Comments by "Fredinno" (@innosam123) on "The Geopolitics of Space Colonization part 2(feat. Isaac Arthur)." video.

  1. I’m fairly certain space colonization is unlikely within the century. The costs, even under the most optimistic estimates (ie. Elon’s Starship ‘aspirational’ launch costs) are too high for any private company to justify or finance- and there’s not enough of a public push to allow it to happen (as seen by NASA’s generally inflation-adjusted stagnant budget.) For example, even assuming a $2M launch cost for the Starship, just launching 1 Million to Mars (incl. 3 cargo flights/100) costs $60B. Going by F9 costs/kg, and extrapolating it out to Starship, you get something like $9 Trillion. That’s a completely useless range of costs, but even if we saw current launch prices drop by 10x (even under the most optimistic estimates, SpaceX only ever accomplished 2-3x cost reductions- under pessimistic estimates, within 20%<), that’s still $900B. Only a handful of companies, even under an extremely bloated capital market, are valued higher than a trillion. A government could finance it- but that can only happen if there’s near unanimous support or someone with a ton of political clout, popularity, and competence like a HW Bush/LBJ/Reagan, to force it though (HW tried in OTL, but it was fairly half-hearted.) We’ve been waiting for a century at this point. There is also little need for the resources of space in any near-term scenario. We’re not even remotely close to being K-1, and over 80% of the Earth’s surface is basically unmined. Just the sunlight falling on the Sahara dwarfs current world energy consumption- let alone that falling on the Pacific. There’s also actually likely overproduction of foodstuffs in the Americas. The human population are more likely to decrease in the medium term before they start increasing again.
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