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See this 2007 discussion form more on this: http://science.slashdot.org/story/07/08/05/1450217/the-fermi-paradox-is-back

Really, who wold want to live in a gravity well if they don't have to?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
http://www.itsbetteruphere.com/
http://space.mike-combs.com/l5-fcis.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_habitat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining

To go beyond what we can do with today's technology, quantum physics tells us that there is potentially an infinite amount of matter and energy in any finite volume of space. And visible space is vast (14 billion light years cubed, at least). There may be things that will still be fought over, but they are probably different things than access to matter and energy (aesthetics about hat colors?).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy#Utilization_Controversy
"As a scientific concept, the existence of zero-point energy is not controversial although the ability to harness it is."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_(Red_Dwarf)
"The race eventually splits and descends into civil war, over what colour the hats at the hot dog and doughnut stand Lister planned to open on Fiji were going to be (in the later-published novelization "Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers" the cause of the cat civil war is whether their god was named Cloister or Clister). Ironically the two factions claimed they were going to be red or blue, whilst Lister had wanted them to be green."

Besides, methane breathers might find Earth fairly inhospitable, preferring, say, Saturn's moon Titan? And machine intelligence might prefer the Oort cloud for ready access to materials in zero gravity?

This might happen. Exploration is driven by wealth, but migration by poverty. Because the poor are the only ones willing to suffer the hardships of being the first generation of settlers. Cubans are happy to sail rickety rafts to the US. Perhaps Somalians will sail rickety rockets to the moon, once the wealthy space tourists tire of the deprivations of actual space-flight, and the privateers look for new markets.

People who say it better than me: http://space.mike-combs.com/wannabe.htm

I wonder how much it would cost to construct solar panels in orbit which then transmit their power to Earth's surface through a focused microwave beam, vs the cost of building (and decommissioning) a nuclear reactor. http://space.mike-combs.com/spacsetl.htm#SPS

The one area the US government was prohibited from competing with private sector companies in by the act that established NASA was satellite communications.

That relegated other areas of economic development of space to a communist model of government run services. It is no surprise, then, that the Soviets were more efficient in developing launch capabilities and indeed manned space presence -- they were professional communists: If their communist bureaucracies didn't function, they didn't eat. Contrast that with the US where government institutions can fail continually and the private sector can still provide the necessities. It is virtually guaranteed that once the vital national interests of the space race were realized by the Apollo Program, that NASA would degenerate into a far worse failure mode than the Soviet Union's space program. We are just now starting to enter the age of private launch services as a result.

To, in this context of communist domination of space launch services, point to the failure of space programs to develop the economic potential of space is tendentious to say the least. How many people had flown at the time the Kelly Act privatized air mail?

The math has been done and it is clear:

Habitats fabricated in free space can provide thousands of times more habitable surface area than Earth.

The only question is whether technological civilization should leave Earth to ecological remediation.

What about the space program and space habitats? There is room for quadrillions of humans in space...
    http://space.mike-combs.com/

Besides, the Earth itself is very deep. And who needs much copper these days? We use fiber optics, which is mostly sand...

http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net]
"... Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land? ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "

Which at least one person told me they are getting sick of hearing, but remains true nonetheless. :-) Now if more people else would just take up discussing this irony at every opportunity, I could move on to other things. :-)

Let's say we can travel reliably to the moon (like with solar-powered laser launchers, but made easier perhaps by cold fusion?). If so, we can build space habitats using lunar resources to house trillions of humans, as Gerard K. O'Neill outlined. Example:
        http://space.mike-combs.com/

So, while one can imagine there might be future conflicts over resources in space in hundreds or thousands of years, any Earthly conflict over resources (like oil or land) quickly would become pretty meaningless in such an abundant future.

So, focusing on the military value of the Moon and space travel (in the way people normally talk about it) is just ironic. It's like two dehydrated people crawling out of the desert to the shore of a great freshwater lake and then using the last of their strength to try to drown each other in the lake because they are afraid there is not enough water to take one drink. It's actually more than ironic -- I mainly phrase it that way to be polite. :-)

Even without using the Moon, there is enough to go around on Earth though. Some examples:
            http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html#A_taste_of_Post-Scarcity

Security is a great thing -- we just need to go about it in enlightened non-ironic ways, like by focusing mainly on intrinsic security and mutual security instead of focusing mainly on extrinsic security and unilateral security.

