devoid of ANY resources other than photons, be more suitable for our life than the Earth would be in any state of pollutive decay?
Those photons are quite a resource in their own right. But there is also every element you can find on earth floating around in ridiculous abundance, and easier to access too.
As to why, well there aren't many reasons to choose a station over earth, but there are plenty of reasons to choose a station over anywhere else. We would have perfect control over the gravity in a station for a start, which neatly sidesteps a whole host of problems with either bone decalcification or excessive gravity, not to mention being able to fine tune the environment any way we like. The idea might seem a little claustrophobic at first glance but really, it would be like living in a large city with vacations elsewhere from time to time.
I predict we'll colonise space itself long before we start colonising other worlds.
How is it not measurable, you either go up or down in relevant search results. Anyway amusing as this story is, I have a hunch that almost all of the SEO spam has nothing to do with SEO, but is rther people trying to social engineer access to servers for viral distribution purposes.
Anything that could reach us would kill or enslave us if they are anything at all like us.
Even we aren't like us. Not every culture is as incompetently bent on domination as the anglosphere. The Romans now, there was a group who knew how to hold an empire together. Their philosophy wasn't the laughable 'if they're fighting one another at least they aren't fighting us', but rather to make conquered nations semi-equals, citizens if they so chose.
Anyway and on topic, there's no particular reason why we won't defeat age related mortality before too long. It's not physically impossible to live for millennia, just quite difficult. Death is hardwired into our DNA for reasons which no longer make sense, if reason is the correct term. Once that bridge is crossed there is nowhere in the universe out of our reach, even without FTL travel. What will you spend the next thousand years on the colony ship doing? Meditate, master every skill known to man, study, write and perfect literature to awe the ages, enhance everything around you. Had I a million years to live it wouldn't be enough or near enough.
Believe me, the future holds wonders no man or woman could dream of.
I'd love to take one of those beasts and put an electric engine in it. Or better yet something truly anachronistic like a late model Silver Ghost and trick it out with all the latest high tech gadgets.
Oh get over yourself. Nothing in what I said puts down subjects like history, art, or medieval fabric studies. In terms of dipshits like the one in the summary however, I would certainly qualify his expertise as a lesser form of learning. This convoluted pseudopolitical freewheeling bullshit shouldn't darken the door of any academic institution worthy of the name.
There is NOTHING wrong with an engineer learning about history, religion, literature, psychology, etc, as long as - which is what the article points out - you approach it with a sense of uncertainty, doubt, and skepticism. In fact, I find it patently absurd that anyone who considers themself remotely intelligent or rational could argue breadth of knowledge is a bad thing.
Shouldn't the well rounded stuff have been dealt with in high school?
Yes! This! A thousand times this! PLEASE let me never have to deal with anyone who thinks some contrived term someone pulled out of their bottom to create the tools to describe an invented social-philosophical-literary issue is as worthy as a differential equation again.
Do you think the reason might actually be that a 7" tablet in your hand is a lot easier to manage than a laptop?
No, I don't think that. I own a netbook and a tablet and the only thing I read books on is my nook because I don't feel like the backs of my eyeballs are being bleached while I do so.
No. Wrong. Ebooks didn't get started because of ipads, the ipad screen is the same as a laptop screen. If it were that easy to read books on a laptop screen nobody would have needed to invent ereaders. Whether or not ipad fans like it, the simple reality is that you can't read books or even lengthy texts as easily from a luminescent monitor as from an e-ink display. Mod me down all you like, claim otherwise based on anecdote, but you didn't have people selling their book collections when laptops became common. End of story.
It's a very simple, small device that does one job and does it well. I'm surprised to hear that their hardware division is struggling, although in fairness I had to buy mine from ebay since they didn't sell them outside the US. I must buy another to use for spare parts. I've actually started to get rid of all my books at this point.
Interestingly Africa would fare the best if the ice caps melted, barring the areas that would be turned into arid ovens. The entire continent is basically a giant plateau, sea level rises won't bother it much.
