[ExI] Space governance

[Stuart LaForge]

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).

In theory a maximum of 200TWh could be extracted from a mere 8.01 kg  
of matter if 100% efficiency could be achieved in energy harvesting.  
We need to quit making excuses for extinction and invest in research  
in nuclear rocketry.

>>
>> 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?

The point is neither Earth nor Mars could reboot themselves on their  
own, but if both existed, either one could reboot the other. A Mars  
colony really is like a backup for the human species on Earth.

> 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.

Maybe not baseline biological humans, but I can envision specific  
adaptation brought about by genetically engineering and possibly  
selectively breeding some humans to be especially adapted to 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.

That is a distinct possibility at least for significant proportion of  
the population. But my hope is that humans will expand rather than  
condense. It just seems more extropic.

Stuart LaForge