8 ms·

> In a statement on Monday, the Amazon boss said: "Our vision is millions of people living and working in space, and New Glenn is a very important step." Serio

by Jgrubb 10y ago

> In a statement on Monday, the Amazon boss said: "Our vision is millions of people living and working in space, and New Glenn is a very important step." Serious question because I don't know - seems like it would introduce a lot of overhead into daily life having to support that much life "out there". What's the value prop? Why would I want to live in space (aside from it being cool)?

walkingolof 10y ago
Redundancy mostly, spreading the species, I assume. Most of what we need to do in space can be done by robots.
agumonkey 10y ago
I can see that as interesting. Cut the interaction between humans and the biosphere, make them live closer to constant solar power, let the biosphere regenerate and produce better and fewer nutrient that we cannot recycle in the sky... brb, writing my SF novel.
Pfhreak 10y ago
It's the frontier. There's money to be made, there's incredibly quantities of resources out there -- kilometer wide balls of platinum, chunks of iron larger than the sum of what humanity has mined to date. Managed well, a huge pool of resources that would obviate some of the need for us to destroy our own planet to get at resources.
- idlewords 10y ago
  None of that stuff makes economic sense to retrieve. And the place is called "space" for a reason.
  - michwill 10y ago
    This stuff makes economic sense to retrieve at certain costs of space launch. As well as manufacturing some stuff (like optical fibers) in space, producing energy, sending nuclear waste there etc
  - perrylaj 10y ago
    I disagree. If your goal is to collect metals only for the purposes of returning to earth, then perhaps you are right in the short term. However, if those materials are used off-planet (or on-site) for the further production, it makes a LOT of sense. Once the foundation of production is in place, mining and building <more spacecraft, Mars habitats, ...> becomes almost exponentially more efficient to do off of Earth (especially factoring in time requirements). Beyond that, there is a good chance that future technologies will require 'rare-earth' and other precious metals that exceed quantities that could ever possibly be extracted here at any cost.
    - vkou 10y ago
      That's a closed loop. Mining asteroids is extremely valuable because getting stuff into space is very hard. Making it cheaper to put more raw materials into space will have the effect of... Making it cheaper to put more raw materials into space. How do we profit off of this? Manufacturing? I understand why you would want to build a widget factory in China, but what possible goods could we produce on Mars, that wouldn't be easier to produce on Earth? I understand the situation of rare-metal shortage, but many of them are rare because extracting them requires uneconomical amounts of energy. Mining them from space (And good luck finding an asteroid with more then traces of Gallium) would still require uneconomical amounts of energy.
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        > I understand why you would want to build a widget factory in China, but what possible goods could we produce on Mars, that wouldn't be easier to produce on Earth? On Mars? Probably none. In LEO? That might be a different topic. In general, you don't want to move up the gravity well if you can avoid it. A naive person in me hopes that as space manufacturing becomes an option, the terrestrial manufacturing costs will rise significantly as people will no longer be willing to tolerate the abuse of humans and ecosystem alike that today's manufacturing is.
  - DasIch 10y ago
    What the Wright brothers did also made no economic sense in the context of cargo planes and airlines. Innovation is not just about making completely new things possible, it's also about improving the things you can do, making them cheaper: Making it so that you can do them in a way that does make economic sense. This is just the first step of several. The first step is worth doing, even if you won't cross the finish line while doing it.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- dasmoth 10y ago
  Also, it's the frontier and some people feel uncomfortable living anywhere else.
fit2rule 10y ago
I'd like to think that one of the ways we can address the urgency of global warming is to move our manufacturing industries into space, and re-vitalize Earth as a new garden planet. Like, I know its just sci-fi, but I could imagine that no manufacturing at all ever needs to be done down here - we can do it all on an Asteroid - and live in a garden of eden, receiving our latest toys directly from orbit. I imagine a day when I order my Amazon/Apple/Tesla product by satellite, and it slowly flies itself down into the atmosphere and delivers itself to me... A man can dream.
ghshephard 10y ago
Read Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson, to get a really good understanding of why we need to get off this fragile ball of life as quickly as possible. Until we are a space faring civilization, we are one asteroid/comet strike away from extinction.
- idlewords 10y ago
  Read Seveneves and extinction will come to feel like a blessed release. It's a terrible novel.
  - david-given 10y ago
