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We have a whole damn solar system we’re barely even using. Overpopulation is a fake bugbear of small minded bucket crabs.

dangus 8mo ago
I'd love to hear about your economical plan to extract resources and populate the rest of the solar system. It currently costs approximately $4,000 per kg to transport anything into space, that's current bargain basement SpaceX pricing. It also consumes non-renewable fossil fuels to do so. Let me know how you plan to figure out planetary terraforming, gravity manipulation (so we can live on planets with vastly different gravity), planetary climate management, off-earth mining. How many of these problems have been solved even with 1-5% progress? Can you name one material we are currently mining from space? Maybe mining space junk orbiting earth, that would be a low hanging fruit, right?
- somenameforme 8mo ago
  Falcon Heavy costs around $1,400 per kg. This is still quite a lot but it can be contrasted against the ~$54,000 per kg from Space Shuttle to understand why the 'hype' around Starship is justified, with the big goal there being to drop another couple of orders of magnitude off the price. At that point costs will be low enough that the door to space will finally be open to full commercial exploitation.
  - dangus 8mo ago
    I’ll buy your argument for the sake of it. We are killing two orders of magnitude of cost. $14 per kg to get something to space. Well, right now a gallon of gasoline all-in after extraction, refinement, transportation, and taxes retails for $3-4 in the US. So that gallon of gasoline isn’t worth transporting to and from space. That gasoline would cost $38 just to import it from space (2.7kg). Okay, fine, we’re just doing space mining to get stuff like precious metals: platinum, gold, etc. not sure what societal problems that solves, but hey, here we are. Here’s where I stop buying your argument for the sake of it: you’re telling me we are chopping 2 orders of magnitude off the price, but then you’d have to explain to me how sending material to space is going to be cheaper than UPS Ground Saver retail rates. Elon wants to launch solar panels into space and send power back to earth…sure fine but why is any utility company considering doing that rather than putting them in a former corn field in Nebraska? The amount of acreage the USA blows on fire ethanol production alone is enough land to power the entire country with terrestrial solar power, the cheapest form of energy on the market.
    - somenameforme 8mo ago
      Deep space solar solves the intermittency problem of solar, benefits from an inverse square relationship with the distance meaning you can get way more power per panel, is directly applicable to SpaceX's primary goal of getting to Mars, and so on. The big picture goal is making humanity multiplanetary, of which every SpaceX project can tie into one one way or the other, even the ultimately unsuccessful Boring Company. As for how sending stuff to space could be cheaper than sending it by some retail delivery service - it's because the economy is extremely dysfunctional on many fronts, especially in the US. You pay dramatically more for a bottle of water in Michigan, home to a sizable fraction of the entire world's fresh water supply, than you do in the middle of the desert in Saudi Arabia. [1] [1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/bottled-water-cost-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/bottled-w...
      - dangus 8mo ago
