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What does “break even” mean in this context?

• Someone 5y ago
  What it always means: getting your investments back (I don’t think that paper corrects for inflation) The paper is light on details to start with, but doesn’t mention that at all. I think they build housing and sell it to people wanting to live there.
  • cortesoft 5y ago
    Sorry, my question was whether this meant break even as in “we are extracting resources from Venus and selling them back on earth for more money than it cost to get them” or “Venus is now self sustaining” If it is the first one, that seems hard to calculate, because if you are extracting that many resources you are going to distort the market on earth. You comment makes it seem like they will break even by selling houses on Venus? How can they possibly know the market for Venus housing?
    • Someone 5y ago
      Unless I’m overlooking something, that paper doesn’t go into details, to say it extremely mildly. As far as I can tell, they only say “the first aerial space colony floats free and can be sold and inhabited”. And as I said, the whole paper is highly optimistic. They’re suggesting huge space colonies (“the terraformed Venus is unlikely to be fully occupied until the population of the space colonies reaches ~3×10¹⁰”. That’s about four times the current population of earth) I think I’m not alone in not seeing us put “several small space colonies” in the orbit of Venus and construct “a heavy orbital ring around Venus” ten years after we started planning. I guess they extrapolated exponential growth of everything imaginable.