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Comment by marktangotango | Hacker News Reader

Spacex is building the transcontinental railroads of the solar system. There is mind boggling upside for them. I'm kinda disappointed Blue Origin seems to have fallen in a rut. I'm sure Musk will be happy to provide transportation for Bezos space colony construction projects!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Tycoon

Edit My point isn't to disparage Bezos, but to highlight the fact that anyone with grand aspirations in orbit/solar system will have to go through Musk and Spacex until a competitor does appear. RE space colonies, I believe the natural sequence of events for space tourism is: sub orbital, oribital, long term orbital (a small space "hotel") culminating in orbital habitat ala O'Neil Cylinders. Cheap kg to orbit enables all of that.

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Transcontinental railroads provided routes between already populated areas, with viable trade between them.

Solar system beyond Earth is more like a desert, possibly rich with resources, but nearly no resource is precious enough to be worth carrying by a starship.

The incentives for space expansion past LEO and GEO will not be economical.

That doesn't really hold up though. California has a lot desert and was sparsely settled until the gold rush for example. Also, in situ resource utilization is an area where technology and innovation are certain to provide advantage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization

California has a nice climate, lots of free air, some freshwater, several easily navigable havens for bulk transport. The barrier of settling there near the shore is pretty low, even if you don't trade much and just self-sustain.

A more proper comparison would be Klondike. Inhospitable, barren Arctic land, rather hard to self-sustain, really easy to die. It was only interesting because of the rich gold deposits.

Compared to that, Moon is like 100x the hardships of Klondike, but without the gold, and a ship back to Earth is so expensive that any cargo costs more than gold by weight. Or, at least, so it is now.

There are no immediate economic incentives to settle on the Moon or Mars or even further away. But there are non-economic incentives, much like those which produced the Mayflower.

I often think of this observation by Bruce Sterling:

> I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.

https://boingboing.net/2004/01/08/sterling-ill-believe.html

Gobi desert doesn't have 1/3 earth gravity.

What are the economic benefits of low gravity? If so, would the moon be more economically valuable than Mars?

I’m genuinely curious about the economics of doing more in space than putting up satellites.

I mean obviously you need less energy to move things around. We spend an enormous amount of energy to move things around on earth.

1/6th of Earth gravity is even better.

Short term: a wonderful tourist attraction. You can nearly fly.

Long term: people with muscular / bone disabilities who cannot withstand Earth gravity. An interesting retiring home (for a narrow wealthy set, of course).

Who is going to pay to fly these sickly retirees to the moon, and then continuous supply them with resources that are literally free on Earth (ie air)? Medicare?

Moreover, if they struggle with earth gravity, how will they survive launch and landing?

By using the space elevator, of course!

For a spacefaring civilization reliant upon chemical rockets, less gravity is better. Point being Mars is a better place for such a civilization, not earth.

Though both are probably apocryphal:

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,"

and:

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."

We're really bad at predicting how things will change. Who would have thought that Tim Berners-Lee would be a link in a chain to Donald Trump's election?

Yeah but watching Bezos turn into a household joke is worth it.

He’s a household joke the same way Elon is a household joke.

Bezos is a household joke even in Elon's household. Elon is a nightmare in Bezos'es. That's where the difference is.

Can someone explain the joke to me?

Do we know the Chinese part of the story? I feel like the western media hardly report anything on them while e.g. Wikipedia suggests that there are new developments happening all the time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Manned_Space_Program

How significant are those in practice?

Can we just build private space, lunar, and martian colonies? They could be financed by Tesla shareholders.

The colonisation of the world by Europeans started with government investment, but eventually became self-sustaining.

If these offworld colonies are free of political correctness, crime, taxes, welfare systems, and disease, and contain only beautiful, healthy, and intelligent people (via careful selection, including genetic screening and IQ tests, of permitted colonists), they could draw the best of humanity to them.

Are you familiar with the term "Company Town"? We have, collectively, quite a lot of history with the concept. The Soviet Union did quite a lot more with the idea than western countries did.

The GULag system was just one collection of data points. The nuclear weapons reservations, space launch complexes, and bio-weapons towns were others.

The experience was not, on average, considered inspirational.

Oligarchs live well because they exploit their subjects.

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