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Comment by Paul_Clayton | Hacker News Reader

Colonization would, I think, not require economic justification. Using transportation and communication barriers to facilitate isolation or at least localization may be important to some people.

With vast discretionary spending, people would be able to sacrifice some pleasures for pleasures related to achieving a long-term impractical goal. Space travel does not have to be the most efficient means of enjoying life to be a human choice.

A colony in Antarctica would be much more practical than one on the Moon, but a Lunar colony is more romantic.

If material trade is not worthwhile, conquest may be somewhat discouraged. (Some people might wish to rule all of humanity or convert/exterminate all heretics, so no distance would be perfectly safe, but a perceived threat in Antarctica would be easier to eliminate than a perceived threat on the Moon or in the Large Magellanic Cloud.)

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> Colonization would, I think, not require economic justification. Using transportation and communication barriers to facilitate isolation or at least localization may be important to some people. […]

> A colony in Antarctica would be much more practical than one on the Moon, but a Lunar colony is more romantic.

This really highlights the problem with the belief of “space colonization”: people have a romanticized fantasy of what it would be like: because it's so remote, and dangerous (and expensive), a lunar base would be the exact opposite of isolation: people would live packed in really tight space with little opportunity for isolation or intimacy except in the bathroom. It would be the modern version of being a sailor in a 17th century merchant ship, hopefully without the scurvy.

> but a perceived threat in Antarctica would be easier to eliminate than a perceived threat on the Moon or in the Large Magellanic Cloud.)

What makes you think that? If we have transportation mediums able to build a colony on the moon (that is, able to send tons of material out there) we have the means of transportation needed for carpet bombing it! But you wouldn't even need that, as a moon base would be as dependent from earth as an antarctic base is from mainland (you're not going to put a TSMC chip fab on the moon anytime soon…)

I think the security is actually pretty good on the other space bodies, provided the colony is self-sufficient and does not depend on supplies from Earth. Mars is better then Moon though.

The modern space rockets are slow and easily detectable, and I am sure that if one could get to the moon, and then wanted to build a system that shoots them down, they'd be able to. Especially given that moon-based interceptors will have much smaller gravity well to worry about.

Another argument is that very technically complex products, like space rockets, require a complex society. So if Earth falls into anarchy, there is a good chance the supply chains would be disturbed enough that no one could build multiple space rockets full of bombs even if they wanted to.

> I think the security is actually pretty good on the other space bodies,

You realize that any failure of a life-support device (air containment and renewal, water storage and renewal, heating) means you're dead before anyone can send help? It's like being stranded on an inflatable boat in the middle of the ocean: one tiny hole you can't fix and you're dead.

> provided the colony is self-sufficient and does not depend on supplies from Earth. Mars is better then Moon though.

Please tell me how your colony is going to manufacture the semiconductors it relies on in a self-sufficient way…

> So if Earth falls into anarchy,

That's the opposite argument from the one you made above (“Some people might wish to rule all of humanity or convert/exterminate all heretics” is the opposite of anarchy!) and in that case you're as safe on Antarctica from a military perspective.

> there is a good chance the supply chains would be disturbed

Which means death in medium terms, because as I said above as no space base can be self-sufficient (heck no country on earth can be self sufficient in the modern world already, how do you expect a small spacial colony to be better at self-sufficiency than China?!)

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