The costs have already been mentioned, which is why you scale things up over time. Staffing I wouldn't imagine to be a major issue at the end of the day, many factories even today are moving towards full automation. We're talking about manufacturing on a massive scale. Free energy on earth, true, but that doesn't remove the other advantages of working in space. Space junk is not pollution in the manufacturing sense, unless you're banging artifacts off one another in the open for some reason. Think more 'toxic industrial byproducts'. As for the comment upthread, when I can drive a car made completely of iron and nothing else, I'll admit that as a point. Also, what makes you think goods will simply be left to plummet to the earth willy nilly?
As I mentioned earlier, one single asteroid contains tons of metals, including semi precious and precious, for every man woman and child on earth. The idea of any single group being given legal title recognised by every government on earth to the majority of the resources of the system is not, I feel, realistic. I would certainly oppose any attempt to do so.
Agristations could easily exist, no reason at all for them not to. Energy can be provided by microwave satellites (and please don't insult me by talking about 'death rays'). Building houses, yes that's a point, it wouldn't make any sense to do that in space. Just about everything else though, why not?
What makes you think national governments aren't going to maintain a military presence in space alongside the commercial ventures? These events will not take place in a vacuum.
You're painting a picture of a gang of rich people seizing the basically limitless resources of the asteroids, pumping the earth full of cheap goods and then lording it over the huddled masses? Again, what?
Let's say I'm a company. Myself and many other companies, my competitors, have spent decades trying to harvest, refine and deliver raw materials to increasingly larger and more or less fully automated manufacturing stations. The process spent the first two thirds of this period being unprofitable, the next quarter of this period breaking even, and only in the last few years has it been making a profit. Now I can scale up these processes arbitrarily because in space there are no effective limits. I may only be making a hundred bucks profit on each Mercedes luxury car sold for three grand, but I'm moving ten million of them every year and they're going straight to the customer. And that's just one subset of one type of product. It's no longer economical to manufacture things on earth, unless governments apply tarriffs to orbital goods.
Now why would I want to try to hold earth to ransom? I'll lose my profits and they'll just send a bunch of muscly men with guns to take my stuff. Why would I want to start a war, murder millions of people by dropping rocks on them when the retaliation would vapourise me? Why would I stop selling? That's assuming there's one unified orbital polity to speak of, which is very very far from probable given the kind of independent minded people who are likely to make the first real steps into space.
It would be like China refusing to sell products to the west. It would hurt them a great deal more than it would hurt the west. What you're outlining might occur but it would require massive incompetence from the entire planet Earth and massive malice from putative astronaut-merchants.
There may even be nationalised stations up there once the process of using the resources of space becomes effective. Certainly in terms of defence I'd expect governments to keep their hand in. Maintaining a year's food supply in case of emergencies isn't difficult, the USA used to do just that, along with national stockpiles of other stuff in case the stations somehow stopped working.
The entire solar system? No - but doing so will be within the reach of the first people to develop off-world resources and manufacturing, so wealth will continue to leverage more wealth and the overwhelming majority of humanity will not get a look in.
Are you seriously imagining a group of waxed moustaches in top hats and tailcoats seizing asteroids then what, setting up private palaces in the sky and somehow locking everyone else out of space? What?
You don't need to be independent of Earth's resources to economically dominate it. If you have such resource/manufacturing capacity as is supposed, someone from Earth can send you whatever you need. This won't enrich Earth, because the trading relation will be so absurdly asymmetrical.
None of this makes any sense. The Earth is the largest and indeed only market in which to sell your goods. You build up a presence in space by selling your goods there. Why would you stop?
I'm trying to keep my responses civil, but its hard whilst you keep trying to imply I'm stupid just because I'm questioning your conclusions. I do understand the issues at hand, you could do with paying more attention to what I understand.
Be as uncivil as you like, it will only strengthen my argument. The only situation in which your points might have merit is if somehow a small group was allowed full legal title to the majority of the system's resources and this claim was recognised by the majority of the world's governments. Whatever about the likelihood of the former, the latter is right out. Even trying to claim a sizeable portion of the easily acquired resources would be laughable. Claiming one single asteroid like Eros, that might happen. And if it does we're on the threshold of post scarcity from just that one single asteroid.
