Chunnel as metaphor (was Bootstrapping Hawaii)

> We can boil it down to two possibilities. A) Something that already
> has a presence in the Terrestrial economy and which is known to exist in
> greater quantity or to be more easily manufactured in space. As of yet,
> there is no gold in space, and we have found no zero-gravity silk.

But remember the terrestrial economy is a lot more than mining
and even manufacturing. Look at the largest sectors of economic
activity - for example from the US Census Bureau Economic Census
numbers: http://www.census.gov/epcd/www/econ97.html

Manufacturing, with a payroll of $572 billion in 1997, is the
biggest sector; Health care and social assistance comes next
at $378 billion; next come finance and insurance, retail trade,
wholesale trade, and professional, scientific and technical services,
each in the $200 to $300 billion range. Mining is actually one
of the smallest payroll areas, at $20 billion/year, and sales are
not so large either; that may be in part because our highest-cost
resources (oil in particular) are imported, rather than mined in the US.
But still, there's a lot more to the economy than mining...

Within manufacturing, the highest payroll and sales areas are
transportation equipment (cars, trucks, aerospace), computer
and electronic products, machinery and fabricated metal products,
and (esp. in sales) chemicals and food.

We probably won't be manufacturing cars in space any time soon;
anything involving complex chemical or mechanical processes seems
difficult to imagine in an early space industrial center. But
who really knows? The economic census at least gives you a picture
of what people are willing to pay for right now...

Arthur