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To: NicknamedBob

I’m just not sure getting the 1% to pay their fair share will fund colonization of the solar system.


80 posted on 11/24/2012 5:32:55 PM PST by kjam22 (my newest music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VciTnYA4Bfk)
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To: kjam22

That has never been the idea or the way to colonize the Solar System. The permanent colonization of the Solar System can be accomplished only by self-sustaining economies. The costs are simply too astronomical for such an effort to be sustained by any form of deficit government spending imaganiable. The Earth’s gravitational well is simply too expensive in energy to permit very much transport out of the gravitational well. Human colonization of space will become sustainable only after the off-planet presence has become a net exporter of goods and services to the Earth and itself. Necessarily, this will begin with very small numbers of humans providing extremely high value products and services to the Earth. Later on humans will produce goods and services for the extraterrestrial industries and economy that will in turn expand the extraterrestrial human populations, infrastructures, economies, and habitats. After the extraterrestrial human population reaches the point where it outnumbers the human population of the Earth, you will find the extraterrestrial population’s ancestors come from only a very small number of original space emigrants who were the pioneers of the colonization of the Solar System. More than 99.9% of Earth’s present day population would never have any descendants among the extrateresrial populations.

It was once observed that if there ever were a hypothetical instantaneous trasporter to beam emigrants off of the Earth to extraterrestrial habitats because the Earth and its remaining inhabitants were doomed to destruction, it would be impossible to evacuate more than a fraction of the Earth’s population. The reason given was that humans would breed more humans faster than the transporters could instantaneously transport them off of the Earth. I don’t know wheether or not their math would hold up to scrutiny, but the general principle is certainly applicable in the case of colonizing the Solar System with currently envisioned technologies.


84 posted on 11/24/2012 6:05:47 PM PST by WhiskeyX
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