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There is a right order in which to do these things: 1) enable space harvesting of energy and minerals, 2) unleash growth. Doing 2) first as we are is just pl

There is a right order in which to do these things: 1) enable space harvesting of energy and minerals, 2) unleash growth. Doing 2) first as we are is just planetary-scale suicide. We should even first concentrate on 0) figure out how to preserve the biosphere liveability, and stick to these rules.

ETH_start 2y ago
I respectfully disagree. There are vast opportunities, even on Earth, to expand energy generation without overloading the environment — such as utilizing arid lands for large-scale solar farms and expanding nuclear power, among other solutions. That said, I believe a robust space economy is imminent, not some distant uncertainty. Starship has already had partially successful test launches, and if it follows the same trajectory as the reusable Falcon 9, we will soon have a fully reusable vehicle capable of delivering 150 tons to low-Earth orbit per launch. If Musk follows through on his ambition to develop a fleet large enough to transport the materials needed for a self-sustaining Martian civilization, we could see an explosion in lift capacity within the next decade or two, radically transforming the scale of human expansion into space.
- gf000 2y ago
  Even a post-ww3 nuclear wasteland Earth with climate catastrophe is orderS of more habitable than anything else in the Solar system. Musk is a scammer and is dumb as a rock on any technological question. Also, energy is useless if it's not where you actually want to use it, and transporting it is expensive/lossy. The cheapest energy is one which doesn't have to be used up to begin with, and we could optimize the existing workflow much more, over some child-dream Martian scam.
  - ETH_start 2y ago
    That is simply not true. A post-World War III nuclear wasteland would be subject to attack and pillaging by roving human bands, whereas a deep space colony would not be. And energy transportation being lossy is not a deal breaker when you can generate massive amounts of energy out in space. Even if you lose 90% of it, 10% of an enormous number is still an enormous number.
    - gf000 2y ago
      Did you account for the maintainance of any equipment out in space? Just because we can produce space junk faster doesn't make the rest any cheaper. Also, getting robbed is a luxury compared to not having air to breathe.
      - ETH_start 2y ago
        It will get more affordable as the amount of infrastructure that is outside of Earth's gravity well — and any other steep gravity well — increases. The thing with the Starship is it allows us to expand that infrastructure rapidly, so we can soon have a sizable industrial base that can access low-gravity resources like asteroids and moon regolith.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      Anywhere we can get to at the scale necessary to make significant power, there's not much stopping humans, or at least automated robots, from also going there to attack and pillage. -- The most habitable place in the solar system, outside of Earth, is Mars. Mars has 50% of the sunlight that Earth. Owing to the lower sunlight level, it is colder than Antarctica. The atmosphere is equivalent to taking ours, then systematically deleting every molecule that isn't carbon dioxide without replacing it with anything else. Owing to the combination of low partial pressure and low temperature, half the atmosphere condenses into the polar caps each Martian winter. The ground is more toxic than an actual, literal, superfund cleanup site. It is drier than the actual, literal Sahara. The lack of oxygen in the atmosphere means there's no ozone layer. The lack of ozone layer, the thin remaining atmosphere, and the lack of magnetosphere, means it's a high-radiation environment. PV there also gets regularly covered in dust. Our moon is even less hospitable, owing to no atmosphere at all and being tidally locked with Earth. Venus has an atmosphere so dense that it has gone beyond the critical point where gas and liquid cease to be distinguishable, so you could reasonably also describe it as an ocean. An ocean of 465°C supercritical CO2 in which lead occasionally condenses onto mountaintops. -- There's three currently achievable ways to transport power through space at scale. Optical, microwave, or kinetic. Optical is either a bunch of mirrors or a laser on the sending side, with a normal PV system on the receiving side. Usual caveats apply, Earth spins so it has a relative night, doesn't work through clouds, maximum power density before PV systems overheat etc. All EM systems, microwave and optical, share a constraint about focussing: minimal size of target depends on the size of the antenna and the wavelength used. Because microwaves are so much longer (no much freedom to choose a different wavelength as there's a limited atmospheric window), the normal suggestion for ground stations is a 10 km diameter receiving rectenna — that's contiguous, you don't get PV's advantage of being able to split it up. Kinetic currently means an RFG — launch it e.g. electromagnetically towards a similar coil on the ground that decelerates it to extract the energy. This is theoretically possible and would totally work, but to be clear: it's shooting a bullet into the barrel of another gun, and this is not something we have a lot of experience doing, certainly not at scale or for the purposes of power generation.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Starship is only a breakthrough compared to the status quo; compared to the scale needed to unlock even a full K1 power consumption it's about as close as the 25m swimming certificate I got as a kid is to swimming across the Atlantic from Lisbon to Miami… 276,400 times. K2 is 10 orders of magnitude harder than K1. Using rockets at all for K2 is a terrible idea, as you are forced to start treating oxygen as a mineral to be extracted from rocks, because there isn't enough in Earth's atmosphere… by 8 orders of magnitude.