Ultimately there will be private randian palaces in the sky. There will also be socialist paradises, islamic compounds, christian stations, all of these and more. Because by the time we're able to build such things, the barriers to entry will be low enough that a wide variety of groups will be able to take advantage of them.
You won't achieve a post scarcity society (if such a thing is even possible...) with rich guys holding all the resource wealth.
No your problem here is that you're seeing 'rich guys' and having a fit of the commies. There are exactly three entities that could make a serious attempt to exploit the resources of the solar system at this point: The European Union, The United States of America, and the Peoples' Republic of China. And they would damn near bankrupt themselves in the attempt. No rich guy, no cabal of rich guys, no army of rich guys is going to make this happen. Even Planetary Resources themselves acknowledge this.
what can Earth possible have to offer?
In order to reach a position where you could be independent of Earth, you'd have to spend a very long time selling stuff to Earth. And by then why stop? In fact by then the barriers to entry would be reduced so much that system resource exploitation would be on the level of opening a factory. It is not possible to sidestep the middle of the process and somehow lay claim to everything above the atmosphere.
I do understand the scales involved. I'm an astronomer. Understanding things on a really big scale is kind of my job.
Try applying some of that understanding to economics next time, eh.
Do you seriously think that the primary limit on manufacturing, and hence overall wealth, are raw resources?
Is there any compelling reason why you can't manufacture things in space? It would offer lots of advantages in fact - abundant free energy, pollute all you like, raw materials literally raining on you, and you can drop consignments next door to wherever they are meant to be going.
Space mining is a fantasy for rabid Star Trek fans who can't count, nothing more.
Slashdot Mirror
devoid of ANY resources other than photons, be more suitable for our life than the Earth would be in any state of pollutive decay?
Those photons are quite a resource in their own right. But there is also every element you can find on earth floating around in ridiculous abundance, and easier to access too.
As to why, well there aren't many reasons to choose a station over earth, but there are plenty of reasons to choose a station over anywhere else. We would have perfect control over the gravity in a station for a start, which neatly sidesteps a whole host of problems with either bone decalcification or excessive gravity, not to mention being able to fine tune the environment any way we like. The idea might seem a little claustrophobic at first glance but really, it would be like living in a large city with vacations elsewhere from time to time.
I predict we'll colonise space itself long before we start colonising other worlds.
How is it not measurable, you either go up or down in relevant search results. Anyway amusing as this story is, I have a hunch that almost all of the SEO spam has nothing to do with SEO, but is rther people trying to social engineer access to servers for viral distribution purposes.
Anything that could reach us would kill or enslave us if they are anything at all like us.
Even we aren't like us. Not every culture is as incompetently bent on domination as the anglosphere. The Romans now, there was a group who knew how to hold an empire together. Their philosophy wasn't the laughable 'if they're fighting one another at least they aren't fighting us', but rather to make conquered nations semi-equals, citizens if they so chose.
Anyway and on topic, there's no particular reason why we won't defeat age related mortality before too long. It's not physically impossible to live for millennia, just quite difficult. Death is hardwired into our DNA for reasons which no longer make sense, if reason is the correct term. Once that bridge is crossed there is nowhere in the universe out of our reach, even without FTL travel. What will you spend the next thousand years on the colony ship doing? Meditate, master every skill known to man, study, write and perfect literature to awe the ages, enhance everything around you. Had I a million years to live it wouldn't be enough or near enough.
Believe me, the future holds wonders no man or woman could dream of.
Hear hear, well said sir. Every word the pure ring of truth.
I'd love to take one of those beasts and put an electric engine in it. Or better yet something truly anachronistic like a late model Silver Ghost and trick it out with all the latest high tech gadgets.
Oh get over yourself. Nothing in what I said puts down subjects like history, art, or medieval fabric studies. In terms of dipshits like the one in the summary however, I would certainly qualify his expertise as a lesser form of learning. This convoluted pseudopolitical freewheeling bullshit shouldn't darken the door of any academic institution worthy of the name.
