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On 26/09/2020 14:05, BillK wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:mailman.70.1601125546.3037.extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">
<blockquote type="cite" style="color: #000000;">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">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.
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap=""><snip>
</pre>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">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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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
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?</pre>
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<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Ben Zaiboc</pre>
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