[ExI] Fwd: Space governance

[BillK]

On Sat, 26 Sep 2020 at 10:27, Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> Ben Zaiboc wrote:
>
> 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.
<snip>
>
> 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
> _______________________________________________


I agree. Unless the cost of getting into space can be greatly reduced,
space will be for the few pioneers who will have to increase their own
population slowly.

For millions of people, creating virtual worlds to live in will be
much cheaper, more comfortable and much more attractive. You can't
just reboot a real Mars colony when a disaster occurs. In future, will
we live almost permanently in virtual worlds as our Earth environment
becomes less attractive?


BillK