Manifesto of the Cornucopians — a coda about Space Colonization

Robert Mitchell remarks, in re a conversation about the Malthusian limits on human population growth:

You don’t have to see the worlds wilderness converted to farm land. There is lots of room in the oceans, and if we get enough surplus, L-5 colonies, the Moon, Venus, Mars, and more. All of this is possible with current technology. If you are worried about things going wrong, then we definitely need more people. More people = more surplus = spaceflight = terraforming. There will always be problems, space would make a good firebreak.

 

My comment: I did not even mention space colonization in my little essay on Cornucopianism, only because that makes the whole problem of the limits of Malthus moot, even ridiculous, for any society rich enough to send people and gear out of Earth’s gravity well, and clever enough to exploit the endless — literally endless — natural resources of the Final Frontier.

Blow the moon into chunks of rock, give Earth a ring like Saturn, and hollow out the resulting asteroids, spin them for gravity, and just add air, soil, and water and VOILA! You and your family can live in cramped misery equal to the privates the crew of a submarine enjoy, with the additional knowledge that riot, war, or engineering failure could cause a power outage. Power outages on Earth mean you find candles and talk with your neighbors while sitting on the porch. Power outages aboard the O’Neill colony means you keep checking a medical readout clamped to your baby’s ear to check on oxygen content in the bloodstream. 

But I am a bit of a sceptic (despite my love of science fiction) of space colonization in the near future. The technical and economic hurtles to be cleared just look too steep to me. Why build a base on the moon, when it is cheaper to build in Antarctica? And why build in Antarctica, when vast acres in Patagonia, or even Chile, are unoccupied? Would not it be easier to move to New Mexico, and try to find (or gene-engineer) a form of cactus that can be grown and consumed in a cost-effective fashion? 

I can imagine technologies that could change the cost-benefit ratio of space colonization, but I cannot imagine them being found in the near term.

Antigravity, for example, would be a nice way to lower the cost of moving mass from surface to orbit, but then again so would a flying unicorn that shoots floaty rainbows from her magic horn.

In the near future we will have to make due with space elevators or skyhooks or groundbased launching lasers or railguns or something. Chemical rockets ain’t the wagontrain to the planets we were hoping they’d be.