We have a whole damn solar system we’re barely even using. Overpopulation is a fake bugbear of small minded bucket crabs.
It currently costs approximately $4,000 per kg to transport anything into space, that's current bargain basement SpaceX pricing. It also consumes non-renewable fossil fuels to do so.
Let me know how you plan to figure out planetary terraforming, gravity manipulation (so we can live on planets with vastly different gravity), planetary climate management, off-earth mining. How many of these problems have been solved even with 1-5% progress?
Can you name one material we are currently mining from space? Maybe mining space junk orbiting earth, that would be a low hanging fruit, right?
$14 per kg to get something to space.
Well, right now a gallon of gasoline all-in after extraction, refinement, transportation, and taxes retails for $3-4 in the US.
So that gallon of gasoline isn’t worth transporting to and from space. That gasoline would cost $38 just to import it from space (2.7kg).
Okay, fine, we’re just doing space mining to get stuff like precious metals: platinum, gold, etc. not sure what societal problems that solves, but hey, here we are.
Here’s where I stop buying your argument for the sake of it: you’re telling me we are chopping 2 orders of magnitude off the price, but then you’d have to explain to me how sending material to space is going to be cheaper than UPS Ground Saver retail rates.
Elon wants to launch solar panels into space and send power back to earth…sure fine but why is any utility company considering doing that rather than putting them in a former corn field in Nebraska? The amount of acreage the USA blows on fire ethanol production alone is enough land to power the entire country with terrestrial solar power, the cheapest form of energy on the market.
As for how sending stuff to space could be cheaper than sending it by some retail delivery service - it's because the economy is extremely dysfunctional on many fronts, especially in the US. You pay dramatically more for a bottle of water in Michigan, home to a sizable fraction of the entire world's fresh water supply, than you do in the middle of the desert in Saudi Arabia. [1]
[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/bottled-w...
If the economy is dysfunctional on earth, why is SpaceX a special snowflake company that is not also dysfunctional? It’s a US-based company. It’s publicly traded just like UPS. UPS has more competitors than SpaceX (FedEx, USPS, DHL, Amazon fulfillment, numerous B2C couriers, international couriers)
Using the price of bottled water is not meaningful to this discussion. Bottled water is a convenience product, the water is not a significant aspect of the retail cost of the product. Bottled water costs $5 inside the airport and $.15 at the Costco 2 miles down the road. The water is not the driver of the cost.
We only have one proven habitable planet and we need to protect it. Multi planetary habitation is some combination of 4 things:
1. Billionaires’ excuse to extract the earth dry for profit.
2. Billionaires’ fantasy to escape the pitchforks at their doorsteps, to build a gated community in the cosmos
3. Billionaires’ pump and dump investment vehicle
4. Billionaires’ science fiction affirmation of their narcissistic belief in their own demigodhood.
SpaceX is not publicly traded. It's privately owned and operated, with Elon's motivation behind the company being consistently ideological in nature. The water prices were apples to apples comparisons - the cost of a 0.33 liter bottle of water in an average restaurant.
A good starting point is Gerard O’Neill’s 1977 book The High Frontier.
> It currently costs approximately $4,000 per kg to transport anything into space, that's current bargain basement SpaceX pricing. It also consumes non-renewable fossil fuels to do so.
There are plenty of materials in the solar system that aren’t at the bottom of a gravity well. It’s just a question of developing ISRU infrastructure. The fossil fuel problem is already solved; all of the newest rockets use methane fuel, which can be produced without fossil fuels.
> Let me know how you plan to figure out planetary terraforming, gravity manipulation (so we can live on planets with vastly different gravity), planetary climate management, off-earth mining. How many of these problems have been solved even with 1-5% progress?
Half of those aren’t serious problems. You don’t need to terraform anything to fit quadrillions of people into the solar system because you can just use small bodies like the moon as material for space colonies. You stated yourself how expensive it is to get out of the gravity well; why go back down into another one? The space colonies—which can be built with known materials, at scales approximating that of a US county—would rotate, providing artificial gravity through centrifugal force. ISRU (“off-earth mining”) is a very active field of research.
The obvious next step is to industrialize the Moon and build a mass driver out of lunar materials that we can use to ship lunar materials into cislunar space for construction. The best discussion of how to do the practical next steps that I’ve encountered is Ian Long’s YouTube channel, Anthrofuturism. (https://youtube.com/@anthrofuturism). The best starting point there is “How To Develop The Moon” (https://youtu.be/WZN2xXMb28g), largely based on his book, also titled How To Develop The Moon (https://a.co/d/0dn84hJa).
There’s a beautiful future available to us if we can escape the bucket crabs.
Living in space is essentially like living in the ocean with all the same environments challenges. We don’t do that and never have because it doesn’t really make logical sense, we have better options available. It lends the question of “why do that?”
Why? Why do we want to live in space colonies? To what end?
This planet will be habitable for tens of thousands of years at the bare minimum if we take care of it, certainly moreso than the vacuum of space.
If you put one crab in a bucket, it might climb out. If you put many crabs in a bucket, they will actually stop each other from climbing out. This is an extremely common metaphor.
> Living in space is essentially like living in the ocean with all the same environments challenges.
Maybe we’ll do that too someday.
> This planet will be habitable for tens of thousands of years at the bare minimum if we take care of it
With a very limited amount of space and resources. We got into this discussion because of concerns about overpopulation. The Earth has plenty of natural resources and can almost certainly handle a much higher population than it has now, but exploiting the rest of the solar system will make it last even longer and allow significantly more material wealth for every person alive even at a significantly higher total population.