It’s seemed clear for a while, but Jeff Bezos has now said explicitly that that’s his vision for humanity’s future in space. While Elon remains a planetary chauvinist. Fortunately, there’s room for both visions.
38 thoughts on “O’Neill Space Colonies”
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I’m sorry, I thought you had the opposite POV, and you were just questioning how (e.g. SLS).
I’m glad we agree here.
Competing visions. Competing ideas. Always a nice thing.
Competition is always good. A lesson NASA has kept stillborn.
The good news is Bezos has the money to burn. He’s going to need it.
May the best idea win. The winning move being to get the first 100 people on mars.
Musk needs some 3rd party competition which I expect will happen about a decade after the 1st mars colonists.
I’m sure you can come up with better name calling if you work at it. Seward’s folly is a good example.
The winning move is to establish a colony in which someone is born off Earth.
My personal recommendation is to look at dwarf planets (plenty of mass but not much of a gravity well) but I’m not dogmatically attached to that.
Sorry Joseph, while historic an off world birth is mostly meaningless. An off world economy is.
We want an off world birth as part of a sustainable eco-structure, not a flags and footprints operation.
Of course, but in itself it means very little. It’s like the first person on to walk on mars doesn’t mean much beyond historical context. The 1st 100 colonists or 1st 100 births would have meaning since that would be evidence of sustainable.
“The winning move being to get the first 100 people on mars.”
Why? As much as I’d volunteer to go right now if it was possible, in the longer term, Mars is a dead end.
We’re not going to stick engines on the back of Mars and fly it to another star system. We can certainly do that with an O’Neill habitat.
In terms of the heat death of the universe, sure, mars is a dead end.
In terms of economic growth it’s the biggest deal.
O’Neill colonies are not going to other stars. At best we will go from one to another farther out.
Diversity can be a good thing. If they were to both achieve their visions, we’d be all that much better off.
If someone will loan me a few bln, I’ll get started setting up CHON mining in the Jovian Trojans. Best price, safe and delivered.
“The only winning move is not to play.”
What trade will be possible if you have to drag your product up out of Mars’ gravity well?
What competitive advantage would your products have over the moon or the asteroids?
Don’t you understand? It’s made on Mars. MARS!
And there are people who would pay through the nose for “made on MARS!”, but unlikely enough to make a Martian economy work.
Which is why no one lives in South Dakota, nor Arizona.
Seriously, we do not move somewhere because of the economy. Sure, lots of people do that. But lots of people don’t, too. We live in crazy places (boiling or freezing) just because we can. 90% of the jobs in Arizona could be done in California, and in greater comfort.
But some people just don’t like California.
Martians living in giant mansions connected planet-wide to huge malls always in perfect environmental shirt-sleeve comfort will wonder how people can possibly live in the harsh environment of an earth 4th of July bar-B-QUE!
Mike Rowe will have his ‘dirty jobs mars edition’ where he shows the average martian that some martians have to use spacesuits rather than sit at an overstuffed chair controlling a robot digger/explorer.
Rand, you do snark much better than you do silly and that was just plain silly… but at the same time revealing of both your blind spots. You simply can’t imagine an economy that grows by itself (which ultimately is what all growing economies do.)
Turn that logic on it’s head… how can the earth economy grow without outside trade? If we discovered an advanced but shy ecosystem in our solar system would we suddenly wonder how our earth could have possibly prospered all these centuries without trade from this more advanced economy?
Get your real genuine Mars Key chain, 3D printed with real martin materials, ACT NOW!
Only 99.99 + 8.95 shipping and handling.
7 billion consumers back on earth.. should beable to sell a couple.
There aren’t going to be many things that make sense to ship around the solar system, even if SpaceX get the cost from Earth to Mars down to $100 a kilo. Humans, complex electronics, fissionables and other rare raw materials, probably not much else. To make colonization economically feasible, we really need local manufacturing technologies that can make most of the things we need–particularly those that are heavy and low value–from local materials.
For bulk material shipments to make sense, you probably need to redirect asteroids or comets, or to use a mass-driver or similar means of launching cargoes unattended to their destination.
One overlooked constraint will be the time value of money. You might be able to send robots (and a big pile of supplies) to an asteroid, refine metal, and use solar sails or the like to bring the high value stuff to market in LEO or move the entire asteroid. The question is if the time needed to get the stuff to LEO is so long as to make the rate of return too low. If interest rates remain low, it can make these decisions easier. It’s similar to the calculations in deciding to oil drilling in places like the North Slope of Alaska, etc.
Bezos, Musk, etc. can ignore some of this as long as they use their own money.
That’s a little silly.
How this will work:
1) Computer programmer (mars obsessed) decides to move to Mars. His income probably drops slightly, and his lifestyle is much worse using a normal society metric. Um, by definition, he is not normal.