Agreed completely, although technically basket weaving is engineering.
Agreed.
There is NOTHING wrong with an engineer learning about history, religion, literature, psychology, etc, as long as - which is what the article points out - you approach it with a sense of uncertainty, doubt, and skepticism. In fact, I find it patently absurd that anyone who considers themself remotely intelligent or rational could argue breadth of knowledge is a bad thing.
Shouldn't the well rounded stuff have been dealt with in high school?
Yes! This! A thousand times this! PLEASE let me never have to deal with anyone who thinks some contrived term someone pulled out of their bottom to create the tools to describe an invented social-philosophical-literary issue is as worthy as a differential equation again.
Do you think the reason might actually be that a 7" tablet in your hand is a lot easier to manage than a laptop?
No, I don't think that. I own a netbook and a tablet and the only thing I read books on is my nook because I don't feel like the backs of my eyeballs are being bleached while I do so.
Ebooks have a much lower screen resolution and are still the reason people are getting rid of paper.
They eyestrain worry is overstated.
No. Wrong. Ebooks didn't get started because of ipads, the ipad screen is the same as a laptop screen. If it were that easy to read books on a laptop screen nobody would have needed to invent ereaders. Whether or not ipad fans like it, the simple reality is that you can't read books or even lengthy texts as easily from a luminescent monitor as from an e-ink display. Mod me down all you like, claim otherwise based on anecdote, but you didn't have people selling their book collections when laptops became common. End of story.
Why would you use an ipad for reading books? Seems like an invitation to eyestrain to me.
It's a very simple, small device that does one job and does it well. I'm surprised to hear that their hardware division is struggling, although in fairness I had to buy mine from ebay since they didn't sell them outside the US. I must buy another to use for spare parts. I've actually started to get rid of all my books at this point.
Interestingly Africa would fare the best if the ice caps melted, barring the areas that would be turned into arid ovens. The entire continent is basically a giant plateau, sea level rises won't bother it much.
Not even 25 years ago the prevailing belief was that there wouldn't be that many stars with planets
Was it?
The costs have already been mentioned, which is why you scale things up over time. Staffing I wouldn't imagine to be a major issue at the end of the day, many factories even today are moving towards full automation. We're talking about manufacturing on a massive scale. Free energy on earth, true, but that doesn't remove the other advantages of working in space. Space junk is not pollution in the manufacturing sense, unless you're banging artifacts off one another in the open for some reason. Think more 'toxic industrial byproducts'. As for the comment upthread, when I can drive a car made completely of iron and nothing else, I'll admit that as a point. Also, what makes you think goods will simply be left to plummet to the earth willy nilly?
As I mentioned earlier, one single asteroid contains tons of metals, including semi precious and precious, for every man woman and child on earth. The idea of any single group being given legal title recognised by every government on earth to the majority of the resources of the system is not, I feel, realistic. I would certainly oppose any attempt to do so.
Agristations could easily exist, no reason at all for them not to. Energy can be provided by microwave satellites (and please don't insult me by talking about 'death rays'). Building houses, yes that's a point, it wouldn't make any sense to do that in space. Just about everything else though, why not?
What makes you think national governments aren't going to maintain a military presence in space alongside the commercial ventures? These events will not take place in a vacuum.
You're painting a picture of a gang of rich people seizing the basically limitless resources of the asteroids, pumping the earth full of cheap goods and then lording it over the huddled masses? Again, what?
Let's say I'm a company. Myself and many other companies, my competitors, have spent decades trying to harvest, refine and deliver raw materials to increasingly larger and more or less fully automated manufacturing stations. The process spent the first two thirds of this period being unprofitable, the next quarter of this period breaking even, and only in the last few years has it been making a profit. Now I can scale up these processes arbitrarily because in space there are no effective limits. I may only be making a hundred bucks profit on each Mercedes luxury car sold for three grand, but I'm moving ten million of them every year and they're going straight to the customer. And that's just one subset of one type of product. It's no longer economical to manufacture things on earth, unless governments apply tarriffs to orbital goods.
