Is Space The Next Frontier?

Nader Elhefnawy remains skeptical. But I think he misses one of the strongest drivers, only mentioning it once, almost in passing:

Such miseries as famine, war, and persecution cannot be ruled out in the future, of course, but they are hardly a likely driver of space development. In fact, given the extraordinary economic demands that any space development effort will make, it may be much more practical for a prospering world than one suffering through such disasters to undertake such efforts in any foreseeable future.

Emphasis mine. One of these things is not like the other. One can have persecution in the midst of prosperity, and that combination may well result in emigration, just as it did from England to the Americas in the seventeenth century, and from the American east to Utah in the nineteenth. I think that a combination of a desire for freedom in concert with evolving technology is the most likely driver for human migration into space. Unless we’ve all uploaded ourselves first.

[Late morning update]

Clark Lindsey doesn’t buy Elhefnawy’s thesis:

If there existed large O’Neill habitats today, there would be no problem in attracting tens of thousands or even a few million people to move to them. The number will depend on the cost of getting there but when talking about a fraction of a percent of the world’s population, you can find that many people to do virtually anything. The excitement of building a new world in the new environment of space will be charm enough to attract large numbers of people.

Of course, the trick is finding a way of getting from where we are today to a point where building large habitats becomes feasible. I agree that such progress will not be attained by individuals heading out into the last frontier in their own spaceships. But that does not mean that individual action is not the essential element in making it happen. Even if one buys the revisionist view that the expansion into the American West was primarily due to “railroads and speculators, [] logging companies and mining concerns”, one should remember the fact that these organizations were made up of individuals who took huge personal risks. Many, if not most, of those companies and concerns failed and took down all the individuals involved with them. Similarly today the individuals involved in a private entrepreneurial space start-up are taking huge risks with their careers and investments. Many, if not most, of those firms will fail. The people involved know the risks but they make the effort anyway. That is the nature of tough endeavors on earth and it is the same for space.

Of course, perhaps the biggest question is whether modern culture and government will allow, let alone encourage, such risk taking.

7 thoughts on “Is Space The Next Frontier?”

  1. I’m not aware of any government in world history that has actually encouraged people to “vote with their feet”. Or welcomed critical feedback of any kind, really. With the exception of expanding the body politic to new groups and the repeal of Prohibition, even the USA has had the situation of “Establish individual rights at outset; one-way ratchet them back since.”

    But I agree with the thesis that persecution can exist in America today. I’m feel financially persecuted every time I look at what Congress is up to. I just wish I had somewhere better to go.

  2. Space transportation costs must come down. Until this happens, any ideas about space will remain fantasies. Transportation costs will decline as a result of a competitive space transportation industry. Although there are promising start-ups, this process will take several decades, much like the airline industry from 1930 to 1960 (from the Ford Tri-motor to the Boeing 707).

  3. I would somewhat disagree, kurt. If it were proven possible to live on the Moon, just as you please, free of the harassment you get down here from being productive and wanting to mind your own business, and have everyone else mind his, then I bet there’d be takers for one-way tickets, even if you had to save up 10 years’ pay for them.

    So far as we can tell, however, your life off the planet is even more tightly controlled by the massive government/media machine than it is down here. God forbid you fart, smoke, tell a sexist joke, leer at someone, eagerly earn a profit, or fail to give a fool a break and the best part of your own living. Not a life that would attract the pioneer spirit.

  4. We got “Schoolhouse Rocks” with Netflix a few months ago. One of the songs/cartoons was called “elbow room” and it was about the expansion into the west in the United States.

    Towards the end of the song they explicitly called out space as a new frontier to expand into for those who wanted elbow room.

    It seemed to me that a few animators and song writers in the 70’s had a more inspiring vision for space exploration and development than most people in any field do today.

  5. Carl Pham,

    Launch costs would have to decline by a factor of 100 just to get to the level where people could pay 10 years worth of salary to immigrate into space. A $100,000 per person (or maybe couple) would be in the ballpark of what people would pay to immigrate into space.

    Also, the infrastructure (industry, habitats,etc.) also has to develop in lockstep with immigration. This requires far lower launch costs as well. Low transportation costs are essential for trade. A space colony will certainly not be autarkic. The idea is to be politically independent, but to freely trade with the rest of the world (think Hong Kong and Singapore).

    The key is lower space transportation costs. We talked about this in 1990 and it is still the major hurtle today.

  6. kurt, I think of it like activation energy and exothermic chemical reactions. If the reaction is strongly downhill, then even if the activation energy is sky-high, eventually the reaction starts to go, and then the released energy gets things really rolling, e.g. this is what happens when you start a fire.

    So, personally, I suspect the issue is whether the process is downhill. Right now, it’s not. It’s not possible to live on the Moon by your own efforts, untethered to the mother planet, at all. Even if transportation costs were zero, no one would go, because you can’t live there.

    You’re right that if transportation costs were zero, people could perhaps explore the Moon, learn how to live there, eventually build a place where you could live, and then it would be possible. But that’s a whole lot of speculative investment before people can start to see it being possible. Tricky.

    So personally I think the solution will come when someone figures out why being on the Moon is valuable, and how it can be made to pay, either in dollars or personal liberty. And then people will figure out how to get there for less. I see the development of recent commercial space ventures as following that track, honestly. I see the ISS “tourist” program catching the imagination of people with money to spend. Suddenly, they could see why it was worth money to go to space. In the beginning, only $20 million would get you there. But that sparked interest, and the interest provoked clever technical people to try to drive the price tag down, and I’m sure they will.

    So I think, despite this being against the conventional wisdom, that the reduction in travel costs will follow, not lead, the discovery or fashioning of a really compelling and plausible reason to be there, elsewhere, off the planet.

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