[ExI] Fwd: Space governance

[Ben Zaiboc]

Ben Zaiboc wrote:

On 25/09/2020 18:55, Adrian Tymes wrote:
>  I was thinking about this very topic just yesterday.

The thing that immediately occurs to me is how much it would cost 
(energy, not necessarily money) to put even just 20k biological humans 
into space in the first place. I don't see a sizeable off-planet 
population of humans-as-they-are-now ever being plausible. The only 
scenario where that might be possible, I think, is where a small 
off-planet population grows thorough reproduction (even then, there are 
immense problems that might just be unsolvable), but I don't see how 
anyone can think that large populations of humans can be lifted off the 
planet. Just do the maths. How much energy does it take to put 100kg 
into orbit? How much mass would be needed to launch and support a single 
human? The amount of energy it takes doesn't change, no matter what 
technology you use, so how could millions of people ever get into space?

I'm not talking about transmitting uploads, of course. That changes the 
picture completely.



OK, I just looked this up. Absolute theoretical minimum energy to put 
100kg into LEO = about 3 Gigajoules (or around 0.8 MWh.). This is with 
perfectly efficient technology that can technomagically translate you 
from the ground to orbit (the figure is based on the difference between 
the kinetic energy you have on the ground and the kinetic energy you 
have in LEO).

Say 100kg = one person, plus a tiny amount of gear. Bump the 0.8 MWh up 
to 1MWh, and say everyone can take a suitcase.  So, 20k people would 
take 20GWh, or roughly one ten-thousandth of an estimated global energy 
consumption of 200TWh. Now scale this up to millions of people. 
Launching a mere 20 million space cowboys (about 1/400th of the global 
population) would need a full tenth of the energy consumption of the 
entire world. With technology that's effectively magic. With real, 
near-term technology, maybe 50 times worse (guessing here).

Draw your own conclusions (but check my maths first, I'm not exactly the 
most numerate person in the world).

-- 
Ben Zaiboc