Re: SF rocket propulsion?


Ordover@xxxxxxx wrote:
Again, that involves hand-waving into existence an off-Earth economic
base, but that's not going to happen unless first you can find
something to sell to the only place the customers are right now, which
is on Earth. There is nothing whatever on the periodic table you can
sell to Earthpeople at a profit if you have to get it in space. Heck,
if you showed up with 10,000 tons of platinum mined in the asteroids,
you'd just crash the market for platinum down to the point where it
wouldn't pay your bills.


That isn't necsessarily true. Unless the buisnessman is incompetent,
he won't destroy his own market. Also, other buisnessmen won't enter
the market if he already can flood it. However, I could see him being
hit with an antitrust suit because he won't sell all of his metal :).
The question comes down to how much is the total value that lots of
platinum will provide. With a proper pricing structure, he could get
most of that consumer surplus.

It is kinda like software, a software company sets the price for its
software high enough to cover fixed costs of writing the sortware. The
mining company will set prices high enough to cover the fixed costs of
getting the asteroid.

The analogy between space travel and the sea-borne Age of Exploration
underlies so much of the science fiction cosmic consciousness back to
Lensmen that it's hard to step back and realize that analogy is false.
We're not going to colonize other planets or build giant space-borne
structures, even if we can, unless someone figures out a way to have it
make economic sense.

The glib example is that right now we can move the sphinx to the Moon,
but why would we? A more powerful example is that we have the proven
ability to feed the world, but don't for economic reasons - same with
providing a good level of medical care for everyone on Earth.

Just because we can do something doesn't mean we will unless it makes
economic sense.

Similarily, we could build cities on the ocean, but we don't (except
near high land value cities). Despite assertions to the contrary,
Earth is not overpopulated. We have lots of relatively low cost land.
There is no need for more living room, especially at the cost
differential that an orbital settlement would cost.

.

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