OT: Cost of space travel

Laserlight writes:
>   Besides, if we stick to the "travel is horribly expensive and
> it takes an $11 billion bottle of wine to justify it" theory,

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
> metal spaceships.

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 ;-)

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