Digest 1105 Msg 7

> I think this is the correct way to view this:

> Firstly, we can all agree that building orbital habitats to build
> orbital habitats is begging the question. It's the same circular
> logic (and fatal flaw) in the Mars settlement promoter's scenario;
> that we're going to build settlements on Mars because we're going
to > economically develop Mars which we'll need to do to support all
those > settlers coming to Mars.

I never bought O'Neill's comments about the "habitat building" phase
for it rings too close to the Mars scenario you wrote above.

Building orbital land area for people to move to, without an economic
reason for them to want to build land area in orbit just doesn't make
sense.

Think of it this way: Whichever group builds the first Habitat will
have control over an impressive array of productive assets already in
orbit. They will have a workforce/population experienced at what they
do, and business models/contracts that are already established.

So they build another habitat with some of their spare capacity and
sell it to another country. Now we're at the Mars scenario. The
country sends up settlers and they are going to orbit to do what? They
have no prodcutive assets with which to generate trade income with
Earth/mother country. On the flip side, why after making the long,
painful, high barrier to entry, slog via bootstrapping to establishing
orbital commerce and civilization will the original group just hand
over the keys to the kingdom to another group thus lowering the
barriers to entry for the new group? That new group, now that they
have a nice Habitat to live in have a much easier task to either buy
raw materials and process them or go out and establish their own
mining/retreival operations and the end result is downward competitive
pressure on the principal industry that supplies foreign exchange for
orbital civilization and that allows them to maintain a semblence of
balance of payments that facilitate the importation of the multitude
of goods that can't be sourced in orbit.

It wouldn't surprise me if this Habitat building model would lead to a
real estate bubble phenomena where Habitats are built and paid for,
new settlers move up, the increased productive capacity crashes prices
for export goods resulting in less demand for people in orbit and a
surplus of Habitat land as people move back to greener economic
pastures on Earth and Habitat construction ceases altogether until the
inventory of orbital real estate clears.

More likely, I think, is that growth would follow an organic path,
mostly, but not entirely, driven by yet unrealized economic demand.
The Habitat growth cycle would remain under the auspices of the
original construction group so as not to slit their own throats by
enabling their competitors to more cheaply, or efficiently, set up
their own orbital supply chain. In this regard, Habitat growth would
always be preceded by demand and would not be entirely speculative as
the "Mars Scenario."

Frankly, if I was in charge, there's no way I'd build a Habitat and
sell it to another group thereby lowering the barriers to entry for
the new settlers to establish material supply chains, and
manufacturing centers by not having to claw their way up the gravity
well and bootstrap themselves up the infrastructure ladder. I'd rather
use those resources to grow the potential of my own group and let the
settlers profit instead.

Lastly, perhaps it would help to think of it this way. Microsoft
builds Windows XP. Leave aside the facts that early in the story they
bought DOS and let's just assume that they built the code entirely on
their own, line by line. They bootstrapped up to Windows XP. Now they
get to sell their product and their competitors have to go through the
same grueling process if they want to enter the OS market. Now, kick
in the "Mars Scenario" and Microsoft can make easy money by selling
the actual Windows XP code to competitors so that they don't have to
start from scratch. After a time, there would be a whole slew of
competitors to Windows XP that are indistinguishable from the
original. What would this do to Microsoft's long term potential? Sure,
they'd have to compete for business, which many of us would like, but
why would Microsoft willing kill the golden goose? To reinvigorate a
stagnant culture by going on a diet of bread and water?

TangoMan