What timescale are you talking about? I guess it’s asking “are we going to colonize the solar system before growing a lot here on earth?” I agree that seems pretty unlikely though I’m not sure this is the best argument.
My default expectation would be that humans would be motivated to move to space when we’ve expanded enough that doing things on earth is getting expensive—we are running out of space, sunlight, material, or whatever else. You don’t have to extrapolate growth that far before you start having quite severe crunches, so if growth continues (even at the current rate) then it won’t be that long before we are colonizing the solar system.
(Even if people did expand into space before we needed the resources, it wouldn’t matter much since they’d be easily overtaken by later colonists.)
I think we have about 10 more doublings of energy consumption before we’re using most incident solar energy. We’re currently doubling energy use every few decades, so that could sustain a few centuries of growth at the current rate. (Like many folks on LW, I expect growth to accelerate enough that we start running up against those limits within this century though.)
What timescale are you talking about? I guess it’s asking “are we going to colonize the solar system before growing a lot here on earth?” I agree that seems pretty unlikely though I’m not sure this is the best argument.
My default expectation would be that humans would be motivated to move to space when we’ve expanded enough that doing things on earth is getting expensive—we are running out of space, sunlight, material, or whatever else. You don’t have to extrapolate growth that far before you start having quite severe crunches, so if growth continues (even at the current rate) then it won’t be that long before we are colonizing the solar system.
(Even if people did expand into space before we needed the resources, it wouldn’t matter much since they’d be easily overtaken by later colonists.)
We won’t run out of space, material, or energy on Earth in any meaningful sense for a long time (when adding substitution and recycling possibilities), especially as growth seems to be in the services sector. My old post is related: http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2011/11/we-dont-have-a-problem-with-water-food-or-energy/ ; since then, most of the technologies I talked about have gotten cheaper.
The early expansion might pay the large fixed costs, allowing economically viable expansion to start much sooner...
I think we have about 10 more doublings of energy consumption before we’re using most incident solar energy. We’re currently doubling energy use every few decades, so that could sustain a few centuries of growth at the current rate. (Like many folks on LW, I expect growth to accelerate enough that we start running up against those limits within this century though.)