  - ETH_start 2y ago
    It's clearly a stepping stone. If we can transport 15,000 tons of mass to low earth orbit per day, we can set up an extraterrestrial industrial infrastructure for harvesting and refining building materials, so that we don't need to overcome Earth's gravity well to acquire material for space-based construction.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      A stepping stone in the way that the Pesse canoe was the stepping stone to the creation of the modern USA. Actually, not even that. 15,000 tons of mass to low earth orbit per day isn't nothing, but at the same time, rockets cannot ever scale to K2. Can barely scale to K1, but only if you don't mind catastrophic climate change from burning order-of one percent of Earth's atmospheric oxygen. K2 requires a VN replicator. If you have one of those, you only need one successful rocket launch. Not one per day, one total. Just so long as the rocket is big enough to fit the replicator, that's it. Hmm. 15000 tons, so 100 Block 2 Starship+Booster, per day. Accounting for fuel-rich engines and methane's greenhouse factor, launching that with rockets is ~150 million tons of CO₂-equivalent per year. Seems small, but even all by itself that's 3x the maximum sustainable level of emissions — even if absolutely everything else, everywhere in the planet, was completely and perfectly greenhouse-neutral, it's too much. Shame, really. Mars missions only work if SpaceX gets a Sabatier plant that fits in a Starship, masses less than 150 tons including power systems (or 200 tons on Block 3), and can produce 330 tons (for Block 2) in two years while on Mars, yet no talk from them about work on this because Musk is too busy Muntzing his government.
- throwawayqqq11 2y ago
  I think you are very delusional. 1) "Opportunities on earth" will always be more efficient in many aspects. Cost, waste, energy demand, reliability, throughput to provide for the 99% remaining on earth, the ones we actually try to solve problems for. You are ignoring cost-benefit analysis, scaling factors and side effects. 2) You are betting on space industries to compete and replace earth bound processes but only give launch capabilities as an argument. I think there are vast uncertainties and unknowns to overcome. Even if it plays out as you imagine, it will probably neither happen in your lifetime nor in next generations. All the while we continue to damage your foundation because we chase a pie in the sky. 3) Shooting for mars is idiotic. Going for the moon yields similar results and is much "easier". From there the rest of the solar system gets closer to us but please keep in mind, I am still not talking about self sustaining colonies or industries. Given that our earth still provides plenty, shooting for space in general is idiotic imo. If I had to bet on a technical long shot solution, I would go for nuclear fusion instead of bezos/musk, who I suspect to be equally delusional. Please read closely. Id like to tell you something about population dynamics. Maybe you have heard about the malthusian point of crisis, where food demand overshoots supply and a population starts to decline/collapse. This picture is incomplete. Every species faces 3 categories of destabilizing threats: resources/nutriment, waste products and selective factors (a general term for internal/external stressors like predators, war, diseases, catastrophes, etc). All of our man made problems fit into one of these categories! In the long run, every species has to solve these problems! Pointing at the potential resources and space for landfills beyond earth will not free you from these constraints, it just extend your grace period and enables you to pretend to have solved anything. An actual self sustaining colony means producing _and recycling_ everything, from the vital technology stack down to every day products. If any tech billionaire ever reaches that awareness of the problem and a solution for it, then why build it in space?! What we need is a circular, sustainable econmy, which is also a big moonshot, unfortunately. But either way, the realization of the problems we face is the first step. CO2 is just one our urgent waste products. Can you name a second one with global implications?
