I think the argument can be reformulated like this: space has very large absolute amounts of some resources—matter, energy, distance (distance is a kind of resource useful for isolation/safety). The average density of these resources is very low (solar in space is within an order of magnitude of solar on Earth) and for matter it is often low-grade (Earth’s geophysics has created convenient ores). Hence matter and energy collection will only be profitable if (1) access gets cheap, (2) one can use automated collection with a very low marginal cost—plausibly robotic automation. (2) implies that a lot of material demands on Earth can be fulfilled that way too on Earth, making the only reason to go to space that one can get very large absolute amounts of stuff. That is fairly different from most material economics on Earth.
Typical ways of getting around this is either claiming special resources, like the Helium-3 lunar mining proposals (extremely doubtful; He3 fusion requires you to have solved lower energy fusion, which has plentiful fuels), or special services (zero gravity manufacturing, military, etc). I have not yet seen any convincing special resource, and while nice niche services may exist (obviously comms, monitoring and research; tourism? high quality fibre optics? military use?) they seem to be niche and near-Earth—not enough to motivate settling the place.
So I end up roughly with Stuart: the main reasons to actually settle space would be non-economic. That leads to another interesting question: do we have good data or theory for how often non-economic settlement occurs and works?
I think one interesting case study is Polynesian island settlement. The cost of exploratory vessels were a few percent of the local economy, but the actual settlement effort may have been somewhat costly (especially in people). Yet this may have reduced resource scarcity and social conflict: it was not so much an investment in getting another island as getting more of an island to oneself (and avoiding that annoying neighbour).
I think the argument can be reformulated like this: space has very large absolute amounts of some resources—matter, energy, distance (distance is a kind of resource useful for isolation/safety). The average density of these resources is very low (solar in space is within an order of magnitude of solar on Earth) and for matter it is often low-grade (Earth’s geophysics has created convenient ores). Hence matter and energy collection will only be profitable if (1) access gets cheap, (2) one can use automated collection with a very low marginal cost—plausibly robotic automation. (2) implies that a lot of material demands on Earth can be fulfilled that way too on Earth, making the only reason to go to space that one can get very large absolute amounts of stuff. That is fairly different from most material economics on Earth.
Typical ways of getting around this is either claiming special resources, like the Helium-3 lunar mining proposals (extremely doubtful; He3 fusion requires you to have solved lower energy fusion, which has plentiful fuels), or special services (zero gravity manufacturing, military, etc). I have not yet seen any convincing special resource, and while nice niche services may exist (obviously comms, monitoring and research; tourism? high quality fibre optics? military use?) they seem to be niche and near-Earth—not enough to motivate settling the place.
So I end up roughly with Stuart: the main reasons to actually settle space would be non-economic. That leads to another interesting question: do we have good data or theory for how often non-economic settlement occurs and works?
I think one interesting case study is Polynesian island settlement. The cost of exploratory vessels were a few percent of the local economy, but the actual settlement effort may have been somewhat costly (especially in people). Yet this may have reduced resource scarcity and social conflict: it was not so much an investment in getting another island as getting more of an island to oneself (and avoiding that annoying neighbour).
I agree with that reformulation.
Weren’t the early british and french colonies in North America driven by geopolitics rather than economics?