He’s smoking something I don’t think I want to try. The human brain is far more than the sum of its signals. EMS is the SF equivalent of Trek’s Data or more directly TOS’s Roger Korby. We can’t have a significant space breakout without that? Has he ever watched any early episode of The Expanse?
To paraphrase a recent post from PM’s high school alum:
You go into Space with the humans you have. Not the humans you wish you had.
He missed the book version of 2001:ASO.
The monolithic aliens and their Star Children spawn were quite happy living on the surface of a star. Something about feeble energies being of no concern. Whatever 1:4:9:…? gets you.
“So my guess is that Earth will run out of energy long before it runs out of raw materials.”
One of those raw materials is uranium. It makes up 3 ppm of the Earth’s crust, which has an estimated mass of 2.77E22 kg. That translates to 8.31E16 kg uranium, 0.7% of which is U-235. The energy contained in 5.8E14 kg of U-235 is about 3.8E10 quads (quadrillion BTU). The world uses about 575 quads per year. If we doubled that, we would still have enough U-235 to last 33 million years.
That’s without going to fast breeder reactors, and/or the thorium cycle. And, of course, it doesn’t include fusion which, if it ever becomes commercially viable, will extend us into the billions of years of energy supply.
(Or we could go with “unlimited” solar and wind, and be back in the stone age in nothing flat…)
I disagree with his guess, though I note that it is just a guess on his part.
I do wonder at his obsession with “cooling,” however.
2nd Law of Thermodynamics challenged?
With unlimited fusion energy it has been speculated humanities’ energy consumption could exceed the Earth’s capacity to shed the waste heat. But that presumes the former. I suppose any human development running with a near inexhaustible energy supply would have this as a local issue. Not an issue for the ultimate heatsink however because:
Baby, it’s cold outside
Emissivity is the fourth power of temperature so we need a 4% increase in Earth heat to raise the temp 1%K ~3K. Current human activity is right around 1/10,000 of solar heating now so we need a factor of 400 of new heat before we are moving the meter.
Yes we have lots of energy on Earth at current usage levels. But exponential growth can eventually overwhelm any such finite resources.
In a few hundred years you can hit half the economy off Earth, well before energy is a binding constraint. We need a factor of 10,000 before we outgrow ground and ocean-based solar power on Earth.
–When will off-Earth economy be larger than the on-Earth?
Where in the solar system will that off-Earth economy be then?–
Off Earth economy becomes larger than Earth “surface” economy, when we have SPS. Or energy of SPS will be cheaper in the GEO orbit, as compared to after it’s beamed/transmitted to Earth surface.
And earth economy will go where ever the energy is cheaper.
But if we Mars settlements, electrical power at Mars surface will more expensive then electrical power at Earth surface, therefore the higher price of electrical power on Mars surface could {if enough Mars surface electrical market} cause SPS to be done in Mars orbit before Earth orbit. Mars orbit is good place to bring space rocks.
If have space rocks plus cheap electrical power in Mars orbit, one have a lot Earth’s economy going to Mars orbit.
One will have a lot people in space, when food is cheap in Space.
Mars surface could good place to grow food for Space. But if and when there a lot people living in space, costs to leave Earth will lower {below $5 per kg to LEO- chemical rockets will not used for most of delta-v to leave Earth surface. And such non chemical rocket way to get to orbit will also be used on Mars and Moon.
Mars simply has more land for farming than Earth. Or Earthling might want farmland for people living on Earth surface, but might be against farmland on Earth to be used to ship food into Earth orbit.
Martians are unlikely to have such a view. It seems a cheap place to ship Mars food to Earth, will be Earth high orbits- So, Earth/Moon L-4/5 colonies should good location for longer stay residential living. And such places probably going want parks more than farming.
And it seems size of economy will followed where there is more human population. It seems it going a while before space population exceed human population on Earth surface. I could see 2 billion people living at least part time somewhere in Earth’s orbits before 2100, and probably only a few million living Mars surface. And perhaps tens of millions, not living on Mars or Earth surface and orbits. It seems one could have faster birth rates in Space rather on Earth of Mars surfaces. Or space will eventually get higher Earth population from higher space birth rates.
Robots will remain tools of humans. But robots will send places human don’t want to live- and living very near the sun, sounds like place human don’t want to live, but also travelling to other stars or just distant parts of our solar system.
Two big things neglected is that first, Earth will be where the biggest and fastest computers are for a long while.
