What math are you on? The entire reason moving the "free" ore in the asteroid belt to Earth is expensive is propellant. If we had cheap interplanetary transport, it would absolutely make sense to mine and return matter.
Which we don’t. And how do you expect to get it? Especially when the ‘cheap’ part is already too expensive to make it cost effective even within our own neighborhood?
That’s the point!
You might as well complain there is no point in being poor when you could just be rich. Or that I could take all vacations I wanted if it was free to take vacations. Thanks?
I mean just looking at the energy expenditure growth rate of Earth, you spend as much energy as kings used to in a day. And there is still an absolutely massive amount of solar energy left to harvest.
Might want to keep workshopping that one.
The best way to extract detailed information about a star system is to colonize it. Remote sensing only goes so far.
Then think for a moment about all the other things we’d probably prefer to do with such a monstrous amount of energy. That’s the opportunity cost, even if that energy is free.
We’re entirely speculating on that colonization part - we’ve never tried it.
A fantasy that even if it happened, would be competing with other things - like powering future air conditioning, or the equivalent of 3D porn, or solving world hunger, or building more aircraft carriers, or the like.
So will never be free or actually infinite eh? That’s the opportunity cost part of the equation.
I propose we should, since any subgroup that doesn't grow will be overshadowed by groups that do. If propensity to reproduce has a genetic component it will be selected for.
I think the underlying question is ‘when would such a course of action (interstellar travel) be more preferable than the alternative’.
We could have growth to near infinity and still have interstellar travel be inferior to all our other options, based on our current understanding of physics.
I’m pointing out that relative benefit and cost matter and tend to drive decisions - and that the massive cost with (currently) no plausible benefit which could outweigh it, makes it unlikely we would end up taking that course.
Unless we discover new physics, or new ‘value’ somewhere which would justify it.*
Energetically, for instance, even if we found a planet of pure most expensive thing we can think of (except perhaps for antimatter, though that is a more complicated discussion) just a few light years away, it would never be economic to go get it based on our current understanding of physics.
Even sending a physical probe would be of dubious value, especially considering everyone who would be alive or benefit from anything it could ever provide (including information) would be long dead before we could even find out if it could talk to us over those distances or had arrived.
This is so obvious, btw, that sci-fi writers always have to come up with new physics (or outlandish extrapolations of current thoughts on potential physics - see the Expanse’s Epstein drive, or Star Trek warp tech and subspace communications) for the story to be even a little plausible or interesting. [http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-dri...]
And it always has to be a mcguffin, because otherwise the whole story falls apart.
For example, in The Expanse, the Rocinante’s drive would have to output 60+ TW of power for even a moderate burn (2G). Something even the most basic mining rockhopper is supposedly capable of, and folks are regularly shown in poverty type living conditions while being those rock hoppers.
The amount of power produced from just that one engine in that universe in an hour or less would be sufficient to distill enough water, power enough hydroponic grow farms, and synthesize enough chemicals, to feed and hydrate literally hundreds of millions of people. Maybe a billion, if sufficiently efficient.
The United States currently consumes a total of 4 trillion Terawatt hours a year [https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect....], and at that engines moderate 60 TW power output level, it would produce energy equivalent to our current entire yearly electrical energy usage every 4 minutes. And they’re shown, in context, doing half that rate as a matter of course for weeks. Even if we converted that to electrical energy in the most absurdly inefficient way possible (boiling water to drive steam turbines), it would produce that degree of electrical power every 15 minutes.
Does the Expanse make any sense at all, if each individual ship is burning more than the energy equivalent of all the clean water, food, drugs, and electrical power the entire Earth needs for a year every single week they operate normally? Or for some of those ships, every minute? Especially when there are shown to be thousands or even hundreds of thousands of such ships operating at once, by a vast array of different powers and interests?
And that Earth, despite having access to all that tech, and building 1000s of those engines (at least), grows crops in open fields and suffers massive famines due to… winter conditions? Due to an asteroid impact? And sometimes just because? And has severe water rationing even for the political elite?
Earth is show to have a pretty dysfunctional (and neglectful) political system, but even they couldn’t pull that degree of insanity off.
And belters worry about using mirrors on Ganymede, when just going to and from Ganymede requires using 4+ orders of magnitude more energy than they would if they used enough grow lights to be getting complaints from Earth about the light pollution.
And a 10,000 year voyage at slow rates to go somewhere that has nothing that justifies the insane cost to do it, with no ability to communicate on timescales equivalent to even the whole of human recorded history, is not a very interesting story. Such a voyage, based on our current track record with technical reliability or social stability is even less likely to succeed.
It’s the economic equivalent of heating your house by burning shovel fulls of $100 bills in your fireplace - because you can’t pay your $150/month heating bill.
Even Mr. Musk eventually decided he’d rather buy Twitter than actually try to colonize Mars, yeah? And relatively speaking, Mars is right there and way friendlier and more interesting in every way than interstellar space.
Actual interstellar space travel seems more and more like the equivalent of the 50’s idealism around powering your hairdryer with a micro-nuclear reactor.
* Notably, sometimes ideology and propaganda can push society into doing really weird things. But even the Crusades had a real macroeconomic and sociological basis for why they needed to happen. So maybe at some point, sending politically problematic ‘colonists’ into space to die will be worth the cost. And some might even make it! Eventually. But chances are, we’ll find more cost effective ways to do it.
There is nothing we are aware of that is even close to expensive/worthwhile enough (except perhaps information) to justify the cost in energy to move it that distance. Even if the energy is essentially free.
Do the math - rocket fuel isn’t very expensive in bulk, but even moving ‘free’ gold, platinum, iridium, etc. is not even close to worth it.
And information can be gathered with telescopes or transmitted with lasers or radio at faster speeds, so why bother with the trek?