[ExI] Fwd: Space governance

[John Grigg]

Spike, as our resident engineer, does Ben's math check out?  :  )

On Sat, Sep 26, 2020, 5:27 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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
>
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