7 ms·

> The main reason humanity hasn't meaningfully started expanding into space is because it used to cost $54,000 to get a liter of water into space. Am I naive i

by cjrp 3mo ago

> The main reason humanity hasn't meaningfully started expanding into space is because it used to cost $54,000 to get a liter of water into space. Am I naive in thinking that we haven't expanded into space because we don't need to? What's the benefit?

andsoitis 3mo ago
> we haven't expanded into space because we don't need to? What's the benefit? Access to resources. A sense of adventure. Learning.
- lokar 3mo ago
  Which resources are cheaper to get from space? I’ve only ever seen hand waiving arguments, never any math.
  - somenameforme 3mo ago
    The hand waving is probably reasonable for a couple of reasons. The first is that you can't really math things out yet when costs are shifting by orders of magnitude on relatively short timeframes. What seems impossible in one year is a casual achievement in the next. If we go back to 2002 (when SpaceX was founded) and I told you that within 2 decades they'd have lowered the cost to get stuff to space by more than 97% relative to Space Shuttle, it'd have sounded somewhere between unreasonable and impossible, yet that is exactly what happened. And Starship is set to send prices plummeting yet again. The second reason is that the notion of economics becomes kind of odd when you start introducing space. Space has practically infinite resources of every type imaginable. For instance one single asteroid, Psyche 16, is thought to have orders of magnitude more gold than has ever been extracted in human history. But I mean, what does this even mean economically? Obviously if you start bringing back hundreds of thousands of tons of gold, the price is going plummet. And even the viable possibility of this happening would probably send the price of gold plummeting. So... it's weird. We're in uncharted waters. And then on top of this access to space will mean we will start expanding outward - colonies, vastly larger stations stations, and so on. And these expansions will develop their own parallel economies with their own needs/production/etc. This is all kind of like trying to predict the economics of the internet before the first cable had been laid.
    - lokar 3mo ago
      Most people I see online freak out at the idea of normalizing living in an apartment/condo and slightly higher density. I don’t see them lining up to live in space :)
      - ben_w 3mo ago
        Depends on the timescale, and what other tech is the prerequisite to this and what other things can be done with that tech. Even with cheap rockets, Musk was talking about 6-digit-dollars for becoming a Martian, I don't see more than a few million people wanting to spend that much for that outcome. If we get self-replicating robots or whatever, big space stations aren't that expensive, but also Earth is huge and you can extract minerals from seawater electrolytically and PV is already cheap, so perhaps we'd just get a load of seasteads instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading
        lokar 3mo ago
        How far out would you say that is? Have you sketched out the net present value calculation for an investment in spacex today based on that?
        ben_w 3mo ago
        > How far out would you say that is? Really hard to say. Everyone who does space stuff talks with the same level of optimism as Musk but historically they deliver less. But for what it's worth, I don't think Musk's going to reach Mars except in an urn, baring some surprise development in anti-aging medicine. Even though their progress is rapid by the standards of the industry, they are still slow in terms of natural human lifespan and his age. > Have you sketched out the net present value calculation for an investment in spacex today based on that? IMO, their market cap should be around $200bn at the moment. That's mostly Starlink, so if there's a Kessler cascade *or* if China makes a competitor that goes down to about $80-100bn The long-term stuff about Mars or turning the moon into a factory for modular data centres is too far into the future to be worth considering.
  - ben_w 3mo ago
    That depends entirely on the price; things are very different when it costs $20k/kg to orbit (basically nothing is worth that) vs. $20/kg to orbit. Some people are suggesting making high quality fibre optics and pharmaceuticals in LEO already with Falcon prices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Forge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Forge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varda_Space_Industries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varda_Space_Industries While I am *extremely* skeptical, I've heard people talk about space-based solar. I mention this only so nobody adds an "and also" for that. Ditto anyone talking about lunar He-3. This is a bad idea, "why" is long enough to be worthy of a blog post. But if you were committed to expansionism for whatever reason, then you'd want some way to get industrial quantities of steel from mines already in space, to make the factories themselves cheaper. Possibly megastructures like an orbital ring, too.
  - petrocrat 3mo ago
    It's not about the "Access to resources. A sense of adventure. Learning." Since you are right. All of these things are available on Earth for far cheaper, with better ROI and with far less risk of dying or getting early cancer from cosmic rays. The real benefit is a commanding lead over geopolitical rivals in the domain of satellites and satellite platforms for hosting devices in orbit, thus securing an insurmountable national security advantage.
- CuriouslyC 3mo ago
  The only argument for space is because you're so set on capitalism that you'd rather destroy the earth than stop trying to continually grow profit. If you're that sick and deluded, then space gives you a way to escape the consequences of your own foolish hubris.
chrissnell 3mo ago
A hedge against civilization-destroying events. Meteors, global war, disease.
- phlakaton 3mo ago
  Space is not a hedge against these things. At best it's our final tomb. There is no backup plan.
  - petrocrat 3mo ago
    to be fair, in the pharoahs quest for immortality after death, if they could have put their pyramid burial tombs in space to avoid decay/ruin for longer they would have. I wouldn't be shocked to see the oligarchs paying for their own space burials inside very lavish satellites whose orbit won't decay for thousands of years so they can "live forever".
ben_w 3mo ago
> What's the benefit? For why we'd want to go at all: there's a lot of resources up there, and pollution is much less of a concern for factories made up there. Also some material processes may be much easier in zero-gee. But that doesn't mean it's actually worth the effort.
ajmurmann 3mo ago
Asteroid mining is the obvious one. That said as part of looking into SpaceX's business I learned that currently the TAM for launching other people's stuff into space is under $10 billion. SpaceX already owns most of that market. Their own focus on data centers in space IMO speaks for itself.