  - ETH_start 2y ago
    I agree that Earth’s problems should always be a priority, but I think there’s a tendency — especially in today’s political climate — to be overly skeptical of space exploration, particularly when the private sector is involved. It’s worth asking whether that skepticism comes purely from a neutral assessment of the facts or if it’s influenced by a broader narrative that frames space expansion as a distraction rather than an investment in the future. The thing is, we already have a real-world example of how a large space program benefited Earth: the Apollo program. It wasn’t just about getting to the Moon — it led to a wave of new technologies that had nothing to do with space travel but ended up shaping industries back on Earth. That’s what happens when you push engineering and science to their limits. Space missions are, by their nature, some of the most ambitious and disciplined blue sky projects we undertake. They force researchers and engineers to tackle extreme challenges, and in doing so, they produce breakthroughs that spill over into everyday life. That kind of well-funded, high-stakes R&D has historically driven progress in ways that aren’t always obvious at first but turn out to be game-changers. Now, when people talk about space expansion as unrealistic or too difficult, what they’re often really saying is that it’s too expensive. And historically, they’ve been right — cost has always been the biggest obstacle. But that’s exactly what’s changing. Before SpaceX, launching anything into orbit cost around $15,000 per kilogram. That meant sending a single astronaut into space could cost nearly a billion dollars. At those prices, space wasn’t an option for anything beyond government-funded prestige projects. But we’re already past that era. Falcon 9 proved that launch costs can be dramatically reduced, and we’ve seen the direct impact of that—Starlink is a perfect example of a space-based system that’s already providing real-world benefits. With Starship, the cost of going to orbit could drop by another order of magnitude. If that happens, access to space will go from being a rare, ultra-expensive event to something routine. That completely changes what’s possible. I think it’s shortsighted to assume space won’t provide massive benefits to Earth. Just like how early computing looked niche and impractical until it took over everything, space development is on that same trajectory. The same people who dismissed reusable rockets a decade ago are now watching them land on drone ships in the ocean. I just think it’s worth taking a step back and asking: is this skepticism really coming from a place of objective analysis? Or is it just part of the broader push to downplay space exploration, especially when it’s coming from the private sector? Because if history has shown us anything, it’s that ambitious, long-term projects often look like distractions — right up until they change the world.

ETH_start 2y ago

I respectfully disagree. There are vast opportunities, even on Earth, to expand energy generation without overloading the environment — such as utilizing arid lands for large-scale solar farms and expanding nuclear power, among other solutions. That said, I believe a robust space economy is imminent, not some distant uncertainty. Starship has already had partially successful test launches, and if it follows the same trajectory as the reusable Falcon 9, we will soon have a fully reusable vehicle capable of delivering 150 tons to low-Earth orbit per launch. If Musk follows through on his ambition to develop a fleet large enough to transport the materials needed for a self-sustaining Martian civilization, we could see an explosion in lift capacity within the next decade or two, radically transforming the scale of human expansion into space.

gf000 2y ago
Even a post-ww3 nuclear wasteland Earth with climate catastrophe is orderS of more habitable than anything else in the Solar system. Musk is a scammer and is dumb as a rock on any technological question. Also, energy is useless if it's not where you actually want to use it, and transporting it is expensive/lossy. The cheapest energy is one which doesn't have to be used up to begin with, and we could optimize the existing workflow much more, over some child-dream Martian scam.
- ETH_start 2y ago
  That is simply not true. A post-World War III nuclear wasteland would be subject to attack and pillaging by roving human bands, whereas a deep space colony would not be. And energy transportation being lossy is not a deal breaker when you can generate massive amounts of energy out in space. Even if you lose 90% of it, 10% of an enormous number is still an enormous number.
  - gf000 2y ago
    Did you account for the maintainance of any equipment out in space? Just because we can produce space junk faster doesn't make the rest any cheaper. Also, getting robbed is a luxury compared to not having air to breathe.
