[extropy-chat] Re: riots in france

[Samantha Atkins]

On Nov 7, 2005, at 9:41 AM, David Lubkin wrote:

> 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.

At this point no one on Earth can go to these destinations at any  
price.  If I missed something major then please acquaint me with the  
folks building the colony ship or even the next asteroid homesteaders  
or folks heading out to L5.  I would be very interested.

>
> 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.
>

I agree of course.  But we don't have access to space now and won't  
at the rate we are going for (very optimistically) over a decade.  It  
will take much longer to have so much easy access to space and  
somewhere to go to take the "poor and huddled masses" off Earth's  
hands, if ever.   So this smells like a sci-fi pipe dream.

- samantha