Science fiction author Spider Robinson has written a column in which he despairs about the future of space travel (and more.)
I left it deeply concerned for the future — not merely of my chosen genre or my chosen country, but my species.
… Incredibly, young people no longer find the real future exciting. They no longer find science admirable. They no longer instinctively lust to go to space.
Every so often, people like Mr. Robinson despair that humanity will ever go to Mars and beyond. They point out that we haven’t even gone back to the moon. Obviously, humanity has lost the will to go into space.
Baloney.
The problem is that, right now, space is just too expensive.
Minumum estimates for a mission to Mars are in the neighborhood of $5 billion. Sure, our government spends more than that on tons of things, but it just doesn’t seem to be a priority right now.
The pessimists look at this and think that the situation will never improve, and that therefore humanity will never get to Mars.
They should know better.
A $5 billion Mars mission would be about 0.25% of the U.S. national budget. But we don’t want a simple there-and-back like we did with the moon. No, let’s talk about the costs of a full-fledged permanent colony on Mars. $50 billion. Too little. $500 billion? $5 trillion?
Let’s take the $5 trillion number for the sake of argument.
That’s about half of our annual GDP. Even if you spread the cost over ten years, that’s a full 5% of our national output. We could never afford that.
That is, we could never afford 5%. That doesn’t mean we could never afford the $500 billion ($5 trillion over ten years.)
Assume our economy grows at an average rate of 3%.
In 2103, it will take about 0.25% of our economy for ten years to establish the Martian colony. And that’s assuming new technology hasn’t made it less expensive than the original estimate.
Still too expensive? In 2203, it will only take about 0.014% of our economy to do it.
In 2303, it would only take 0.0007% of our economy.
If we wait five hundred years, it would only take 0.0000019%.
Wait a thousand, and it’s 0.00000000000073%.
Somewhere over the next thousand years, the costs of colonizing Mars will be low enough relative to our economic situation that we will do it.
It will happen.
We just may not get to see it. And I think that’s what really upsets the people who complain that humanity has lost the will to go into space.
Note: Some of my figures may be off here and there. So what? Even if they are off by several orders of magnitude, the fact remains that economic growth will eventually reach the point where space travel is not so expensive relative to other things. And that’s when it will happen.
(Note: This entry was originally published on my now-defunct political blog, Attilathepundit.com.)