Alan Boyle has an interesting report from Esther Dyson's little space conference, on the state of the entrepreneurial space industry, and its invigorated prospects for investment.

I see some people still are deluded about space colonization prospects.

I wish them good luck.

Barring a disruptive event, such as discovery of precious resources, new propulsion technology getting dropped on our lap, or something like that, the prospects are dim.

Even *if* space tourism takes off, how many people are you going to find living in space? The environment is naturally ill-suited for our bodies, it is in the middle of nowhere. At best it will be a popular vacation destination for extreme sports fans, but I doubt it will be as popular as the Everest or North Pole tours.

Mass colonization of surfaces outside our own special little dirt ball compared to that seems way out there. Ultimately the cause is quite simple...

It turns out the Earth is big enough to cram everyone! The birth rate regretably keeps collapsing. Despite the best efforts of the Indians, to the pleasure of the environuts. So the Earth surface has enough space. Heck, we did not even bother to colonize large expanses of arctic or desert. Which is eminently more livable than outer space. Even exausting that, we could go building vertical, up or down, or colonize the other two thirds of the planet, which are ocean.

People keep talking about the Mayflower, etc. Guess what buddy, the European powers started pushing colonization because there wasn't any more room left to support the population given the technologies of the day! The Agricultural Revolution of the Middle Ages and a period of relative peace sent the population way up there, so then they had to send noblemen to the Middle East to get a piece of land for their fief. That turned out to not be enough, so off into the sea in search of more land we went.

Yes, before colonization was trade and spices, etc. But that was little more than some dozen trips and did not provide the future envisioned by the O'Neill croud.

The Moon is so resource poor, the best prospects of colonizing it would be to either turn the thing into a prison camp or a tax haven. Probably both.

So, let's don't even try. Give up. I mean, what's the point of even living?

European population

Actually because of the wave of plagues which hit Europe beginning in the the fourteenth century, the population of Europe declined and did not recover until the 18th century. Population pressure does not explain the European era of exploration.

To Brad:
See this article and this chart.

The Mayflower voyage was in 1620.

Colonization of space is like a Dutch Auction. As technology advances, the expense and risk of sending out permanent settlers will continually fall.

Whoever grabs for the brass ring first (and survives, Roanoke Colony did die off after all) will be in the drivers seat for future expansion across the solar system. Try Sam Huntington (Clash of Civilizations) blended with Robert Zubrin. Being first will not guarantee success but its a start.

Q: What langauge, what religion, what political system will predominate across the solar system in 700 years?

A: That possessed by whichever subset of humanity gets out there first with the most and does the best job of successfully having children. Jewish mothers are extremely wise; in the end all that really matters are the kids.

Master genuine CELSS and ISRU (be it in 25 years or 125 years) and the solar system becomes a giant sterile Petri dish filled with nutrients just waiting for some humans to start the biggest population explosion humanity has ever seen.

Our technology is not quite there yet, but its coming.

And whether it will be 50 years before the first child is born away from the Earth or 250 years does not really matter. Those civilizations and cultures (US-West, EU-West, China, India etc. . .) that do the best job of initiating space settlement will rule the solar system 500 - 1000 years from now.

= = =

PS - Mike Griffin has told Congress that in the end this is the "real" reason we need to fund space exploration.

PS - Space settlement will do NOTHING to solve Terran overpopulation. Babies are easier to make than RLVs.

However there are more people of Polish descent living in and around Chicago, Illinois than live in and around Warsaw, Poland.

European population part 2

Did you read the article you linked Gojira? I did.

"By 1500 the total population of Europe was substantially below that of 200 years earlier,"

You may have been misled by the crummy graph. One of the problems with wikipedia is it ain't perfect. Hence the sloppy graph which contradicts the article it is linked to.

Here is a better source, the book 'In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World it Made' by Norman F. Cantor.

One excerpt "this epidemic was probably the worst to hit humanity in its brief history and the European population did not recover to its pre-pestilence levels for almost four hundred years. "

That recovery date is a good 250 years after the discovery of the New World. It wasn't population pressures which drove the age of exploration.

Brad: Exploration started because the western powers needed Asian goods they only got via costly land trade which involved paying off the arabs. So trade was the reason for starting it.

Large scale colonization of the Americas and Africa only started much later, in some cases like China not at all. The O'Neill crowd is discussing space colonization, not trade.

Discovery of the Americas, 1492. Mayflower trip, 1620.

Not all the places recovered from the plague at the same time. But if you look at the charts, by the time mass colonization started the population had surpassed pre-plague levels.

European population part 3

"Charts" ? What charts? Do you mean the single crappy wikipedia graph you linked to? It's wrong. Have you nothing better to prove your point?

I have already shown you two sources (including one of your own!) that contradict your claims. European population levels of 1620 did not exceed the levels of pre-plague Europe. Give it up dude.

France is not Europe dude. It is in Europe yes, but Europe is a bit bigger than that.

European population part 4

"France is not Europe"? Non-sequitor. Fortunately for Gojira, I have done his research for him.

Bottom line, I was wrong about how long European population took to recover in Europe. My searching for information turned up plenty of sources, and much of it was contradictory or imprecise which didn't help. I even ended up looking for answers to new questions raised by my original search.

Despite Gojira's wikipedia info and the first hits I found about the Plague, which claimed a depressed population far past the year 1500, I found with deeper searching that population had actually doubled by 1750. That threw me for a loop. Europe was a mess post 1300 and it wasn't just the Plague.

Agricultural production topped out by 1300 and Europe was beset by famines even before the disaster of Plague. And the Plague wasn't just the one Big One, it kept coming back over the centuries although never as big as the first time it hit in the 1300's. Then there was the awful warfare such as fighting the Turks and the Moors, the 100 Years War and 30 Years War. And to top it all off the Little Ice Age hit and didn't relent until the 1800's, that must have made agricultural production even harder.

It was the agricultural question that hit me then. How could a Europe suffering from famines in 1317 manage to feed double it's population by 1750? And all during the Little Ice Age too? I knew this was before industrialization or modern agriculture so how did the Europeans do it? Back to searching I went.

The answer was 'Enclosure'. Enclosure was the practice of 'enclosing' farms. What we think of today as ordinary private farms, fenced off from other property. Before enclosure farming was more of a communal effort. It turns out enclosed farms were more productive than previous farms, probably from the care and improvement of the land that the owners lavished on their own private property.

Enclosure also promoted great social unrest because some people were getting rich with the practice, and some of the rich were taking land from poor communities and enclosing it to become even richer. I'm struck by the parallels with 19th century industrialization and the rise of the Robber Barons. Enclosure is sort of an agricultural capitalism parallel to industrial capitalism, with similar benefits and dangers.

Interesting stuff all in all.

But Gojira is still wrong about population pressure as the reason for colonization by Europeans. European colonization if anything was an effort to increase population in the pursuit of goals such as commerce and nationalism, not as an escape valve to relieve population pressure at home. The only significant shifts of population from the old world to the new world occured during the 19th century, hundreds of years after the new world colonies were first founded.

European colonization if anything was an effort to increase population in the pursuit of goals such as commerce and nationalism, not as an escape valve to relieve population pressure at home.

At first, space colonies will be prestige builders for their sponsor. Later, trade will develop.