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> 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 bo

> 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.
- philwelch 8mo ago
  > I don’t know what the fuck anyone means by bucket crabs. If you put one crab in a bucket, it might climb out. If you put many crabs in a bucket, they will actually stop each other from climbing out. This is an extremely common metaphor. > Living in space is essentially like living in the ocean with all the same environments challenges. Maybe we’ll do that too someday. > This planet will be habitable for tens of thousands of years at the bare minimum if we take care of it With a very limited amount of space and resources. We got into this discussion because of concerns about overpopulation. The Earth has plenty of natural resources and can almost certainly handle a much higher population than it has now, but exploiting the rest of the solar system will make it last even longer and allow significantly more material wealth for every person alive even at a significantly higher total population.

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.

philwelch 8mo ago
> I don’t know what the fuck anyone means by bucket crabs. If you put one crab in a bucket, it might climb out. If you put many crabs in a bucket, they will actually stop each other from climbing out. This is an extremely common metaphor. > Living in space is essentially like living in the ocean with all the same environments challenges. Maybe we’ll do that too someday. > This planet will be habitable for tens of thousands of years at the bare minimum if we take care of it With a very limited amount of space and resources. We got into this discussion because of concerns about overpopulation. The Earth has plenty of natural resources and can almost certainly handle a much higher population than it has now, but exploiting the rest of the solar system will make it last even longer and allow significantly more material wealth for every person alive even at a significantly higher total population.