    - ETH_start 2y ago
      It will get more affordable as the amount of infrastructure that is outside of Earth's gravity well — and any other steep gravity well — increases. The thing with the Starship is it allows us to expand that infrastructure rapidly, so we can soon have a sizable industrial base that can access low-gravity resources like asteroids and moon regolith.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Anywhere we can get to at the scale necessary to make significant power, there's not much stopping humans, or at least automated robots, from also going there to attack and pillage. -- The most habitable place in the solar system, outside of Earth, is Mars. Mars has 50% of the sunlight that Earth. Owing to the lower sunlight level, it is colder than Antarctica. The atmosphere is equivalent to taking ours, then systematically deleting every molecule that isn't carbon dioxide without replacing it with anything else. Owing to the combination of low partial pressure and low temperature, half the atmosphere condenses into the polar caps each Martian winter. The ground is more toxic than an actual, literal, superfund cleanup site. It is drier than the actual, literal Sahara. The lack of oxygen in the atmosphere means there's no ozone layer. The lack of ozone layer, the thin remaining atmosphere, and the lack of magnetosphere, means it's a high-radiation environment. PV there also gets regularly covered in dust. Our moon is even less hospitable, owing to no atmosphere at all and being tidally locked with Earth. Venus has an atmosphere so dense that it has gone beyond the critical point where gas and liquid cease to be distinguishable, so you could reasonably also describe it as an ocean. An ocean of 465°C supercritical CO2 in which lead occasionally condenses onto mountaintops. -- There's three currently achievable ways to transport power through space at scale. Optical, microwave, or kinetic. Optical is either a bunch of mirrors or a laser on the sending side, with a normal PV system on the receiving side. Usual caveats apply, Earth spins so it has a relative night, doesn't work through clouds, maximum power density before PV systems overheat etc. All EM systems, microwave and optical, share a constraint about focussing: minimal size of target depends on the size of the antenna and the wavelength used. Because microwaves are so much longer (no much freedom to choose a different wavelength as there's a limited atmospheric window), the normal suggestion for ground stations is a 10 km diameter receiving rectenna — that's contiguous, you don't get PV's advantage of being able to split it up. Kinetic currently means an RFG — launch it e.g. electromagnetically towards a similar coil on the ground that decelerates it to extract the energy. This is theoretically possible and would totally work, but to be clear: it's shooting a bullet into the barrel of another gun, and this is not something we have a lot of experience doing, certainly not at scale or for the purposes of power generation.
ben_w 2y ago
Starship is only a breakthrough compared to the status quo; compared to the scale needed to unlock even a full K1 power consumption it's about as close as the 25m swimming certificate I got as a kid is to swimming across the Atlantic from Lisbon to Miami… 276,400 times. K2 is 10 orders of magnitude harder than K1. Using rockets at all for K2 is a terrible idea, as you are forced to start treating oxygen as a mineral to be extracted from rocks, because there isn't enough in Earth's atmosphere… by 8 orders of magnitude.
- ETH_start 2y ago
  It's clearly a stepping stone. If we can transport 15,000 tons of mass to low earth orbit per day, we can set up an extraterrestrial industrial infrastructure for harvesting and refining building materials, so that we don't need to overcome Earth's gravity well to acquire material for space-based construction.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    A stepping stone in the way that the Pesse canoe was the stepping stone to the creation of the modern USA. Actually, not even that. 15,000 tons of mass to low earth orbit per day isn't nothing, but at the same time, rockets cannot ever scale to K2. Can barely scale to K1, but only if you don't mind catastrophic climate change from burning order-of one percent of Earth's atmospheric oxygen. K2 requires a VN replicator. If you have one of those, you only need one successful rocket launch. Not one per day, one total. Just so long as the rocket is big enough to fit the replicator, that's it. Hmm. 15000 tons, so 100 Block 2 Starship+Booster, per day. Accounting for fuel-rich engines and methane's greenhouse factor, launching that with rockets is ~150 million tons of CO₂-equivalent per year. Seems small, but even all by itself that's 3x the maximum sustainable level of emissions — even if absolutely everything else, everywhere in the planet, was completely and perfectly greenhouse-neutral, it's too much. Shame, really. Mars missions only work if SpaceX gets a Sabatier plant that fits in a Starship, masses less than 150 tons including power systems (or 200 tons on Block 3), and can produce 330 tons (for Block 2) in two years while on Mars, yet no talk from them about work on this because Musk is too busy Muntzing his government.