2) Farmer Bob looks at the computer programmer, and notes that the programmer will pay 100x Earth prices for carrots on Mars. He decides to move to Mars and grow carrots – he is a bit of a Mars nut, but he will actually be making more money on Mars than he could on Earth.
3) Etc, etc. Eventually you have lots of diverse jobs on Mars. They in general pay less on Mars than on Earth, and are harder to do. People go to Mars for the most part because Mars is cool. (Everyone has their own reason, just like why they live in AZ’s furnace of Hades)
Eventually, you get enough people there so that society is pleasant. If you find a “killer app”, you end up like California. If you don’t, you end up like South Dakota.
But either way, humans are on Mars. (And all the Earthlings think they are crazy, by definition)
IIRC, Mars’ gravity is slight enough that a beanstalk is feasible there with current tech.
True, but on the moon you can do the same thing without it being sandblasted to hell and gone. 🙂
If you are not going to listen, why should I repeat the answer?
You listed items, but didn’t make an argument that those items were better made on Mars than on the moon or the various asteroids.
I say that the total cost of your products from Mars will be uncompetitive because you need to spend more to lift your products out of Mars’ gravity well. Can you say, for instance, “My shipping costs are lower than you think because I can manufacture propellant more cheaply from (say) Mars’ atmosphere than someone else who has to mine water on the moon”? Or, “My manufacturing costs are lower because we don’t have to work in hard vacuum”?
Ok, I’ll give you the respect that you will listen (even though I suspect I’m being Charlie Brown to your Lucy with the football.) The following is exactly right…
Edward M. Grant
October 30, 2016 At 5:19 PM
There aren’t going to be many things that make sense to ship around the solar system.
While that may not be universally true, it is generally true. However, that doesn’t mean the laws of economics fail any more than the law of gravity. What economic law?
How people utilize stuff. For some reason when people think about economics they get very rigid in their thinking.
Economics is the ultimate in adaptability. Imagine you have two large cities that trade with each other. Each has stuff they make better than the other. What happens if they get cut off from each other? Does economic activity stop? If it doesn’t, why not? Could each separate city continue to grow even without any trade between them? How is that possible?
It’s possible because all wealth comes, as Bill Whittle correctly states, from thin air. H asks, where did the wealth of a city like Los Angeles come from which is magnitudes more than the import/export trade it had in the last 100 years? It came from the source of all wealth. All the little individual trades that get unnoticed by those that can’t see anything unless it travels long distance.
Places that don’t have certain stuff utilize alternative stuff. The only requirement is that they have that alternate stuff.
Mars does because stuff is abundant and diverse and listed on the periodic table of elements. The moon doesn’t because essential elements are missing and must be imported… so for the moon, trade is absolutely essential. On mars it isn’t.
This doesn’t mean mars is better without trade. It just means what it means… mars has the ability to grow without it… just add people.
Although it should be obvious, trade is even more essential in space than on the moon. No space habitat will grow without import trade. Space habitats will have abundant energy to sell, but that will always be competing against more local sources. While there are abundant minerals in space and the energy cost to get them will eventually be low, building the infrastructure for mining will be slow (and generally centralized which makes growth even slower.)
Space will get its growth on the back of trade between points that grow independently.
Another weird thing about economics is it can turn weaknesses into strengths. The biggest weakness of mars is energy… half the earths solar power and expensive alternate fuel sources. This means nuclear power makes much more economic sense.
Martians will focus on energy production to the point they will be more innovative than here on earth. In a naturally higher radiation environment and few lawyers they will finally get power too cheap to meter.
Shipping and trade doesn’t have to come in the form of ships and things that go in them.
Let’s say you want to manufacture something to sell on Earth. Why would you make it on Mars when you could just as easily make it on Earth? The wealth generated would be transferred to Mars the same way banks transfer money now. The same would work in reverse once Mars has manufacturing ability.
Future headline: Presidential contenders weigh in on Apple holding $2 trillion in offworld profits. Donald Trump Jr says lower the tax rate for one time repatriation. Ivanka says not so fast, Apple needs to pay their fair share.
Wodun, do ya think we need another dynasty? But you make some good points.
Mrs Facebook “Honey when are you going to buy me a real martian diamond like Mrs Gates has?”
You have to dodge Phobos, IIRC.
Oh, that’s just being phobosphobic. /s
Not only is there room for both visions, they support each other. It’s like the shipping industry and the railroad. Separate they are both useful, together they magnify capability.
Absolutely and it’s not just both it’s many. Once these two begin showing things that work, other will fill in the niches with better stuff.
Amazing that an article about O’Neill colonies doesn’t mention “Mobile Suit Gundam”, even in passing.