What off-Earth resources? (was Because that's whethe people are)

On 3/9/12 1:05 AM, hitssquad wrote:

> > Ultimately the population off Earth will vastly outnumber the
> population on it.
>
> That was essentially the claim the original question "Why?" was
> addressed to.

True enough.

> Also, I'm not sure it's compatible with your earlier claim:
>
> "But if we're going for realistic, we should probably speculate that
> by the time space colonies become practical in any serious way, we'll
> probably already have mind uploading"

Sure it is; uploads are people too!

> Where would these quintillions (you did say "vastly outnumber") of
> off-Earth people get their nitrogen -- from Titan and Triton?

I'm not sure we have to go to quintillions -- even trillions would count
as vastly outnumbering (anything over a couple orders of magnitude
counts in my book!).

Looking at nitrogen as a limiting factor is interesting, though since
you've brought up mind uploading again, it's worth noting that such
folks don't need any (and yes, I expect uploads to vastly outnumber
biological humans within a couple centuries).

> > The rest of the solar system is [...] full of resources
>
> The mystery remains what those resources might be. There's hydrogen and
> helium in the gas giants, though that's unavailable until starlifting
> technology is developed (yes, I'm calling the gas giants stars -- small,
> cold stars).

Well, if you're going to call them that, then "starlifting" is pretty
easy. If we have fusion rockets (possibly based on the polywell reactor
research currently going on in San Diego), then a crude method would be
to simply launch payloads of liquified hydrogen (and He, if there's a
market for that) by rocket. A better method would be to build a big
linear accelerator, floating buoyantly, and launching hypervelocity
cargo carriers. Sure there are engineering details to be worked out,
but nothing that looks like a show-stopper. And those are just the
first two methods that spring into the mind of some software engineer
before he starts his day; I'm sure there are better ones.

> There might be a lot of platinum-group metals in the asteroids -- whose
> value might crash if anyone actually started mining them, negating one
> of the reasons for doing the mining.

There are indeed a lot of those, and their value is based not just on
the supply, but also the demand -- and, if they're useful for something,
then trillions of people will add up to a lot of demand.

But this misses the point: the cost of everything almost certainly WILL
continue to go down, as we open up new supplies of them, and that's a
good thing. That's the abundance we're talking about.

In addition to the raw materials, space itself (i.e. volume) should be
considered a resource. Some people, at least, want room to spread out
and put some distance between themselves and others, and that's gotten
darned difficult to find on Earth.

Then there's energy -- the Sun puts out an awful lot of it, which is (to
a good first approximation) currently streaming off into interstellar
space, completely wasted. Of course if we do get practical fusion, it
may be easier to carry our own mini-stars with us than to harvest the
output of the Sun. But then we still need something (probably hydrogen)
for fuel, and while there's a lot of that on Earth, there's even more in
the rest of the solar system.

Best,
- Joe