Robin Hanson, <rhanson@gmu.edu>, writes:
> Someday space really will be ready to make a profit on. When
> people like us approach funders (private and public) to suggest
> projects, will they reply "that's what you science fiction sorts
> have been saying for over X decades; you've been dead wrong
> so far, so why should we believe you now"? Fooling funders into
> paying for profitless things now may cost us real big later,
> when it really counts.
I recall you have an article that suggests that to some extent this
phenomenon is inevitable. The lure of potential tremendous riches
from space (or nanotech, or any other far out technology) will induce
investors to put money into it even if the chances of success are
rather modest, because the potential payoff is so big. The net result
is that investors don't make any more money off of space than from more
conventional investments. And a huge amount of money is "wasted" in those
early days, the gigantic reward leading to equally gigantic expenditures.
Is it so bad that the new wealth made avaiable by improved technology
(space resources, etc.) is actually frittered away completely by the race
to get there prematurely? Space or nanotech doesn't actually enrich
the human race, because people waste so much effort trying to produce
the technology?
Hal
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:06:22 MDT