> The same thing that led people to spend months in sailing ships traveling around the world a few centuries ago
The only real equivalent I can think of was the Arctic/Antarctic exploration. However that was massively cheaper and the environment was much more hospitable and not particularly profitable (and they couldn't send drones etc.). Most prior ventures had very practical goals and motivations and were mostly seeking a direct profit even if it didn't always work out.
> have a reasonable expectation of profit
Mainly through government funding though. The only directly profit generating activity that exists is launching satellites which on itself wouldn't really justify all the investment.
> The only directly profit generating activity that exists is launching satellites which on itself wouldn't really justify all the investment.
In the very short-term, yes. In the mid-term, there's a lucrative industry of space tourism yet to be built. In the long-term, there are riches beyond our imagination to be exploited from asteroids and other Solar System objects. All of this should be motivating enough for companies, welwala.
>That's like going back to the 17th century and decrying the exploration of the New World because you're not certain just how much gold there may be and you can't predict what the New World economy might look like.
No it isn't. Exploration of the new world offered obvious substantive benefits - the trees alone were priceless to a countries that had to manage forests very carefully, not to mention new and useful crops coupled with an abundance of land. In short, it was a no-brainer.
And it was extremely cheap compared to building space infrastructure, since food could be grown or purchased from the natives, there was air, sunburn was the only radiation problem.
In space we'll have none of that. There are unsettled regions on earth far more hospitable to human life than anything we'll find outside our gravity well. The idea we ought to sink trillions of dollars into and infrastructure to produce things that are already good enough is hard to justify.
> I think of everything like a commissioned trip to a new continent
It's a great model for the exploration business (or fields similar to it, such as construction projects, entertainment production and so on). It's not applicable to every single industry though.
> SpaceX wants to shuttle settlers to Mars for $500,000 a ticket, with loans available that could be worked off.
Woah. From the 15th - 18th century, colonization of the 'New World' was the equivalent of today's space ventures. There were innovations in funding (joint-stock ventures), technology (vessels that could cross dangerous ocean environments & navigation technology), and in the European perspective, a sense of mystery about a voyage into the unknown. It was seen as a way to start life over, and if you couldn't afford to pay the passage (5 pounds in 1650 is roughly $16030 - $307285 today) you would indenture for a master to work off the debt. Sound familiar?
>Opponents would argue that space research (specifically exploring other planets) is a very expensive way to do basic research
I'd agree with that. Generally, it would seem that the most efficient way to research something is to research it, not to pursue some other scientific endeavor and hope that it throws off some ancillary benefit.
So, I actually think that argument for space exploration is sometimes a bit of a short-sighted ruse to sell space exploration. It should instead be sold on its merits and a broader vision.
> It is hard to convey how “sustainable” this feels to me. For the first time, humans have gone into orbit in a spacecraft that was designed from the ground up to be a commercial venture.
I understand your sentiment, but I’m also profoundly unsettled by the idea that commerce and capitalism are reaching beyond the clutches of our planet. Today is definitely a threshold, but what that threshold means, in a broader sense, is not clear to me.
As liberals we celebrate the entrepreneurial slam-dunk and as technologists we admire the elegant engineering.
But maybe I’m jaded, but I fear the profit motive is going too far. We live in a truly extraordinary moment socioeconomically. Never before in the history of mankind had so much activity been predicated upon commercial viability — and never before had so much gone undone simply because it is unprofitable.
Spacefaring nations’ governments have not abdicated spaceflight, and indeed they’re likely to militarise their approach ever more. But now we have private enterprise ferrying people up there too.
“Sustainable”... what a funny word. When have commercial ventures ever been “sustainable”? A sustainable commercial venture tends to be one that externalises most of its costs (look at the sustainability of bulwarks of 20th century commercial ventures, such as the automotive industry and its bedfellow oil & gas).
I will say I’m glad that manned spaceflight is no longer the prerogative of a couple of extraordinarily well-heeled superpowers. But...