    I wouldn't say it's terrible. Instead I'd say it was deeply flawed and I found it profoundly disappointing. SPOILERS HEREWITH Also, big brain dump. The fundamental premise makes no sense --- the amount of energy needed to blow up the moon in the way described is about 10^29 joules, if you do the maths, and even the sun takes six minutes to release that amount of energy. It's not survivable to be in the same solar system as that, and I'd be unhappy about being in the next solar system; I'd expect some high-fraction-of-the-speed-of-light fragments coming along fairly soon. The first question any sensible physicist is going to ask after seeing the moon explode into fragments like that is 'why hasn't half the Earth been vaporised?' (Not to mention that there's no mention as to what the fragments of the moon are orbiting around.) The research is poor. When the Hard Rain comes, anything in low orbit is going to be toast, because all the bolides are going to have to pass through there to reach the Earth. They literally build the Cloud Ark in the worst possible place. (Why not boost each piece out to geostationary orbit, or better, the same orbit as the Moon but on the opposite side of the Earth? Any fragments you meet there will have very low relative velocity, so you can assemble the habitat there in safety.) Likewise, the entire concept of the Cloud Ark can't work --- it relies on burning thruster fuel all the time, and there is no way to replace this. It's fundamentally unsustainable. (Also, it suffers badly from Darlings: this is when an author discovers a Cool Thing, and is determined to use it whereever possible. In Seveneyes' case, it's whips. When an editor tells you, kill your darlings, this is what they mean. Unless it's important to the plot, this sort of thing is simply an indulgence and should be removed.) The plot is... very telegraphed. Very, very telegraphed. He made such a big thing of the mines and the submarines that it was painfully obvious they were going to important later. Indeed, in the last section I found myself saying, "yes, all right, the people from the mines are coming up, JUST GET ON WITH IT AND MEET THEM". And then when the ex-President shows up at the very last moment before the Earth gets destroyed, the entire remainder of the first-section plot flashed before my eyes, and it wasn't a good sight. (Particularly after the promising beginning when he opted out of political soap-operaing entirely.) Then there's the weird tonal shift half-way through the book, when the cannibals appear. At that point, there is no possible way any of them can survive; they simply don't have the population any more to maintain the skills to run the equipment. As Stephenson says, they live in a high-tech incubator; they need people, lots of people, because they need knowledge to make everything run. With only a double-digit population they might as just give up and die. Instead we take a hard left into some weird metaphysical area, and then whats-her-name gets her magic gene machine out and... I don't know; I had no idea what he was trying to do here. Then there's the last section, set in the far future. We get a bit of closure from finally seeing the other end of the submarine and mine plots (yeah, and what happened to all the other submarines? And all the other mines? Oh, and his explanation of why the mines couldn't expand doesn't make sense either), but it opens up lots of other plot threads, and seems strangely disconnected from the rest of the book. As you can tell, I feel quite strongly about Seveneyes; parts of it are really excellent, especially the first third; so much so that discovering that the whole thing was just sort of... incoherent and rambling... came as a horrible disappointment. I don't know what the book is trying to say, or even if it's trying to say anything at all. Oh, well. I'll just have to go reread Anathem now.
0xffff2 10y ago
For some more concrete reading, try The High Frontier by Gerard O'Neill[1]. He makes the opposite case; arguing that orbital habitats could have a net positive economic return in fairly short order. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/High-Frontier-Human-Colonies-Apogee/dp/189652267X https://www.amazon.com/High-Frontier-Human-Colonies-Apogee/d...
nixos 10y ago
The same question I have for SpaceX's goal of moving to Mars: Who'd go? People compare it to the colonization of America, but there are a few fundamental differences: 1. Who are the pioneers. The early settlers in America were the low class or religious fanatics (think ISIS style). Many couldn't afford their own ticket, made it to America to get a piece of land (translate: basic economic opportunity), which was unavailable in England. Who'd go to Mars? You'd have to send the best and brightest. There'll be plenty of robotic help, but with Mission Control half an hour away (with periodic week long breaks with no mission control), they're on their own. An Oxygen leak? Fix it yourself or everyone dies. Oh. and no StackOverflow for help. How much will you have to offer these people. The first batch will go for the principle or fame (the first colonists on Mars FTW!!). What about the thousandth? 2. For that matter, how will you ship infrastructure there? In the 1600s, all you needed were some "surgeons", blacksmiths and you're done and ready. Nowadays, you'd need hospitals, operating rooms, ER, experts, dentists, metallurgists, teachers, professors, colleges... Oh, and if you're a top notch scientist, won't you want to keep up with what's going on? No scientific conferences/conventions on Mars. 3. Who keeps the loot. Seeing how Tesla's slowly moving everything to a "rental" model, how will "property" exist on Mars? If someone disobeys "God Elon", will he be thrown out into the wild? Or will he threaten to not send basic raw materials until the colony behaves? It'll be a viable threat for quite some time
arzt 10y ago
He's quoted as saying we should move all heavy industry off of earth and turn it into a park for the sake of its own existence.[1] [1]http://www.recode.net/2016/6/1/11826514/jeff-bezos-space-save-earth http://www.recode.net/2016/6/1/11826514/jeff-bezos-space-sav...

by Jgrubb 10y ago

walkingolof 10y ago

Redundancy mostly, spreading the species, I assume. Most of what we need to do in space can be done by robots.

agumonkey 10y ago

I can see that as interesting. Cut the interaction between humans and the biosphere, make them live closer to constant solar power, let the biosphere regenerate and produce better and fewer nutrient that we cannot recycle in the sky... brb, writing my SF novel.

