A lot of us have been saying this for years. It’s good to see that this is becoming apparent outside of strictly space cadet circles. May that continue.
In more rational times it would have been the job of academe to do this sort of prognostication. But that is, of course, simply one of many things the left-addled academy no longer deigns to do unless said prognostication is of certain doom should we not acquiesce to the progressive left running everything – e.g., Climate Change[tm].
A future of genuine progress, peace and plenty holds no charms for those whose lodestar is “revolution” and the opportunities it presents to further aggrandize power.
The Era of Generation
‘Not impossible’: Elon Musk says path to becoming world’s first quadrillionaire runs through Moon and Mars factories
Elon Musk says becoming the world’s first quadrillionaire is “not impossible,” linking the possibility to Moon and Mars factories and a future beyond dollars.”
“Not impossible, but definitely requires factories on the Moon and Mars to achieve. By then, I don’t think dollars will be used as currency. Just mass and energy”
How about Helium-3 dollars? Said He3 mined from the atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune? Transported to the Earth-Moon system and Mars colonies by gigawatt class fusion rockets. We have petrodollars now so why Helium-3 dollars?
Maybe little premature but sounds good.
“Interlune plans to gather scarce lunar Helium-3 for quantum computing on Earth”
“Helium-3 now commands a stable price of around $20 million per kilogram”
$20 million dollars per kilogram is $20K per gram. 28 grams to an ounce yields over half a million dollars per ounce. Considerably more than Gold; and we don’t even have Deuterium/He3 Fusion reactors yet.
The economy would need to be much much larger for that to happen, but it’s certainly possible.
The other possibility is hyperinflation, but that doesn’t really count.
Hoping that the longevity treatments kick in fast enough to give Elon Musk a allot more extra decades; and not soon enough for Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren. Their best contributions to the world of the future is to not be part of it.
There will always be another (commie)
Elon Musk just became a trillionaire, so we asked AI to predict what will happen now that he is a trillionaire. What do you think of this artificial intelligence simulation?
Good thing Elon has enough money to build an android army to protect his money.
Nvidia has a P/E in the mid $20’s, SpaceX would be mid $200’s if they start making, instead of losing money. Not a rational investment. Your money, your choice. Musk’s a former trillionaire by virtue of a permanent 88% share of SpaceX.
Still no assurance that humans can occupy 0g for extended periods. The evidence that exists points to maybe a year in 0g without too serious difficulty returning to 1g but probably not much more. No assurance that humans can occupy low-g either, though it seems easier, slightly, to imagine generating artificial acceleration in space than on a planet. No assurance of long term survival for those that might accept a one way trip.
Still lots of questions about long term occupancy outside the magnetosphere or the atmosphere. Equivalent shielding costs a ton per square foot cross section. It’s the magnetosphere that makes months long excursions to LEO reasonably safe without shielding, provided the Sun doesn’t get to rambunctious.
Fifty-odd years since Skylab and we don’t seem much closer to answering the crucial question about humans in space. Can we survive long term?
Questions that have been within our capability to test and answer for decades, but it hasn’t been done.
We could have all this groundwork done ready for excursions into the solar system with a depth of knowledge; instead we’re tinkering with minor questions in LEO and calling it success.
It feels like so little has been accomplished in this regard since the 70s – 50 years of almost no progress.
Nvidia is a conventional company. It started out with a single product, GPUs, and those turned out to be useful for AI as well as for gaming. So their chips are now more AI-ish than game-ish for the most part. But, big as its market cap is, Nvidia doesn’t seem interested in making a big push into, say, AI compute infrastructure as a service. It seems content to remain a part supplier to others.
SpaceX is something we haven’t really seen before – except for sister company Tesla – a serial start-up. As soon as the first thing it did made money, it was all plowed back into the second, bigger, thing it did to make money. Now we’re into the third thing, AI, and that will, itself, have three stages – terrestrial, Earth-orbital and lunar/solar-orbital. Lather, rinse repeat. The idea is to continue using profits from previous rounds of start-up-ness to finance the next step upward and continue to obtain first-mover advantages. If SpaceX ever runs out of new order-of-magnitude bigger things to do, it will become more like a conventional company, just making big bucks by staying in front of competitors.
There was a book called “Resources of Near-Earth Space” by Wendell Mendel that’s still worth a look. Moon, Mars, Asteroids, and Callisto are within reach. I wrote an article about space resources in 1989, published in Ad Astra and as an appendix to my book Fellow Traveler that was also pretty good (NAA put it in a resource index).
A lot of us have been saying this for years. It’s good to see that this is becoming apparent outside of strictly space cadet circles. May that continue.
