Why don't we have an orbital ring?

[Patroklos]

Remember when Shell spent many billions on Arctic Ocean oil drilling only to have to pull out of the endeavor because it wasn't going to be profitable for them? As far as I know there are still Shell stations around.

Industrial risk on that scale is not an uncommon thing. It can take half a decade to get an aluminum smelter up and running. New nuclear power plants can take over a decade. It can be done, you just have to balance the incentives vs the costs. The trick is the demand. I don't see a terrestrial demand for any space based material that can't be satiated from terrestrial sources. If you can create a space sourced demand on the the other hand..

[Zeropoint]

I guess I'm sort of just *assuming* that there will eventually be space industry with a space demand for space materials, because the alternative is to believe that for the first time in the history of humanity, we'll have seen a new frontier and said, "nah, I'd rather stay home."

[jwl]

I guess I'm sort of just *assuming* that there will eventually be space industry with a space demand for space materials, because the alternative is to believe that for the first time in the history of humanity, we'll have seen a new frontier and said, "nah, I'd rather stay home."

Well, we've been doing deep sea diving for a long time now but there aren't a great deal of deep-sea settlements.

[Adam Reynolds]

I guess I'm sort of just *assuming* that there will eventually be space industry with a space demand for space materials, because the alternative is to believe that for the first time in the history of humanity, we'll have seen a new frontier and said, "nah, I'd rather stay home."

Well, we've been doing deep sea diving for a long time now but there aren't a great deal of deep-sea settlements.

But there is also less of a reason to do so as it is so much closer. Even the Marianas Trench is only 11 km down.

By comparison it is at the absolute best 56 million km to get to Mars, which is the easiest proper destination in the solar system. That requires a much more permanent presence to do anything serious.

[Purple]

Remember when Shell spent many billions on Arctic Ocean oil drilling only to have to pull out of the endeavor because it wasn't going to be profitable for them? As far as I know there are still Shell stations around.

You can always pull counterexamples out of a hat. But a few examples a trend don't make. Especially not in the case of the oil industry. Oil is a resource everyone needs with a basically unlimited and unquenchable demand. So oil companies can blow huge amounts of money on anything that smells like it will get them oil and even if they fail they can fall back to selling oil.

Industrial risk on that scale is not an uncommon thing. It can take half a decade to get an aluminum smelter up and running. New nuclear power plants can take over a decade. It can be done, you just have to balance the incentives vs the costs. The trick is the demand. I don't see a terrestrial demand for any space based material that can't be satiated from terrestrial sources. If you can create a space sourced demand on the the other hand..

Infrastructure projects like that are different. Nobody expects to have their money back from a nuclear power plant in a year or two. And again, everybody needs power. Just what is it that we could reasonably demand from space that we don't have on earth in great quantities already? I simply do not see space as offering any sort of resource that could ever produce such a high demand that it becomes profitable to mine it. At least not in the foreseeable future.

But there is also less of a reason to do so as it is so much closer. Even the Marianas Trench is only 11 km down.

By comparison it is at the absolute best 56 million km to get to Mars, which is the easiest proper destination in the solar system. That requires a much more permanent presence to do anything serious.

So there is less incentive to profit of a thing that's easier to get to? I don't get it.

[jwl]

Note that it's not just under the ocean, we don't have any settlements on Antarctica bar some research bases either. I mean, it does better than space does, but it's still not exactly populating the new frontier. Space is not the only new frontier where we decided we would rather stay at home.

[Guardsman Bass]

In Antarctica's case, though, there's a treaty involved that heavily limits commercial activity on the continent. If it didn't exist and the continent was carved up among a couple of countries, you'd probably have mining companies down there, oil drilling companies down there, and so forth - along with possibly a small town to service them if the number of personnel gets into the hundreds or thousands.

As for space, a lot of it depends on whether it eventually becomes cheap enough for groups of humanity to try it out, assuming they want to (notice that there are pretty few takers despite a lot of talk for sea-stedding on Earth). I personally tend to think that space colonies will grow slowly or gradually shrink, assuming they ever get founded at all. There's a lot of romanticism about it that won't survive the realities of what it means to colonize a hyper-desert like Mars.