        Batteries also solve the intermittency problem, for less money, and their materials are essentially 100% recyclable. Solar+batteries together are already cheaper than any other form of grid scale electricity production. Entire islands with thousands of people on them have replaced their fuel-based power generation with solar+battery and are seeing lower costs and higher reliability. If the economy is dysfunctional on earth, why is SpaceX a special snowflake company that is not also dysfunctional? It’s a US-based company. It’s publicly traded just like UPS. UPS has more competitors than SpaceX (FedEx, USPS, DHL, Amazon fulfillment, numerous B2C couriers, international couriers) Using the price of bottled water is not meaningful to this discussion. Bottled water is a convenience product, the water is not a significant aspect of the retail cost of the product. Bottled water costs $5 inside the airport and $.15 at the Costco 2 miles down the road. The water is not the driver of the cost. We only have one proven habitable planet and we need to protect it. Multi planetary habitation is some combination of 4 things: 1. Billionaires’ excuse to extract the earth dry for profit. 2. Billionaires’ fantasy to escape the pitchforks at their doorsteps, to build a gated community in the cosmos 3. Billionaires’ pump and dump investment vehicle 4. Billionaires’ science fiction affirmation of their narcissistic belief in their own demigodhood.
- philwelch 8mo ago
  > I'd love to hear about your economical plan to extract resources and populate the rest of the solar system. A good starting point is Gerard O’Neill’s 1977 book The High Frontier. > It currently costs approximately $4,000 per kg to transport anything into space, that's current bargain basement SpaceX pricing. It also consumes non-renewable fossil fuels to do so. There are plenty of materials in the solar system that aren’t at the bottom of a gravity well. It’s just a question of developing ISRU infrastructure. The fossil fuel problem is already solved; all of the newest rockets use methane fuel, which can be produced without fossil fuels. > Let me know how you plan to figure out planetary terraforming, gravity manipulation (so we can live on planets with vastly different gravity), planetary climate management, off-earth mining. How many of these problems have been solved even with 1-5% progress? Half of those aren’t serious problems. You don’t need to terraform anything to fit quadrillions of people into the solar system because you can just use small bodies like the moon as material for space colonies. You stated yourself how expensive it is to get out of the gravity well; why go back down into another one? The space colonies—which can be built with known materials, at scales approximating that of a US county—would rotate, providing artificial gravity through centrifugal force. ISRU (“off-earth mining”) is a very active field of research. The obvious next step is to industrialize the Moon and build a mass driver out of lunar materials that we can use to ship lunar materials into cislunar space for construction. The best discussion of how to do the practical next steps that I’ve encountered is Ian Long’s YouTube channel, Anthrofuturism. (https://youtube.com/@anthrofuturism https://youtube.com/@anthrofuturism). The best starting point there is “How To Develop The Moon” (https://youtu.be/WZN2xXMb28g https://youtu.be/WZN2xXMb28g), largely based on his book, also titled How To Develop The Moon (https://a.co/d/0dn84hJa https://a.co/d/0dn84hJa). There’s a beautiful future available to us if we can escape the bucket crabs.
  - dangus 8mo ago
    Why does everyone in this thread keep talking about bucket crabs like they’re in some kind of groupthink cult? I don’t know what the fuck anyone means by bucket crabs. Living in space is essentially like living in the ocean with all the same environments challenges. We don’t do that and never have because it doesn’t really make logical sense, we have better options available. It lends the question of “why do that?” Why? Why do we want to live in space colonies? To what end? This planet will be habitable for tens of thousands of years at the bare minimum if we take care of it, certainly moreso than the vacuum of space.
Der_Einzige 8mo ago
Thank you! You will have a place in the world post singularity. The person who keeps responding to you won’t.

