[extropy-chat] Re: riots in france

[David Lubkin]

Damien Broderick wrote:

>Yeah, and all those immigrant un[der]employed Muslims should just 
>knuckle down and save up their spare francs and stop their whining 
>and build a starship like the rest of us do.
>
>Or not.

My point was that there were (1) new places to go to, (2) where 
people who find their current circumstances intolerable could go, not 
whether (3) these particular people can afford to go.

Check out Freeman Dyson's cost analysis in "Pilgrims, Saints and 
Spacemen," _Disturbing the Universe_, pp 118-26 (1979). His reasoning 
seems sound, and comparably rigorous to Thomas Sowell's treatment of 
similar questions.

The Mayflower expedition -- which is, after all, what Jack referred 
to -- cost 7.5 man-years of wages per family. The colonists borrowed 
the funds from investors who stayed home. It took them 22 years to 
pay off this debt.

Dyson believe(d | s)  that it is essential to have a frontier as a 
social safety valve and that we had to get launch costs down to a 
comparable price before colonizing the asteroids was plausible.

Both make sense to me, and I think we could have done this decades 
ago. I wonder which groups would set out, were it an option today. Of 
course, when they got there, they'd find a Chabad center on the next rock.....


-- David.