Pfhreak 10y ago

It's the frontier. There's money to be made, there's incredibly quantities of resources out there -- kilometer wide balls of platinum, chunks of iron larger than the sum of what humanity has mined to date. Managed well, a huge pool of resources that would obviate some of the need for us to destroy our own planet to get at resources.

idlewords 10y ago
None of that stuff makes economic sense to retrieve. And the place is called "space" for a reason.
- michwill 10y ago
  This stuff makes economic sense to retrieve at certain costs of space launch. As well as manufacturing some stuff (like optical fibers) in space, producing energy, sending nuclear waste there etc
- perrylaj 10y ago
  I disagree. If your goal is to collect metals only for the purposes of returning to earth, then perhaps you are right in the short term. However, if those materials are used off-planet (or on-site) for the further production, it makes a LOT of sense. Once the foundation of production is in place, mining and building <more spacecraft, Mars habitats, ...> becomes almost exponentially more efficient to do off of Earth (especially factoring in time requirements). Beyond that, there is a good chance that future technologies will require 'rare-earth' and other precious metals that exceed quantities that could ever possibly be extracted here at any cost.
  - vkou 10y ago
    That's a closed loop. Mining asteroids is extremely valuable because getting stuff into space is very hard. Making it cheaper to put more raw materials into space will have the effect of... Making it cheaper to put more raw materials into space. How do we profit off of this? Manufacturing? I understand why you would want to build a widget factory in China, but what possible goods could we produce on Mars, that wouldn't be easier to produce on Earth? I understand the situation of rare-metal shortage, but many of them are rare because extracting them requires uneconomical amounts of energy. Mining them from space (And good luck finding an asteroid with more then traces of Gallium) would still require uneconomical amounts of energy.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      > I understand why you would want to build a widget factory in China, but what possible goods could we produce on Mars, that wouldn't be easier to produce on Earth? On Mars? Probably none. In LEO? That might be a different topic. In general, you don't want to move up the gravity well if you can avoid it. A naive person in me hopes that as space manufacturing becomes an option, the terrestrial manufacturing costs will rise significantly as people will no longer be willing to tolerate the abuse of humans and ecosystem alike that today's manufacturing is.
- DasIch 10y ago
  What the Wright brothers did also made no economic sense in the context of cargo planes and airlines. Innovation is not just about making completely new things possible, it's also about improving the things you can do, making them cheaper: Making it so that you can do them in a way that does make economic sense. This is just the first step of several. The first step is worth doing, even if you won't cross the finish line while doing it.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
dasmoth 10y ago
Also, it's the frontier and some people feel uncomfortable living anywhere else.

fit2rule 10y ago

I'd like to think that one of the ways we can address the urgency of global warming is to move our manufacturing industries into space, and re-vitalize Earth as a new garden planet. Like, I know its just sci-fi, but I could imagine that no manufacturing at all ever needs to be done down here - we can do it all on an Asteroid - and live in a garden of eden, receiving our latest toys directly from orbit. I imagine a day when I order my Amazon/Apple/Tesla product by satellite, and it slowly flies itself down into the atmosphere and delivers itself to me... A man can dream.

ghshephard 10y ago

Read Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson, to get a really good understanding of why we need to get off this fragile ball of life as quickly as possible. Until we are a space faring civilization, we are one asteroid/comet strike away from extinction.

