Digest 1105 Msg 7

Amen Tangoman! Any discussion I have about people settling space usually dies in when it gets compared to anything Earthside. Want to live under the ocean - its cheap by comparison. Want to live in Greenland or Antarctica - its pretty cheap as well. Want to live in space - well that is more expensive than a penthouse in Trump tower downtown New York. I don't see where anyone is going to be handing those out anytime soon. The one thing you can't get a decent comparison to on earth is power generation. Wind, Terrestrial solar, etc doesn't get you anywhere near what the world population currently uses in the forms of burning fossil carbon or nuclear material. Once the joyride is over you will have to go into space just to stay equal with todays energy production. In reality some conservation will kick in and people will forgo bigger houses, bigger cars, airfreight vegetables, etc simply because they cost to much. That means the path to settlement is AFTER you have satified the thrist of the people on earth for energy and in doing so have beaten the launch and space habitat costs down to something that a middle class person could afford. You've got a red hot market for electricity right now around the world so this is not so to-be-thought of export between space settlements and Earth. Or if you wish to save on launch costs there is always Malibu... Cheers, Thor

> 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 circularlogic (and fatal flaw) in the Mars settlement promoter's scenario;
> that we're going to build settlements on Mars because we're goingt 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.

TangoMan