[ExI] The Moon's Cold Embrace

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2020 at 5:20 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> For all but the richest, it'll be a one-way trip - without friends and
> family who prefer to stay on Earth (which is almost everyone).
>

### The colony would get regular resupply ships which would be running
empty on the way back to Earth. Getting workers back down after a tour of
duty would be cheap.
 ----------------------------------

>
> Would you go, if it meant you would never see any of your current friends
> and family ever again (aside from over video with light lag)?  Or could you
> perhaps convince your family to move?
>
> If you could convince your family to move, would you need teachers &
> schools for your children?  You presumably would work on the necessities of
> the colony - helping build more infrastructure, or helping establish that
> ROI - but what would your spouse do?  Or would this only be for unmarried
> folks with weak to no family connections?
>

### There are lots of unmarried folks with no family connections. Why
wouldn't a spouse be able to find work on the Moon? Spouses on Earth often
do. As the current hysteria about classroom infections shows, teachers are
not really that much needed.
---------------------------

>
> And what exactly would you do, with regards to building more
> infrastructure or establishing that ROI, that could not be done better by a
> robot (perhaps autonomous, perhaps being teleoperated from Earth, whichever
> works better)?
>

### Escaping from Earth.

Yes, a lot of the physical movement and processing of matter would be done
by robots but then the same would be the case on Earth in equivalent
industries - aren't we often talking about the coming human unemployment?
The economic usefulness of humans on the Moon is likely to change in
parallel to their usefulness on Earth.

For me the selling point is that being on the Moon would mean creating new
and increasingly independent societies that could potentially avoid
importing the problems that plague Earth.
 --------------------------------------------

>
>
> One of the key ideas is that "sets of".  Rather than having one monolithic
> nanoreplicator, you have vehicles to prospect & mine regolith for useful
> ores; refineries & smelters to turn the ores into various types of
> feedstock; printers, extruders, & tools to shape the feedstock into useful
> components; assembly robots to put them all together; solar panels to power
> the whole works; and central computers and communications to guide
> everything (with oversight - but not minute-by-minute direction - provided
> from Earth).  You make sure that each element is a thing that can be fully
> constructed by the full set (this is most difficult for the vehicles, which
> have many components of their own, but doable).  This means you're shipping
> up multiple tons for a starter version of this full set, so it's in the
> millions of dollars for transportation costs on top of obtaining that
> initial set of things, but millions of dollars for a credible plan to
> industrialize the Moon can be raised - especially with a good ROI.
>

### Exactly.

Rafal
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