idlewords 10y ago
Read Seveneves and extinction will come to feel like a blessed release. It's a terrible novel.
- david-given 10y ago
  I wouldn't say it's terrible. Instead I'd say it was deeply flawed and I found it profoundly disappointing. SPOILERS HEREWITH Also, big brain dump. The fundamental premise makes no sense --- the amount of energy needed to blow up the moon in the way described is about 10^29 joules, if you do the maths, and even the sun takes six minutes to release that amount of energy. It's not survivable to be in the same solar system as that, and I'd be unhappy about being in the next solar system; I'd expect some high-fraction-of-the-speed-of-light fragments coming along fairly soon. The first question any sensible physicist is going to ask after seeing the moon explode into fragments like that is 'why hasn't half the Earth been vaporised?' (Not to mention that there's no mention as to what the fragments of the moon are orbiting around.) The research is poor. When the Hard Rain comes, anything in low orbit is going to be toast, because all the bolides are going to have to pass through there to reach the Earth. They literally build the Cloud Ark in the worst possible place. (Why not boost each piece out to geostationary orbit, or better, the same orbit as the Moon but on the opposite side of the Earth? Any fragments you meet there will have very low relative velocity, so you can assemble the habitat there in safety.) Likewise, the entire concept of the Cloud Ark can't work --- it relies on burning thruster fuel all the time, and there is no way to replace this. It's fundamentally unsustainable. (Also, it suffers badly from Darlings: this is when an author discovers a Cool Thing, and is determined to use it whereever possible. In Seveneyes' case, it's whips. When an editor tells you, kill your darlings, this is what they mean. Unless it's important to the plot, this sort of thing is simply an indulgence and should be removed.) The plot is... very telegraphed. Very, very telegraphed. He made such a big thing of the mines and the submarines that it was painfully obvious they were going to important later. Indeed, in the last section I found myself saying, "yes, all right, the people from the mines are coming up, JUST GET ON WITH IT AND MEET THEM". And then when the ex-President shows up at the very last moment before the Earth gets destroyed, the entire remainder of the first-section plot flashed before my eyes, and it wasn't a good sight. (Particularly after the promising beginning when he opted out of political soap-operaing entirely.) Then there's the weird tonal shift half-way through the book, when the cannibals appear. At that point, there is no possible way any of them can survive; they simply don't have the population any more to maintain the skills to run the equipment. As Stephenson says, they live in a high-tech incubator; they need people, lots of people, because they need knowledge to make everything run. With only a double-digit population they might as just give up and die. Instead we take a hard left into some weird metaphysical area, and then whats-her-name gets her magic gene machine out and... I don't know; I had no idea what he was trying to do here. Then there's the last section, set in the far future. We get a bit of closure from finally seeing the other end of the submarine and mine plots (yeah, and what happened to all the other submarines? And all the other mines? Oh, and his explanation of why the mines couldn't expand doesn't make sense either), but it opens up lots of other plot threads, and seems strangely disconnected from the rest of the book. As you can tell, I feel quite strongly about Seveneyes; parts of it are really excellent, especially the first third; so much so that discovering that the whole thing was just sort of... incoherent and rambling... came as a horrible disappointment. I don't know what the book is trying to say, or even if it's trying to say anything at all. Oh, well. I'll just have to go reread Anathem now.

0xffff2 10y ago

For some more concrete reading, try The High Frontier by Gerard O'Neill[1]. He makes the opposite case; arguing that orbital habitats could have a net positive economic return in fairly short order. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/High-Frontier-Human-Colonies-Apogee/dp/189652267X https://www.amazon.com/High-Frontier-Human-Colonies-Apogee/d...

nixos 10y ago

The same question I have for SpaceX's goal of moving to Mars: Who'd go? People compare it to the colonization of America, but there are a few fundamental differences: 1. Who are the pioneers. The early settlers in America were the low class or religious fanatics (think ISIS style). Many couldn't afford their own ticket, made it to America to get a piece of land (translate: basic economic opportunity), which was unavailable in England. Who'd go to Mars? You'd have to send the best and brightest. There'll be plenty of robotic help, but with Mission Control half an hour away (with periodic week long breaks with no mission control), they're on their own. An Oxygen leak? Fix it yourself or everyone dies. Oh. and no StackOverflow for help. How much will you have to offer these people. The first batch will go for the principle or fame (the first colonists on Mars FTW!!). What about the thousandth? 2. For that matter, how will you ship infrastructure there? In the 1600s, all you needed were some "surgeons", blacksmiths and you're done and ready. Nowadays, you'd need hospitals, operating rooms, ER, experts, dentists, metallurgists, teachers, professors, colleges... Oh, and if you're a top notch scientist, won't you want to keep up with what's going on? No scientific conferences/conventions on Mars. 3. Who keeps the loot. Seeing how Tesla's slowly moving everything to a "rental" model, how will "property" exist on Mars? If someone disobeys "God Elon", will he be thrown out into the wild? Or will he threaten to not send basic raw materials until the colony behaves? It'll be a viable threat for quite some time

arzt 10y ago

He's quoted as saying we should move all heavy industry off of earth and turn it into a park for the sake of its own existence.[1] [1]http://www.recode.net/2016/6/1/11826514/jeff-bezos-space-save-earth http://www.recode.net/2016/6/1/11826514/jeff-bezos-space-sav...