Asteroid Capture Forum: Spacesettlers
Thread: Asteroid Capture
--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "janet_baker76" wrote:
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> > Again though the question is how do we (you, me and others here) advance the ball on space settlement? If we pick cheaper access to space how do we do it? Buy shares of SpaceX or Bigelow? Talk to congressman? Work on subsystems that will be needed in the short term? Give money to space organisations, National Space Society, etc.?
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> > Brooks
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> It's to open a whole can of worms, but both the private business and the government-run solutions have weaknesses. The huge cost makes it really difficult for 'small business' to risk, and who wants to make Halliburton or say BP bigger? And yet the whole government-run solution has proven unworkable, too (as I see it, for reasons outside of the questions and problems surrounding space exploration--for reasons of the 'trustability' of specific governments based on other issues).
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> But what if the government helped form (and initially finance) a 'space cooperative' that citizens could buy shares in? Or rather, that citizens automatically had real shares in? So that the wealth, through ownership, not salary, a very big difference, would go neither to a government nor to a big company, and governance would be by the owners, an elected board, not government.
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> I know there are many details lacking in my one paragraph, but I'm only pointing in a direction; lots of cooperative plans exist; they appear to have worked well, they have often accompanied big water and agriculture projects in the US. It seems to me that if citizens could see some benefit to themselves, support and demand would grow. It's just not too motivating to put any hope in schemes that would strengthen existing players--they've already shown their knickers.
> But that alone isn't enough. We are in a state of economic stagnation with demand down. If we got an asteroid, what would we do with the materials we mined? We can't even sell our recycles right now, if NPR's coverage is right. Demand is down.
Babies do not make demand, shoppers do.
> So it seems to me that we'd enumerate the enemies of demand with as much attention to detail as given to the dynamics of aerobraking. We actually are divided on those details. Most people reading this post are for every measure that insures 'population planning.' Whatever measure or behavior reduces births is deemed 'good' by default. "Freedom."
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> But no. We need population pressure. We need demand that won't be satisfied just by earth, not the tourist demand for a nice view (pictures can satisfy the plebs well enough). We need to grow demand. Instead, all our public policies are in the opposite direction. And just about everyone I know supports them by default, without lining up the effect on space exploration.
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> Against the interests of space exploration. We can't have it both ways. "Planning" always results in decrease of births. That's first. Then there's the plunge. And after--it will be called paranoid to say so--when they see that planning is a misnomer,is in fact impossible, as they recently admitted in South Korea, with its disappearing population, reproduction will be taken out of our wombs altogether.
The world population will rise to 9 billion over the 40 years and then plateau, which will be beyond what nearly all scientists who've studied it say the Earth can sustain. There is no technology that will get large numbers of humans off planet any time soon. We can barely keep 6 people up there much less 600 million. Also the idea of 'creating' demand for an Earth evacuation to space by overpopulation of the only planet we have is like getting 100 strong prison workers by pitting 10,000 against each other until you have only the strongest 100 remaining. Sure you got to your goal but there's alot of carnage in your wake.
Brooks