Second, light speed. If you’re hanging out in the million miles shell around the Sun (where high performance materials can survive), light speed means that even shooting messages through the Sun at the speed of light results in a six second lag between one side of the hollow ball and the other. Earth connectivity is under 100 ms (under 30 ms, if you can shoot messages through Earth itself).
There’s this huge need for compactness and connectivity in computing. A vast shell with dispersed computing elements (and a loud thermal source in the middle!) is going create a massive hit on the efficiency of computation using the system.
The near Sun economy need not at all be equally spread around the Sun. There would likely be a concentration where fast comm folks hang out together.
Earth is also a vast thin habitable shell (less than 7 useful miles thick) with a huge core, unsuited for inhabitation or computation, which just gets in the way. Perhaps the largest undifferentiated asteroid, Hygeia, will be converted into computronium.
Some years ago I wrote a piece for The Space Review which posited that the basic driver of any future off-earth economy is going to be the Inner Solar System providing beamed energy to the Outer Solar System in return for mass. I still think that’s how things will work out.
This sort of trade could work over a very long timespan – potentially eons. When the Asteroid Belt plays out as a source of mass, there will be the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud awaiting.
Long before that, I expect humanity to have transplanted this basic economic model to neighboring stars.
But these two economic regimes need not at all be of near equal size.
I probably agree with you, but we should settle on some mutual unit of measure. My posited energy and mass industries could, for example, be roughly equal in economic terms but wildly asymmetric in terms of, say, population.
Home office workers are currently 2/3 of the US economy. It is likely to be the thinking that continues to provide the majority of the economy from here on. Long before the majority of physical population moves off Earth, the intellectual locus of the solar system can move. That could be to the Moon, Mars or LEO. LEO and the Moon have the edge on proximity to the old economy which facilitates faster migration. And it could happen well before we run out of energy. Energy is only 5.6% of GDP and that’s before the price of oil dropped to 0. 19 countries with the highest GDP per capita (mostly in Europe and North America), comprising less than 10% of global population, produce 50% of GDP. Looking at individuals, 50% of the wealth resides with 1% of the population. We are coming up on 250 years of USA. It could happen in the next 250.
He’s smoking something I don’t think I want to try. The human brain is far more than the sum of its signals. EMS is the SF equivalent of Trek’s Data or more directly TOS’s Roger Korby. We can’t have a significant space breakout without that? Has he ever watched any early episode of The Expanse?
To paraphrase a recent post from PM’s high school alum:
You go into Space with the humans you have. Not the humans you wish you had.
He missed the book version of 2001:ASO.
The monolithic aliens and their Star Children spawn were quite happy living on the surface of a star. Something about feeble energies being of no concern. Whatever 1:4:9:…? gets you.
“So my guess is that Earth will run out of energy long before it runs out of raw materials.”
One of those raw materials is uranium. It makes up 3 ppm of the Earth’s crust, which has an estimated mass of 2.77E22 kg. That translates to 8.31E16 kg uranium, 0.7% of which is U-235. The energy contained in 5.8E14 kg of U-235 is about 3.8E10 quads (quadrillion BTU). The world uses about 575 quads per year. If we doubled that, we would still have enough U-235 to last 33 million years.
That’s without going to fast breeder reactors, and/or the thorium cycle. And, of course, it doesn’t include fusion which, if it ever becomes commercially viable, will extend us into the billions of years of energy supply.
(Or we could go with “unlimited” solar and wind, and be back in the stone age in nothing flat…)
I disagree with his guess, though I note that it is just a guess on his part.
I do wonder at his obsession with “cooling,” however.
2nd Law of Thermodynamics challenged?
With unlimited fusion energy it has been speculated humanities’ energy consumption could exceed the Earth’s capacity to shed the waste heat. But that presumes the former. I suppose any human development running with a near inexhaustible energy supply would have this as a local issue. Not an issue for the ultimate heatsink however because:
Baby, it’s cold outside
Emissivity is the fourth power of temperature so we need a 4% increase in Earth heat to raise the temp 1%K ~3K. Current human activity is right around 1/10,000 of solar heating now so we need a factor of 400 of new heat before we are moving the meter.
Yes we have lots of energy on Earth at current usage levels. But exponential growth can eventually overwhelm any such finite resources.
