Re: Fermi's Paradox and Rare Earth

On Feb 6, 3:25 am, Raghar <Ragha...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The important number isn't pure volume of allocable production, the
important is ratio of allocable production per population.

I assume by allocable production, you mean government spending ?

A country
of 200 mill people that could allocate 1/10 of its for projects
without expected monetary returns, is much better than country of 3000
mill people that believes in monetary returns of the same projects,
and allocate 1/500 of its resources to accomplish them.

The thing is that with more people, there are more inventions. Things
only need to be invented once. If you have twice the population, you
can have the same number of scientists with only half the cost per
population.

In your example, the 3000 million people would have a massive
advantage, if they allocate 1/10, they get 15 times more research.
Alternatively, they could allocate a smaller fraction, and still get
more research. This means that they have a higher standard of living.

Ofc, there would be increased costs to support that number of people
as fixed resources would have to be shared between more people.
However, cities use very little of our land area and our food supplies
could be made more land efficient by reducing the fraction of meat
without much if any lose of nutrition.

Perhaps better example would be a ST ship. A ship like that could be,
if designed properly, handled by 50 people. Yet it houses over 300
people. What are all of them doing?

What do people do who aren't running utilities and farms on Earth do ?

Are they having a private park on
board? I doubt all of these people are doing massively more than 50
people in ship with similar capability. When you have bunch of people,
you need to employ them somehow. Cleaning the deck isn't important job
at all.

What is the point of the ship ?

If it is a mining ship or something then that is what they would be
doing and if it is a transport ship, then they are passengers.

If it is purely residential, then they would have to do something
else. However, 250 people is pretty small for even for a village.
There would be some employed in providing services for the other
passengers and the rest would be working in 'desk' jobs of some kind.
They could be anything that doesn't require that they be physically in
the same place as their customers. In fact, some of them might even
travel to neighbouring ships to do stuff.

It is like the argument that economies go through stages

Argricultural dominated
95% farmers
5% government

Industry dominated
5% government
5% farmers
90% industry

Service dominated
5% government
3% farmers
5% industry
85% service

On each stage, we get really efficient at the previous stage, and the
'surplus' population is put to work at doing something else.

Ofc, service can then be broken down to different types of services.
The economy will find things for people to do. Pizza delivery is
basically a time saving service so you don't have to make your own
dinner.
.

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