In more rational times it would have been the job of academe to do this sort of prognostication. But that is, of course, simply one of many things the left-addled academy no longer deigns to do unless said prognostication is of certain doom should we not acquiesce to the progressive left running everything – e.g., Climate Change[tm].
A future of genuine progress, peace and plenty holds no charms for those whose lodestar is “revolution” and the opportunities it presents to further aggrandize power.
The Era of Generation
‘Not impossible’: Elon Musk says path to becoming world’s first quadrillionaire runs through Moon and Mars factories
Elon Musk says becoming the world’s first quadrillionaire is “not impossible,” linking the possibility to Moon and Mars factories and a future beyond dollars.”
“Not impossible, but definitely requires factories on the Moon and Mars to achieve. By then, I don’t think dollars will be used as currency. Just mass and energy”
https://www.financialexpress.com/trending/not-impossible-elon-musk-says-path-to-becoming-worlds-first-quadrillionaire-runs-through-moon-and-mars-factories/4269137/
How about Helium-3 dollars? Said He3 mined from the atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune? Transported to the Earth-Moon system and Mars colonies by gigawatt class fusion rockets. We have petrodollars now so why Helium-3 dollars?
Maybe little premature but sounds good.
“Interlune plans to gather scarce lunar Helium-3 for quantum computing on Earth”
“Helium-3 now commands a stable price of around $20 million per kilogram”
https://spacenews.com/interlune-plans-to-gather-scarce-lunar-helium-3-for-quantum-computing-on-earth/
$20 million dollars per kilogram is $20K per gram. 28 grams to an ounce yields over half a million dollars per ounce. Considerably more than Gold; and we don’t even have Deuterium/He3 Fusion reactors yet.
The economy would need to be much much larger for that to happen, but it’s certainly possible.
The other possibility is hyperinflation, but that doesn’t really count.
Hoping that the longevity treatments kick in fast enough to give Elon Musk a allot more extra decades; and not soon enough for Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren. Their best contributions to the world of the future is to not be part of it.
There will always be another (commie)
Elon Musk just became a trillionaire, so we asked AI to predict what will happen now that he is a trillionaire. What do you think of this artificial intelligence simulation?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzuv7eHAOug
Now that made my day. Thanks for that and make it so.
https://tinyurl.com/mrx8c9br
Good thing Elon has enough money to build an android army to protect his money.
Nvidia has a P/E in the mid $20’s, SpaceX would be mid $200’s if they start making, instead of losing money. Not a rational investment. Your money, your choice. Musk’s a former trillionaire by virtue of a permanent 88% share of SpaceX.
Still no assurance that humans can occupy 0g for extended periods. The evidence that exists points to maybe a year in 0g without too serious difficulty returning to 1g but probably not much more. No assurance that humans can occupy low-g either, though it seems easier, slightly, to imagine generating artificial acceleration in space than on a planet. No assurance of long term survival for those that might accept a one way trip.
Still lots of questions about long term occupancy outside the magnetosphere or the atmosphere. Equivalent shielding costs a ton per square foot cross section. It’s the magnetosphere that makes months long excursions to LEO reasonably safe without shielding, provided the Sun doesn’t get to rambunctious.
Fifty-odd years since Skylab and we don’t seem much closer to answering the crucial question about humans in space. Can we survive long term?
Questions that have been within our capability to test and answer for decades, but it hasn’t been done.
We could have all this groundwork done ready for excursions into the solar system with a depth of knowledge; instead we’re tinkering with minor questions in LEO and calling it success.
It feels like so little has been accomplished in this regard since the 70s – 50 years of almost no progress.
Nvidia is a conventional company. It started out with a single product, GPUs, and those turned out to be useful for AI as well as for gaming. So their chips are now more AI-ish than game-ish for the most part. But, big as its market cap is, Nvidia doesn’t seem interested in making a big push into, say, AI compute infrastructure as a service. It seems content to remain a part supplier to others.
SpaceX is something we haven’t really seen before – except for sister company Tesla – a serial start-up. As soon as the first thing it did made money, it was all plowed back into the second, bigger, thing it did to make money. Now we’re into the third thing, AI, and that will, itself, have three stages – terrestrial, Earth-orbital and lunar/solar-orbital. Lather, rinse repeat. The idea is to continue using profits from previous rounds of start-up-ness to finance the next step upward and continue to obtain first-mover advantages. If SpaceX ever runs out of new order-of-magnitude bigger things to do, it will become more like a conventional company, just making big bucks by staying in front of competitors.
There was a book called “Resources of Near-Earth Space” by Wendell Mendel that’s still worth a look. Moon, Mars, Asteroids, and Callisto are within reach. I wrote an article about space resources in 1989, published in Ad Astra and as an appendix to my book Fellow Traveler that was also pretty good (NAA put it in a resource index).