by cjrp 3mo ago

andsoitis 3mo ago

> we haven't expanded into space because we don't need to? What's the benefit? Access to resources. A sense of adventure. Learning.

lokar 3mo ago
Which resources are cheaper to get from space? I’ve only ever seen hand waiving arguments, never any math.
- somenameforme 3mo ago
  The hand waving is probably reasonable for a couple of reasons. The first is that you can't really math things out yet when costs are shifting by orders of magnitude on relatively short timeframes. What seems impossible in one year is a casual achievement in the next. If we go back to 2002 (when SpaceX was founded) and I told you that within 2 decades they'd have lowered the cost to get stuff to space by more than 97% relative to Space Shuttle, it'd have sounded somewhere between unreasonable and impossible, yet that is exactly what happened. And Starship is set to send prices plummeting yet again. The second reason is that the notion of economics becomes kind of odd when you start introducing space. Space has practically infinite resources of every type imaginable. For instance one single asteroid, Psyche 16, is thought to have orders of magnitude more gold than has ever been extracted in human history. But I mean, what does this even mean economically? Obviously if you start bringing back hundreds of thousands of tons of gold, the price is going plummet. And even the viable possibility of this happening would probably send the price of gold plummeting. So... it's weird. We're in uncharted waters. And then on top of this access to space will mean we will start expanding outward - colonies, vastly larger stations stations, and so on. And these expansions will develop their own parallel economies with their own needs/production/etc. This is all kind of like trying to predict the economics of the internet before the first cable had been laid.
  - lokar 3mo ago
    Most people I see online freak out at the idea of normalizing living in an apartment/condo and slightly higher density. I don’t see them lining up to live in space :)
    - ben_w 3mo ago
      Depends on the timescale, and what other tech is the prerequisite to this and what other things can be done with that tech. Even with cheap rockets, Musk was talking about 6-digit-dollars for becoming a Martian, I don't see more than a few million people wanting to spend that much for that outcome. If we get self-replicating robots or whatever, big space stations aren't that expensive, but also Earth is huge and you can extract minerals from seawater electrolytically and PV is already cheap, so perhaps we'd just get a load of seasteads instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading
      - lokar 3mo ago
        How far out would you say that is? Have you sketched out the net present value calculation for an investment in spacex today based on that?
        ben_w 3mo ago
        > How far out would you say that is? Really hard to say. Everyone who does space stuff talks with the same level of optimism as Musk but historically they deliver less. But for what it's worth, I don't think Musk's going to reach Mars except in an urn, baring some surprise development in anti-aging medicine. Even though their progress is rapid by the standards of the industry, they are still slow in terms of natural human lifespan and his age. > Have you sketched out the net present value calculation for an investment in spacex today based on that? IMO, their market cap should be around $200bn at the moment. That's mostly Starlink, so if there's a Kessler cascade *or* if China makes a competitor that goes down to about $80-100bn The long-term stuff about Mars or turning the moon into a factory for modular data centres is too far into the future to be worth considering.
- ben_w 3mo ago
  That depends entirely on the price; things are very different when it costs $20k/kg to orbit (basically nothing is worth that) vs. $20/kg to orbit. Some people are suggesting making high quality fibre optics and pharmaceuticals in LEO already with Falcon prices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Forge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Forge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varda_Space_Industries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varda_Space_Industries While I am *extremely* skeptical, I've heard people talk about space-based solar. I mention this only so nobody adds an "and also" for that. Ditto anyone talking about lunar He-3. This is a bad idea, "why" is long enough to be worthy of a blog post. But if you were committed to expansionism for whatever reason, then you'd want some way to get industrial quantities of steel from mines already in space, to make the factories themselves cheaper. Possibly megastructures like an orbital ring, too.
- petrocrat 3mo ago
  It's not about the "Access to resources. A sense of adventure. Learning." Since you are right. All of these things are available on Earth for far cheaper, with better ROI and with far less risk of dying or getting early cancer from cosmic rays. The real benefit is a commanding lead over geopolitical rivals in the domain of satellites and satellite platforms for hosting devices in orbit, thus securing an insurmountable national security advantage.
CuriouslyC 3mo ago
The only argument for space is because you're so set on capitalism that you'd rather destroy the earth than stop trying to continually grow profit. If you're that sick and deluded, then space gives you a way to escape the consequences of your own foolish hubris.

chrissnell 3mo ago

A hedge against civilization-destroying events. Meteors, global war, disease.

phlakaton 3mo ago
Space is not a hedge against these things. At best it's our final tomb. There is no backup plan.
- petrocrat 3mo ago
  to be fair, in the pharoahs quest for immortality after death, if they could have put their pyramid burial tombs in space to avoid decay/ruin for longer they would have. I wouldn't be shocked to see the oligarchs paying for their own space burials inside very lavish satellites whose orbit won't decay for thousands of years so they can "live forever".

ben_w 3mo ago

> What's the benefit? For why we'd want to go at all: there's a lot of resources up there, and pollution is much less of a concern for factories made up there. Also some material processes may be much easier in zero-gee. But that doesn't mean it's actually worth the effort.

ajmurmann 3mo ago

Asteroid mining is the obvious one. That said as part of looking into SpaceX's business I learned that currently the TAM for launching other people's stuff into space is under $10 billion. SpaceX already owns most of that market. Their own focus on data centers in space IMO speaks for itself.