this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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It sounds like they should be more careful with how they store their methane.
I do want to stress though, that I think that space technology is the single most important subject we can focus on, except maybe medical. If extravagant trips for billionaire's can fund a bunch of it for now, that's fine by me. Only really means that governments should be doing more.
Every day, the sun emits roughly a billion times more energy than the earth uses. That is, all our technology, all our food, all animals, all plants and all the energy needed to create all weather combined consumes about one billionth of the sun's output. The rest is sent into deep space.
This waste of the sun's energy is so vast, that we as a species absolutely want to start capturing more of it as soon as possible, rather than squabbling in the mud for fractions of the 0.0000001% of the sun's output the earth uses today. Obviously we need our planet to survive until then, but getting proper infrastructure in orbit and beyond is such a massive game changer.
I agree to some of it, but also disagree on other parts.
Energy availability, in the future of humanity, will not be the constraining factor. There will be enoigh electric energy from solar panels on planetary surfaces (be it Earth or others). Resources (mining, plants) will be the constraining factor for economy.
Be that as it may, my main point would be that basic orbital and interplanetary infrastructure is an incredibly worthwhile investment since it will allow us to start tapping into energy collection, as well as mining, of a different order of magnitude than we currently have access to on earth :)
Yeah, my point was kinda that you would need to land on a solid surface to mine metals. But now that I think about it, it could also be done on asteroids.