[ExI] Fwd: Space governance

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 26/09/2020 14:05, BillK 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?

Note I'm not talking about  monetary cost. That varies, but the energy 
cost (cost in energy, not monetary cost of energy) doesn't (the minimum 
energy cost, anyway). Unless we get to a state where superabundant 
energy is no problem, I don't see large numbers of humans (biological 
ones) ever getting into space.

The virtual worlds scenario is much much more likely, I agree. And that 
can integrate with uploading too, so I'd expect even when (or if, for 
the pessimists) we do crack uploading and it's widely available, people 
will still live largely in virtual environments, wherever they are 
physically located. And there's a humongous amount of living room 
available in the solar system, even more so when you only need a few 
cubic millimetres of space to live in.

-- 
Ben Zaiboc

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