> Given that, why do I still think that the flood of money being thrown at this tech is dumb, and that most of it will be lost? Partly just because of that flood. When financial decision makers throw loads of money at things they don’t understand, lots of it is always lost.
This is a common take, it feels like a not-cynical-actually-smart counter to the hype train.
I think that take is missing something -- that this is how capitalism pays for fast learning.
You have a space entirely unexploited, you give million pioneering fortune seekers shovels and ignite exploration across the whole unexplored surface area. Most will quickly discover they're unsuited to exploring, or picking at dirt with there's nothing to find here, some will find fools gold and labor over it until they realize it won't buy land, and a couple will strike oil instead of gold and build an entirely new economy generating unfathomable wealth.
On the whole, no money was "lost", even without mentioning overcoming costs of delay since this got the exploration done the fastest.
I'm not saying this is more efficient than centrally planned 5 year programs (though in practice it probably is), but it does seem more effective at learning a new thing fast ...
... and getting from “exploration to exploitation” the fastest.
>>These adventures require so much energy that they will only ever be availible to an elite nanopercent of the population
The cost of launching to space has declined by orders of magnitude over the last 50 years and can be expected to decline by orders of magnitude more in the coming decades.
At one point, air travel was reserved for the richest of the rich, and today hundreds of millions of people fly every year. There's no reason the same couldn't happen with space flight.
> the big bucks are in space activities not space transportation
This is an opinion, not a fact. They are presently in transportation. Moreover, the space mining and manufacturing pitch has been made (incorrectly) for at least forty years. I have yet to see a convincing business model for any of these activities, even assuming cheaper launch costs.
> IMO, the original moon landings didn’t make a lot of sense
The Space Race made perfect sense. It was a political exercise. a proxy for war between nuclear powers. As long as civilizations have existed they've built monuments and undertaken massive tasks as a political exercise.
> ... why should we stop them?
Who said anything about stopping them? My argument is it won't happen because the costs are so high and there's no hope of a return from that.
People like to bring up human exploration as some kind of argument but every aspect of human exploration has been an economic activity. In the Middle Ages, European colonialism was pure exploitation. Columbus's famous journey West was to find a faster way to India... for exploitation.
There is literally nothing we could produce or extract on Mars that would make economic sense to bring back to Earth.
> ...second habitable home for humanity [...] or exploration for its own sake. None of these are particularly compelling given the economics behind them.
So this is what economics has done to "going boldly"? No wonder it's called dismal science ;-)
But seriously, diversification of our real estate beyond a single small planet seems like a necessity given the scale of the potential losses in case (X) happens.
Exploration for its own sake seems like a perfectly valid reason too whether done for touristic or scientific purposes.
As for ROI on space exploration, I wouldn't say it's terrible. It's just that we're short lived creatures and we like our returns fast. Space exploration is a very long term investment with potentially huge returns in far future.
> I would love to see all the energy put into space exploration to simply be put in rehabilitating existing land.
Quote from my past posts [1] on this point:
> It's impossible to predict what tech can come out of such efforts that will be of use here on Earth in the future. The amount of money going to space exploration is peanuts so I think it's well justified if it has even a trace of potential to improve future of humanity and that has been true historically - e.g. satellites (GPS, weather, etc), medicine (MRI), and whole bunch of NASA spinoffs and more.
> I think SpaceX to date has received less than 10 billion (say 20 to be safe) in total for everything! That's 20 years of research, development, coming up with never done before re-usable rockets, etc.
> People spent nearly half a trillion dollars (not billion) on cosmetic products in a single year! You want to point fingers, point at something you can actually locate. Money spent on space is negligible to the point that it doesn't even warrant justifying spending it.
The only real equivalent I can think of was the Arctic/Antarctic exploration. However that was massively cheaper and the environment was much more hospitable and not particularly profitable (and they couldn't send drones etc.). Most prior ventures had very practical goals and motivations and were mostly seeking a direct profit even if it didn't always work out.
> have a reasonable expectation of profit
Mainly through government funding though. The only directly profit generating activity that exists is launching satellites which on itself wouldn't really justify all the investment.
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