In a few hundred years you can hit half the economy off Earth, well before energy is a binding constraint. We need a factor of 10,000 before we outgrow ground and ocean-based solar power on Earth.
–When will off-Earth economy be larger than the on-Earth?
Where in the solar system will that off-Earth economy be then?–
Off Earth economy becomes larger than Earth “surface” economy, when we have SPS. Or energy of SPS will be cheaper in the GEO orbit, as compared to after it’s beamed/transmitted to Earth surface.
And earth economy will go where ever the energy is cheaper.
But if we Mars settlements, electrical power at Mars surface will more expensive then electrical power at Earth surface, therefore the higher price of electrical power on Mars surface could {if enough Mars surface electrical market} cause SPS to be done in Mars orbit before Earth orbit. Mars orbit is good place to bring space rocks.
If have space rocks plus cheap electrical power in Mars orbit, one have a lot Earth’s economy going to Mars orbit.
One will have a lot people in space, when food is cheap in Space.
Mars surface could good place to grow food for Space. But if and when there a lot people living in space, costs to leave Earth will lower {below $5 per kg to LEO- chemical rockets will not used for most of delta-v to leave Earth surface. And such non chemical rocket way to get to orbit will also be used on Mars and Moon.
Mars simply has more land for farming than Earth. Or Earthling might want farmland for people living on Earth surface, but might be against farmland on Earth to be used to ship food into Earth orbit.
Martians are unlikely to have such a view. It seems a cheap place to ship Mars food to Earth, will be Earth high orbits- So, Earth/Moon L-4/5 colonies should good location for longer stay residential living. And such places probably going want parks more than farming.
And it seems size of economy will followed where there is more human population. It seems it going a while before space population exceed human population on Earth surface. I could see 2 billion people living at least part time somewhere in Earth’s orbits before 2100, and probably only a few million living Mars surface. And perhaps tens of millions, not living on Mars or Earth surface and orbits. It seems one could have faster birth rates in Space rather on Earth of Mars surfaces. Or space will eventually get higher Earth population from higher space birth rates.
Robots will remain tools of humans. But robots will send places human don’t want to live- and living very near the sun, sounds like place human don’t want to live, but also travelling to other stars or just distant parts of our solar system.
Two big things neglected is that first, Earth will be where the biggest and fastest computers are for a long while.
Second, light speed. If you’re hanging out in the million miles shell around the Sun (where high performance materials can survive), light speed means that even shooting messages through the Sun at the speed of light results in a six second lag between one side of the hollow ball and the other. Earth connectivity is under 100 ms (under 30 ms, if you can shoot messages through Earth itself).
There’s this huge need for compactness and connectivity in computing. A vast shell with dispersed computing elements (and a loud thermal source in the middle!) is going create a massive hit on the efficiency of computation using the system.
The near Sun economy need not at all be equally spread around the Sun. There would likely be a concentration where fast comm folks hang out together.
Earth is also a vast thin habitable shell (less than 7 useful miles thick) with a huge core, unsuited for inhabitation or computation, which just gets in the way. Perhaps the largest undifferentiated asteroid, Hygeia, will be converted into computronium.
Some years ago I wrote a piece for The Space Review which posited that the basic driver of any future off-earth economy is going to be the Inner Solar System providing beamed energy to the Outer Solar System in return for mass. I still think that’s how things will work out.
This sort of trade could work over a very long timespan – potentially eons. When the Asteroid Belt plays out as a source of mass, there will be the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud awaiting.
Long before that, I expect humanity to have transplanted this basic economic model to neighboring stars.
But these two economic regimes need not at all be of near equal size.
I probably agree with you, but we should settle on some mutual unit of measure. My posited energy and mass industries could, for example, be roughly equal in economic terms but wildly asymmetric in terms of, say, population.
Home office workers are currently 2/3 of the US economy. It is likely to be the thinking that continues to provide the majority of the economy from here on. Long before the majority of physical population moves off Earth, the intellectual locus of the solar system can move. That could be to the Moon, Mars or LEO. LEO and the Moon have the edge on proximity to the old economy which facilitates faster migration. And it could happen well before we run out of energy. Energy is only 5.6% of GDP and that’s before the price of oil dropped to 0. 19 countries with the highest GDP per capita (mostly in Europe and North America), comprising less than 10% of global population, produce 50% of GDP. Looking at individuals, 50% of the wealth resides with 1% of the population. We are coming up on 250 years of USA. It could happen in the next 250.