[Adam Reynolds]

So there is less incentive to profit of a thing that's easier to get to? I don't get it.

Because it is so far away it would require a longer term presence to do anything of value. If we are going to send an astronaut to Mars for one month it would make more sense to send him for several. And eventually it would make more sense to start looking at a long term presence.

There is also no intrinsic advantage to establishing a permanent settlement in the oceans or Antarctica. Establishing one on Mars would give humanity a safety net, if a limited one, against something wiping humanity if anything were to happen to Earth. Though whatever profits exist would only occur after governments bear the initial costs. It's just like the exploration of the New World, the first explorers were not funded by companies, they were founded by governments.

[jwl]

So there is less incentive to profit of a thing that's easier to get to? I don't get it.

Because it is so far away it would require a longer term presence to do anything of value. If we are going to send an astronaut to Mars for one month it would make more sense to send him for several. And eventually it would make more sense to start looking at a long term presence.

There is also no intrinsic advantage to establishing a permanent settlement in the oceans or Antarctica. Establishing one on Mars would give humanity a safety net, if a limited one, against something wiping humanity if anything were to happen to Earth. Though whatever profits exist would only occur after governments bear the initial costs. It's just like the exploration of the New World, the first explorers were not funded by companies, they were founded by governments.

I'm not sure what scenario you are envisioning where something so bad happens to the earth that it damages someone living at the bottom of the ocean. Minus their supplies getting cut off of course, but the same would happen to someone on mars.

[Sea Skimmer]

Remember when Shell spent many billions on Arctic Ocean oil drilling only to have to pull out of the endeavor because it wasn't going to be profitable for them? As far as I know there are still Shell stations around.

Industrial risk on that scale is not an uncommon thing.

They spent more like 1 billion dollars. An actual production well with a platform would have been a few billion. Against corporations with yearly revenue as high as 200 billion dollars that kind of risk is not that not very relevant as it is hedged against dozens of other exploration projects.

It can take half a decade to get an aluminum smelter up and running.

Sure, and a smelter and mine project is probably not over about 5 billion dollars of investment, and has very well defined risks, almost none of which are technical in nature. Mainly the problem is the aluminum market might collapse, but usually you can just slow down construction as a hedge against that.

New nuclear power plants can take over a decade.

Good you mentioned those, because those are actually our upper limit on this. . Because in the west right now, and for the last several decades no private company has been willing to independently take on the risk of building a nuclear plant. Just about all the modern western ones are being built by corporate alliances, and all of them have enormous government loan backing (as high as 100%!) while the non western plants tend to be functionally government projects in the first place. Costs are now as high as 14-20 billion USD for a twin reactor plant, and private companies will not bite at that kind of risk level. Even with 100% loan backing its hard to find people willing to try it, even before Fukushima it was hardly rich pickings even though even at those costs a profit of billions of dollars (over the 1st certification period) can be accurately projected. Assuming it doesn't meltdown.

In the end major development of space is a trillion dollar enterprise, or more, and this can only be an intergovernmental thing in anything like the near term. And since intergovermental anything is horribly slow, inefficiency and unstable that only makes the supply/demand more troublesome, and in some respects actually irrelevant. If the political will ever existed to try to really do the job it'd probably gain such a momentum that it would actually keep going even if it lost is economic rational for years on end. But probably it will only happen in a very different time then now.

[Guardsman Bass]

If such a program could get strong support in Congress, then it might be durable long enough to put some infrastructure in space that Congress would then be loath to defund (especially if it would mean bad blood with other countries involved in it). That's essentially what's kept ISS going for a quarter century as a program, and will likely keep it active until 2025 or such time that they decide to end its mission. Something similar would probably happen for the next program if it was an international mission with congressional support, like if NASA decided to ditch Mars as a destination (again) and go for a Moon base to do research and (ostensibly) test technology for long duration spaceflight and off-world production.