throwawayqqq11 2y ago
I think you are very delusional. 1) "Opportunities on earth" will always be more efficient in many aspects. Cost, waste, energy demand, reliability, throughput to provide for the 99% remaining on earth, the ones we actually try to solve problems for. You are ignoring cost-benefit analysis, scaling factors and side effects. 2) You are betting on space industries to compete and replace earth bound processes but only give launch capabilities as an argument. I think there are vast uncertainties and unknowns to overcome. Even if it plays out as you imagine, it will probably neither happen in your lifetime nor in next generations. All the while we continue to damage your foundation because we chase a pie in the sky. 3) Shooting for mars is idiotic. Going for the moon yields similar results and is much "easier". From there the rest of the solar system gets closer to us but please keep in mind, I am still not talking about self sustaining colonies or industries. Given that our earth still provides plenty, shooting for space in general is idiotic imo. If I had to bet on a technical long shot solution, I would go for nuclear fusion instead of bezos/musk, who I suspect to be equally delusional. Please read closely. Id like to tell you something about population dynamics. Maybe you have heard about the malthusian point of crisis, where food demand overshoots supply and a population starts to decline/collapse. This picture is incomplete. Every species faces 3 categories of destabilizing threats: resources/nutriment, waste products and selective factors (a general term for internal/external stressors like predators, war, diseases, catastrophes, etc). All of our man made problems fit into one of these categories! In the long run, every species has to solve these problems! Pointing at the potential resources and space for landfills beyond earth will not free you from these constraints, it just extend your grace period and enables you to pretend to have solved anything. An actual self sustaining colony means producing _and recycling_ everything, from the vital technology stack down to every day products. If any tech billionaire ever reaches that awareness of the problem and a solution for it, then why build it in space?! What we need is a circular, sustainable econmy, which is also a big moonshot, unfortunately. But either way, the realization of the problems we face is the first step. CO2 is just one our urgent waste products. Can you name a second one with global implications?
- ETH_start 2y ago
  I agree that Earth’s problems should always be a priority, but I think there’s a tendency — especially in today’s political climate — to be overly skeptical of space exploration, particularly when the private sector is involved. It’s worth asking whether that skepticism comes purely from a neutral assessment of the facts or if it’s influenced by a broader narrative that frames space expansion as a distraction rather than an investment in the future. The thing is, we already have a real-world example of how a large space program benefited Earth: the Apollo program. It wasn’t just about getting to the Moon — it led to a wave of new technologies that had nothing to do with space travel but ended up shaping industries back on Earth. That’s what happens when you push engineering and science to their limits. Space missions are, by their nature, some of the most ambitious and disciplined blue sky projects we undertake. They force researchers and engineers to tackle extreme challenges, and in doing so, they produce breakthroughs that spill over into everyday life. That kind of well-funded, high-stakes R&D has historically driven progress in ways that aren’t always obvious at first but turn out to be game-changers. Now, when people talk about space expansion as unrealistic or too difficult, what they’re often really saying is that it’s too expensive. And historically, they’ve been right — cost has always been the biggest obstacle. But that’s exactly what’s changing. Before SpaceX, launching anything into orbit cost around $15,000 per kilogram. That meant sending a single astronaut into space could cost nearly a billion dollars. At those prices, space wasn’t an option for anything beyond government-funded prestige projects. But we’re already past that era. Falcon 9 proved that launch costs can be dramatically reduced, and we’ve seen the direct impact of that—Starlink is a perfect example of a space-based system that’s already providing real-world benefits. With Starship, the cost of going to orbit could drop by another order of magnitude. If that happens, access to space will go from being a rare, ultra-expensive event to something routine. That completely changes what’s possible. I think it’s shortsighted to assume space won’t provide massive benefits to Earth. Just like how early computing looked niche and impractical until it took over everything, space development is on that same trajectory. The same people who dismissed reusable rockets a decade ago are now watching them land on drone ships in the ocean. I just think it’s worth taking a step back and asking: is this skepticism really coming from a place of objective analysis? Or is it just part of the broader push to downplay space exploration, especially when it’s coming from the private sector? Because if history has shown us anything, it’s that ambitious, long-term projects often look like distractions — right up until they change the world.