dangus 8mo ago

I'd love to hear about your economical plan to extract resources and populate the rest of the solar system. It currently costs approximately $4,000 per kg to transport anything into space, that's current bargain basement SpaceX pricing. It also consumes non-renewable fossil fuels to do so. Let me know how you plan to figure out planetary terraforming, gravity manipulation (so we can live on planets with vastly different gravity), planetary climate management, off-earth mining. How many of these problems have been solved even with 1-5% progress? Can you name one material we are currently mining from space? Maybe mining space junk orbiting earth, that would be a low hanging fruit, right?

somenameforme 8mo ago
Falcon Heavy costs around $1,400 per kg. This is still quite a lot but it can be contrasted against the ~$54,000 per kg from Space Shuttle to understand why the 'hype' around Starship is justified, with the big goal there being to drop another couple of orders of magnitude off the price. At that point costs will be low enough that the door to space will finally be open to full commercial exploitation.
- dangus 8mo ago
  I’ll buy your argument for the sake of it. We are killing two orders of magnitude of cost. $14 per kg to get something to space. Well, right now a gallon of gasoline all-in after extraction, refinement, transportation, and taxes retails for $3-4 in the US. So that gallon of gasoline isn’t worth transporting to and from space. That gasoline would cost $38 just to import it from space (2.7kg). Okay, fine, we’re just doing space mining to get stuff like precious metals: platinum, gold, etc. not sure what societal problems that solves, but hey, here we are. Here’s where I stop buying your argument for the sake of it: you’re telling me we are chopping 2 orders of magnitude off the price, but then you’d have to explain to me how sending material to space is going to be cheaper than UPS Ground Saver retail rates. Elon wants to launch solar panels into space and send power back to earth…sure fine but why is any utility company considering doing that rather than putting them in a former corn field in Nebraska? The amount of acreage the USA blows on fire ethanol production alone is enough land to power the entire country with terrestrial solar power, the cheapest form of energy on the market.
  - somenameforme 8mo ago
    Deep space solar solves the intermittency problem of solar, benefits from an inverse square relationship with the distance meaning you can get way more power per panel, is directly applicable to SpaceX's primary goal of getting to Mars, and so on. The big picture goal is making humanity multiplanetary, of which every SpaceX project can tie into one one way or the other, even the ultimately unsuccessful Boring Company. As for how sending stuff to space could be cheaper than sending it by some retail delivery service - it's because the economy is extremely dysfunctional on many fronts, especially in the US. You pay dramatically more for a bottle of water in Michigan, home to a sizable fraction of the entire world's fresh water supply, than you do in the middle of the desert in Saudi Arabia. [1] [1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/bottled-water-cost-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/bottled-w...
    - dangus 8mo ago
      Batteries also solve the intermittency problem, for less money, and their materials are essentially 100% recyclable. Solar+batteries together are already cheaper than any other form of grid scale electricity production. Entire islands with thousands of people on them have replaced their fuel-based power generation with solar+battery and are seeing lower costs and higher reliability. If the economy is dysfunctional on earth, why is SpaceX a special snowflake company that is not also dysfunctional? It’s a US-based company. It’s publicly traded just like UPS. UPS has more competitors than SpaceX (FedEx, USPS, DHL, Amazon fulfillment, numerous B2C couriers, international couriers) Using the price of bottled water is not meaningful to this discussion. Bottled water is a convenience product, the water is not a significant aspect of the retail cost of the product. Bottled water costs $5 inside the airport and $.15 at the Costco 2 miles down the road. The water is not the driver of the cost. We only have one proven habitable planet and we need to protect it. Multi planetary habitation is some combination of 4 things: 1. Billionaires’ excuse to extract the earth dry for profit. 2. Billionaires’ fantasy to escape the pitchforks at their doorsteps, to build a gated community in the cosmos 3. Billionaires’ pump and dump investment vehicle 4. Billionaires’ science fiction affirmation of their narcissistic belief in their own demigodhood.
philwelch 8mo ago
> I'd love to hear about your economical plan to extract resources and populate the rest of the solar system. A good starting point is Gerard O’Neill’s 1977 book The High Frontier. > It currently costs approximately $4,000 per kg to transport anything into space, that's current bargain basement SpaceX pricing. It also consumes non-renewable fossil fuels to do so. There are plenty of materials in the solar system that aren’t at the bottom of a gravity well. It’s just a question of developing ISRU infrastructure. The fossil fuel problem is already solved; all of the newest rockets use methane fuel, which can be produced without fossil fuels. > Let me know how you plan to figure out planetary terraforming, gravity manipulation (so we can live on planets with vastly different gravity), planetary climate management, off-earth mining. How many of these problems have been solved even with 1-5% progress? Half of those aren’t serious problems. You don’t need to terraform anything to fit quadrillions of people into the solar system because you can just use small bodies like the moon as material for space colonies. You stated yourself how expensive it is to get out of the gravity well; why go back down into another one? The space colonies—which can be built with known materials, at scales approximating that of a US county—would rotate, providing artificial gravity through centrifugal force. ISRU (“off-earth mining”) is a very active field of research. The obvious next step is to industrialize the Moon and build a mass driver out of lunar materials that we can use to ship lunar materials into cislunar space for construction. The best discussion of how to do the practical next steps that I’ve encountered is Ian Long’s YouTube channel, Anthrofuturism. (https://youtube.com/@anthrofuturism https://youtube.com/@anthrofuturism). The best starting point there is “How To Develop The Moon” (https://youtu.be/WZN2xXMb28g https://youtu.be/WZN2xXMb28g), largely based on his book, also titled How To Develop The Moon (https://a.co/d/0dn84hJa https://a.co/d/0dn84hJa). There’s a beautiful future available to us if we can escape the bucket crabs.
- dangus 8mo ago
  Why does everyone in this thread keep talking about bucket crabs like they’re in some kind of groupthink cult? I don’t know what the fuck anyone means by bucket crabs. Living in space is essentially like living in the ocean with all the same environments challenges. We don’t do that and never have because it doesn’t really make logical sense, we have better options available. It lends the question of “why do that?” Why? Why do we want to live in space colonies? To what end? This planet will be habitable for tens of thousands of years at the bare minimum if we take care of it, certainly moreso than the vacuum of space.

Der_Einzige 8mo ago

Thank you! You will have a place in the world post singularity. The person who keeps responding to you won’t.