Now why would I want to try to hold earth to ransom? I'll lose my profits and they'll just send a bunch of muscly men with guns to take my stuff. Why would I want to start a war, murder millions of people by dropping rocks on them when the retaliation would vapourise me? Why would I stop selling? That's assuming there's one unified orbital polity to speak of, which is very very far from probable given the kind of independent minded people who are likely to make the first real steps into space.
It would be like China refusing to sell products to the west. It would hurt them a great deal more than it would hurt the west. What you're outlining might occur but it would require massive incompetence from the entire planet Earth and massive malice from putative astronaut-merchants.
There may even be nationalised stations up there once the process of using the resources of space becomes effective. Certainly in terms of defence I'd expect governments to keep their hand in. Maintaining a year's food supply in case of emergencies isn't difficult, the USA used to do just that, along with national stockpiles of other stuff in case the stations somehow stopped working.
The entire solar system? No - but doing so will be within the reach of the first people to develop off-world resources and manufacturing, so wealth will continue to leverage more wealth and the overwhelming majority of humanity will not get a look in.
Are you seriously imagining a group of waxed moustaches in top hats and tailcoats seizing asteroids then what, setting up private palaces in the sky and somehow locking everyone else out of space? What?
You don't need to be independent of Earth's resources to economically dominate it. If you have such resource/manufacturing capacity as is supposed, someone from Earth can send you whatever you need. This won't enrich Earth, because the trading relation will be so absurdly asymmetrical.
None of this makes any sense. The Earth is the largest and indeed only market in which to sell your goods. You build up a presence in space by selling your goods there. Why would you stop?
I'm trying to keep my responses civil, but its hard whilst you keep trying to imply I'm stupid just because I'm questioning your conclusions. I do understand the issues at hand, you could do with paying more attention to what I understand.
Be as uncivil as you like, it will only strengthen my argument. The only situation in which your points might have merit is if somehow a small group was allowed full legal title to the majority of the system's resources and this claim was recognised by the majority of the world's governments. Whatever about the likelihood of the former, the latter is right out. Even trying to claim a sizeable portion of the easily acquired resources would be laughable. Claiming one single asteroid like Eros, that might happen. And if it does we're on the threshold of post scarcity from just that one single asteroid.
Ultimately there will be private randian palaces in the sky. There will also be socialist paradises, islamic compounds, christian stations, all of these and more. Because by the time we're able to build such things, the barriers to entry will be low enough that a wide variety of groups will be able to take advantage of them.
You won't achieve a post scarcity society (if such a thing is even possible...) with rich guys holding all the resource wealth.
No your problem here is that you're seeing 'rich guys' and having a fit of the commies. There are exactly three entities that could make a serious attempt to exploit the resources of the solar system at this point: The European Union, The United States of America, and the Peoples' Republic of China. And they would damn near bankrupt themselves in the attempt. No rich guy, no cabal of rich guys, no army of rich guys is going to make this happen. Even Planetary Resources themselves acknowledge this.
what can Earth possible have to offer?
In order to reach a position where you could be independent of Earth, you'd have to spend a very long time selling stuff to Earth. And by then why stop? In fact by then the barriers to entry would be reduced so much that system resource exploitation would be on the level of opening a factory. It is not possible to sidestep the middle of the process and somehow lay claim to everything above the atmosphere.
I do understand the scales involved. I'm an astronomer. Understanding things on a really big scale is kind of my job.
Try applying some of that understanding to economics next time, eh.
Do you seriously think that the primary limit on manufacturing, and hence overall wealth, are raw resources?
Is there any compelling reason why you can't manufacture things in space? It would offer lots of advantages in fact - abundant free energy, pollute all you like, raw materials literally raining on you, and you can drop consignments next door to wherever they are meant to be going.
Space mining is a fantasy for rabid Star Trek fans who can't count, nothing more.
You just haven't thought this through.