My point was of course we think we are significant. Bacteria probably think they are significant too.
I’m fairly certain bacteria do not think, no more than rocks do. Dogs and cats and apes have some awareness, but thinking that their species has any cosmic significance – impossible; they can’t even comprehend the necessary concepts.
Isn’t there some way of coupling reentry of materials to ascent? I could imagine a large supply of rocks (or industrial scrap) being hauled to the terminus of the elevator, then dropped down, while at the same time lifting payloads.
As most of the source material here seems to be science fiction fantasy, I feel it’s necessary for a business guy to check in.
The only use space has for any practical terrestrial application is:
-Taking satelite imagery of Earth
-Unobstructed imagery and other scientific analysis of anything not on Earth
-GPS and other communications
and that is pretty much it.
Space tourism is not a viable industry in any form. It is an indulgance of a handful of super wealthy attention seeking people. There will not be hotels in space unless there are also permenant colonies in space. Which leads me to my next statement:
There will not be permenant colonies in space. As crowded as Earth gets, you could at best put only a small fraction of people in space. It will take far more resources to maintain a colony of 100,000 people in space than it would take to maintain them here on Earth. And since all those resources come from Earth anyway, there is no benefit. If you could create self-contained habitats of 100,000s or millions of people, you don’t need to put them in space anyway. You could build them here on Earth.
And speaking of resources, there is nothing more impractical than mining asteroids for nickle or iron. We already live on a giant ball of nickle and iron called Earth. How would you put something likethis in orbit to mine asteroids and deliver it’s cargo safely back to Earth?
Not with a “space elevator”. Ok, so you can get stuff to and from Earth orbit. Great. Now what? There’s now a new moon in the form of a 300,000 ton ore carrier in orbit. You still need figure out how to move the damn thing around the solar system. I think that 50 trillion dollars might be better spent elsewhere.
Nah, there’s room for some smale scale, high value product manufacture. Things like space beads and catalyst substrates made of foamed metal.
In the age of European colonial imperialism, colonies never really relieved population pressure in Europe, either. That’s not what they were for.
Why would the resources have to come from Earth?
The point is not to deliver the materials to Earth, but to deliver them to Earth’s immediate neighborhood for use there. The space elevator just makes it possible for humanity to get a permanent toehold off Earth’s surface.
BrainGlutton’s got a point. The argument msmith537 is pretty much identical for both space and the Americas. Certainly, you can ship gold back, but we see how much good that did in the long run for Spain. The real money is moving onwards and upwards.
You don’t put it in orbit, you build it in orbit. Assuming you actually need a cargo ship, as opposed to nudging a desired asteroid in the direction where it’s needed and then grabbing on to it once it gets there. But once there’s enough manufacturing hardware in orbit, you can build anything big you need out of space-derived materials – build it in free fall, with humans and/or teleoperated robots.