From: Mikko Kurki-Suonio <maxxon@s...>
Date: Sat, 13 May 2000 15:44:35 +0300 (EEST)
Subject: OT: Cost of space travel
> Laserlight writes: Excuse me for asking, but did you read Costikyan's article or are you just referring to the title? (Which was about trade, not colonization, but it's still a good reference). Space travel will get cheaper (provided it starts in commercial sense at all) -- but so will almost everything else. It's not that long ago when normal "middle class" people ate vegetarian meals not by choice but because they couldn't afford meat for every meal. If you can get everything you could possibly want from here, for peanuts, why would you bother to export it from West Betelgeuse? > it's going to severly limit our ability to play with little No. I certainly didn't mean to say we should stop playing FT because the premise is not realistic. I meant that taking the premise that wide colonization exists and vast spacefleets duking it out is commonplace, how would that affect the rest of the society? The possibility exists, though, that it can not be reasonably justified. In which case we'd just have to admit that it's science fantasy. It's not necessarily a bad thing. Star Wars is science fantasy, and hugely popular at that. But since we had to break the laws of logic to get there, we can't assume they apply in the future either. E.g. in Star Wars you don't know how long it takes for a light saber to burn through as blast door until George Lucas tells you -- there's no logic in the universe, there's only what you don't know and what you've been told (though this is the goal of some educational systems, it is not representative of the real world ;-)