New Member

>
> I think one point we can all agree on is that if person "A" is talking
> about reducing the cost for a pound to orbit, person "B" is talking
> about High Frontier with SPS as the business plan, and person "C" is
> talking about Mars settlements, person "A" is discussing the most
> near-term and critical issue. I can see the argument that he's the most
> practical, attacking the immediate problem. But persons "B" and "C" are
> equally-far-out in terms of their projections, and the only distinction
> between them is that person "B" is trying to work inside the
> requirements of economics while "C" is leaving that out of his
> projections.
>

But not all decisions are purely economic -- otherwise we'd all live in the
parking lots where we work. In the 50s there was a man who moved to a lake
in Northern Canada, lived in a cabin he built himself, got married and
raised two kids, fought off moose with a two-edged axe, built an DC
electrical generating station out of a car generator and a wooden
paddlewheel under a waterfall (with "bearings" made of scorched birch
lubricated with bear fat), and generally lived "off the grid" to the best
of his ability. He might have made the money he needed to buy bullets and
foodstuffs he couldn't grow or catch by trapping and fishing. It sounded
like great adventure (which I liked) and hard work (which I didn't), but
certainly from a purely economic point of view, living in the tundra wasn't
his most efficient use of time and energy. He went there because he wanted
to. Should he have been dragged back to a city and put to work for his own good?

There perhaps will be some people who end up residing on Mars simply
because they want to. When they do, they'll find some way to make a living
there. (No, I don't know what it is. I haven't been there yet.) Their
economic decisions will be focused on "What do I have to do in order to
stay, without ruining the reason I came?" rather than "How can I maximize
my profit?"

Steve