As for the financial aspect I’d point out that every time humanity has ventured out and explored the world around it the profits have been huge. Whether it's the technology from the space program or spices from the Americas exploration has always turned a profit.
In this case being able to create a self sustaining enviornment in orbit is the first step to creating a self sustaining enviornment that can move beyond our orbit. That in turn is the first step in humanity's continued exploration of the universe we live in and the value of that is immeasurable.
There are two paths to space: governments and private sector. The government path doesn't seem to have made a huge dent in the colonization goal over the last fifty years. It's almost as if we've lost ground since the Apollo program ended. And the reality of the "golden age" of space exploration is that the funding of the program was driven more by the need to beat the USSR than it was by the vision of space exploration as a worthy goal for humanity.
As for the private sector, the issue there is that huge profits could be made, but the risks are way too high and the timeline is way too long. The handful of companies that could afford it are already making huge profits here on earth in things they understand and their shareholders are apt to take a dim view of those companies risking billions of dollars with little hope of return within the next couple decades.
Sadly, the best hope for space colonization is either a) breakthrough developments in a tangential technical field that enable cheap access to space (read: nanotech enables construction of space elevator) and/or b) we trash our planet to the point that our survival requires governments to commit everything they have to space colonization.
We have lost ground since the Apollo program ended. At that time, we had some functional boosters left - they've been rusting in Florida since then. We also had the tooling to make more of the whole stack, but that tooling was intentionally destroyed as part of the Shuttle program. We have lost other material things.
The biggest loss is probably that we've lost the belief that we should go to space.
Geeks seem to have this funny blindspot when it comes to premature optimization if the premature optimization is something that would make for a good sci-fi novel.
Your somewhat glib response reminds me this:
But I should remember, Krauss said, that the long run is a very long time. He told me about a meeting he attended at the Vatican a few years back on the future of the universe: "There were about 15 people, theologians, a few cosmologists, some biologists. The idea was to find common ground, but after three days it was clear that we had nothing to say to one another. When theologians talk about the 'long term,' raising questions about resurrection and such, they're really thinking about the short term. We weren't even on the same plane. When you talk about 10^50 years, the theologians' eyes glaze over.
If you would want to experience another world, you wouldn't want to have your sensors/effectors too far away from your brain. And it doesn't matter if you would be flesh or silicon.
Even planets in our solar system are already too far for remote interaction.
It does matter. It is cheaper to send 100 lbs of computer+powersupply, than to send 10,000 lbs of human+lifesupport.
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you wouldn't want to have your sensors far away from your effectors.
If you existed in silico, why would your sensors need to be far away from your effectors?
Edit: Sorry, I corrected my older comment, it was supposed to say "sensors and effectors far away from brain".
You cannot effectively "be present" [1] at the remote world if your perceive-think-act loop would be spread over large distance.
So even if you would be in silico, you would still need to transfer your actual hardware, not just dumb robots.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presence_%28telepresence%29
If, as I originally posited, humans were to evolve into in silico entities, then human beings (= naked apes) would not exist, would they (other than, perhaps, as specimens on display in zoos)?
Geeks seem to have this funny blindspot when it comes to premature optimization if the premature optimization makes for an interesting problem.
Even if the death of the sun is not imminent, it's still an amusing scenario to toss around.
Whatever is around in six billion years is going to be as different from us as we are from bacteria.
Just because web source code looked a lot different fifteen years ago doesn't mean it'll change considerably fifteen years from now. Mutation can be beneficial, but it can also carry the unfortunate cost of breaking compatibility.
No. [edit: Upon further reflection, I may have misunderstood you. If you simply mean that humans and bacteria have a lot of DNA in common, then I of course agree.]
> there is the possibility that we're already nearly evolutionarily optimal for this universe.
So you think humans are the general solution for the global^Wuniversal optimization problem? Unlikely. Even if we assume that humanity is somehow optimal right now, will this be true in even 100,000 years? A global temperature change of a few degrees or a change in the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere could render us utterly non-optimal.
By way of example, consider that 500 million years ago there was considerably more oxygen in the atmosphere than now. This meant that insects could grow much larger than they are today withought needing to invest resources in lungs to support their body mass (insects lack specialized circulatory organs, generally). But fast forward today and giant insects are a manifestly suboptimal solution. I'm personnally grateful.
I was referring to this: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-humans-...
> So you think humans are the general solution for the global^Wuniversal optimization problem?
It's not that we're physically optimal, but that we're good enough to be able to manipulate heat to an extent that makes metallurgy possible, which allows us to non-trivially optimize our environment to ourselves.
1. We do ourselves in
2. We get hit by a giant asteroid
If Hawaii can attract telecommuters, perhaps Earth orbit can attract telecommuters.
A continuum of accelerations, down to zero g.
Hard vacuum.
A sense of place that is not Earth surface.
For the same reasons that ski bums live near ski slopes, zero-g bums might live near zero-g. When you live in a spinning orbital habitat, you can have rapid inexpensive access - a veritable season pass - to a variety of acceleration levels.
How many people move to, and telecommute from, Hawaii? Who counts them? By contrast, how many people move from Hawaii to the mainland to pursue the same occupation they pursued in Hawaii?
On the other hand, with the lack of distractions, I imagine the Moon would be an incredibly productive locale.
There is excessive latency with satellite internet, which uses GEO satellites. However, satellite internet requires 4 hops. Telecommuting from GEO only requires 2 hops = half the latency. ~23,000 miles x 2 = 46,000 miles. 46,000 miles / 186,000 miles/second = 247 milliseconds of latency (about a quarter of a second).
I guess that is good enough provided your job doesn't involve winning DotA tournaments.
By the way, the top recorded speed of a Bugatti Veyron, the fastest production car in the world, is 253 mph - on the flat. Travelling vertically at that speed, a space elevator car (we might assume it is powered by a 1%-efficient laser-beam stationed on the ground and aimed at photovoltaic panels on the bottom of the elevator car) would take 88 hours (or 3.7 days) to get to GEO.
Thanks for doing the math though :).
http://www.dunnspace.com/leo_on_the_cheap.htm