==
I also posted this comment elsewhere to this story but is not showing up well with the new Slashdot format which seems to collapse subsequent posts under low ranked parents:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1966606&cid=35008680

http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"... Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land? ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "

Which at least one person told me they are getting sick of hearing, but remains true nonetheless. :-) Now if more people else would just take up discussing this irony at every opportunity, I could move on to other things. :-)

Let's say we can travel reliably to the moon (like with solar-powered laser launchers, but made easier perhaps by cold fusion?). If so, we can build space habitats using lunar resources to house trillions of humans, as Gerard K. O'Neill outlined. Example:
    http://space.mike-combs.com/

So, while one can imagine there might be future conflicts over resources in space in hundreds or thousands of years, any Earthly conflict over resources (like oil or land) quickly would become pretty meaningless in such an abundant future.

So, focusing on the military value of the Moon and space travel (in the way people normally talk about it) is just ironic. It's like two dehydrated people crawling out of the desert to the shore of a great freshwater lake and then using the last of their strength to try to drown each other in the lake because they are afraid there is not enough water to take one drink. It's actually more than ironic -- I mainly phrase it that way to be polite. :-)

Even without using the Moon, there is enough to go around on Earth though. Some examples:
      http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html#A_taste_of_Post-Scarcity

Security is a great thing -- we just need to go about it in enlightened non-ironic ways, like by focusing mainly on intrinsic security and mutual security instead of focusing mainly on extrinsic security and unilateral security.

Some of these seem like mostly trumped-up plot devices to make stories to appeal to 20th century audiences, but I'd agree others may always be with us as possible conflicts.

* "rare natural resources" -- to the best of our knowledge, nothing is that rare in the universe that we need to support an unimaginable number of living beings in the galaxy and beyond (as in, millions of quadrillions of people and their biospheres). We have stars for power, we have lots of mass orbiting around to build space habitats, and with artifical retinas like in this story, there will be endless robotic labot to turn matter using solar energy into whatever humanity wants. Star Trek invented stuff that could not be replicated like "latinum", but in practice, who really needs it?

* "control of habitable planets (and the power they bring)" -- in the future, few in their right minds in an advanced space faring society would want to live on a planet, given so many ecological/political restrictions, so little energy flux, being so far from happening city habitats, being stuck at the bottom of a gravity well, beign so corwded, being so dirty, being so poor, being so full of strange diseases, being full of uneducated people who coudl not get into space, being so culturally backwards, and so on. See: http://space.mike-combs.com/ I'm not saying some tiny percent of the quadrillions of people (and other sentients/AIs) living in the solar system in advanced space habitats someday might not want to visit Earth on a pilgrimage, in the same way some very few people from the USA may go on a trip for a week or two to Africa to get a feel for where humanity is from and then go back home glad they don't live there, feeling sorry of the inhabitants, and sponsoring villages there. Actually, places in Africa may be way more advanced culturally than the USA in a lot of ways, so this analogy doesn't quite hold. :-) Also, the current woes of Africa have a lot to do with centuries of exploitation by Europeans and US Americans, so again, this analogy might not hold.

* "culture and politics" -- yes, I agree people will continue to have conflicts over these, which boil down to things like issues of status, impressing the opposite sex, aesthetics, and managing mental illness like a desire for "financial obesity".

* "Sometimes one race just hates another, and wants to fight over it" -- there are less reasons for hatred if there is less conflict over resources. I think some of this is just trumped up plot devices, especially given advanced social technology for mediation. One group related to conflict resolution:
http://www.tc.columbia.edu/icccr/index.asp?Id=About+the+ICCCR&Info=Founder%3A+Morton+Deutsch

* "The Vulcans and Romulans are in conflict due to their historic dispute" -- yes, essentially, a war over philosophy/religion. I agree this may always be an issue, coming down to aesthetics and identity.

* "the Klingon culture is heavily militaristic and demands war as the only route to honor" -- yes, this may always be an issue, and it connects with trying to impress potential mates, too. See James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear for at least one alternative.

However, while I disputed planets having much value above, I could believe there might be broader conflicts about star systems, in the same way some Europeans committed genocide against the Native Americans to get the land they were living on and from. We could potentially see arguments over what aesthetic philosophy or genetic paradigm controlled a solar system, true, even if the planets themselves might not be of much interest (other than maybe as sources of raw materials).

So, a more believable Star Trek might have cultures fighting over control of a star's Oort cloud material a light year away from the star for use in building space habitats? But, such fights would also