problem. Rocket fuel is not ever going to be scarce.
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The collapse has already begun, actually. Fracking is a desperation move, on our part, and we’ve already passed peak oil in the biggest known oil fields. Climate change is going to get worse and worse while our available energy gets less and less. Add the collapse of available food and water, realistically, and you don’t have a stable research based to go fix things. You have a fascist military state (or series of them) and a bunch of failed states fighting for resources and to keep refugees out. That is what I expect. I hope it isn’t true but it is a lot more likely than us developing cheap travel to space.
What is the working solution to our energy problems that will be common and easily available over the next 20 years? It isn’t solar, probably, because so far solar costs a lot to make and requires rare materials. It isn’t fusion because fusion has been “ten years away” for decades. As you state, it isn’t hydrogen because we need energy to get the hydrogen out of water.
Also, the “we” that might solve problems are the rich assholes in enclaves surrounded by guards. It certainly isn’t people like anyone here unless we work for them as underlings.
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We should probably fork into an “energy and dystopia” thread.
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Energystopia?
I can just see this guy complaining about the quality of his internet.
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Darktopia, since there will be no electrons moving, except the few that oxidize in trash fires at the edges of bombed out cities.
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I agree about the “why don’t we do it on Earth?” part. We should, and do. We tunnel into this place every day. I was talking about the mechanism for supporting long term living on another planet or moon somewhere.
There is also an equipoise just above the main portion of the atmosphere of Venus where we could float a large object and not be subject to too high of temperatures or the harshness of Venus, and still be in a gravity well. Although, we’d be bombarded with radiation so we would have to solve that bit.
Will we do it? I dunno. Maybe. We won’t be doing any of it because it’s economical. The economics of it are going to be more of a side effect of having done it for so long.
We do gain things for our expenditures on space exploration. It’s not like it’s just a pit that we throw money into so that we can stamp our feet in the lunar dust. More comes out of it than that. And simple stuff too, like Kapton tape. But other advances and lots of innovations in materials science and chemistry.
Personally, I’d take 90% of the fleet of Aircraft Carriers, scrap it, and pour the money into NASA…
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Check out the new materials enabling or cheapening many existing ways - nanotech stuff for batteries, catalysts, functional materials of all kinds. Also check out the thorium fuel cycle for nuclear plants, which gives us rich supplies of raw energy. The problem here is the material compatibility of the metals for the molten salts; I smell a solution in RCC-clad composites or something similar.
We don’t need that many resources. As long as there are no major upheavals and fast price jumps, we have a chance to adjust. Crude oil getting a few times more expensive over a couple years will lead to alternative hydrocarbon-producing technologies, there are quite some out there.
Many crucial resources have cold or even hot standby backups. See the rare earth mines. As the price of the resource goes up, more complex ways of its obtaining will become economical. As some of the ways are becoming available, and/or cheaper, they can become competitive even without the price hike.
As of refugees, tough choices will have to be made.
Vertical farming. Intense production of edible biomass in small areas. Powered by solar and nuclear. Many ways to clean water. Many more options. The energy is the bottleneck here and we are swimming in it.
Cue thin-film nanotech. Low amount of the actual raw materials, possibly even not using too limited elements. Organic photovoltaics are inefficient now, but they are in their infancy. Titanium dioxide is a promising semiconductor here, and there are many other options.
Green crude. Gene-modded algae, possibly grown in seaborne automated farms, possibly with self-replicating of the pontoons by 3d-printing them from a plastic made from the green crude itself. Possibly use two genetic mechanisms in the algae, one for polymer production, one for hydrocarbons, switch between if you need more pontoons or more product to ship to the shores.
Optionally, biomass-to-liquid. Fischer-Tropsch with suitable catalysts can turn anything organic into a high-value product. Again, can be integrated to the above.
Hydrogen and oxygen for the upper stages, oxygen and hydrocarbons for the first stage. The classics. Optionally hydrogen and nuclear for the topmost stages.
Water and electricity. And biomass. Or coal, to piss off the greenies.
Ad-hoc, most likely.
Contractors, like usual. And robots, they are less uppity and often cheaper.
More resources out there. See asteroid mining. And more lebensraum, on the new frontier.
Far from the naysayers.
The meek shall inherit the Earth. They can keep it, it’s a stupid place.
Many of us already work as such underlings. In many cases it is not quite that bad, especially if you work on something fun and/or cutting edge.
And sometimes you have to go to Moon via London.
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I was never willing to smoke the DMT.
Like Hitler and the Nazis, eh @shaddack? Maybe you’ll get some more that data you liked out of those experiment this time.
It was unwitting. I never inhaled. It was osmosis through my corneas.
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They got us to the Moon and either developed themselves, or forced the “good guys” to develop, the foundations of pretty much all the technologies we rely on these days.
Credit where credit is due.
We do, and I don’t disagree that there’s some good science there!
Side note: that lunar dust is brutal, which is another argument for tunneling
Totally in agreement if we can also put an appropriate amount of that money into genetics and bioengineering.
It’s still pure science but directly related to our health as humans, and once we’re far enough we can start getting in front of some of the issues we’re going to be running into in space.
It’s not quite as popular in sci-fi (because it’s really hard to write properly) but I see that as a far more important component, and the same research could also supplement some of our other issues (like fuel generation and the ability to have smaller and more stable ecospheres)
We already have machines that can assemble things molecule by molecule.…they’re inside us, and we’re barely beginning to understand how they function.
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