this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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In the long term, I've been mulling over an idea for my science fiction universe that the human colonization of cislunar space requires increasing social complexity as there is no longer a single means of survival to deny others like there is presently with wealth. Heat budgets and elemental cycles cannot be consolidated into a single form of currency with the buffer of the environment to anonymously tax the world.
Along these lines I've been asking myself how would this alter the perception of capitalism. This thought lead to my hypothesis that capitalism would be viewed allegorically as a religion where an atheistic perspective allows a satirist to critique the present.
Oxygen on a spacecraft or space station would be your number one commodity to control. Water second and food third.
You would not last very long term like that. To be sustainable in space all elemental cycles are directly monitored and critical. Nothing is anonymous or unimportant. Heat is actually the most critical resource in space at scale if you want to keep living. Heat is the most difficult waste product to deal with because there is no differential to exploit and radiating into space is not very efficient.
This goes into several other aspects of my story and where I think the future is headed. I believe planets are prisons and not where humanity will colonize or travel to in the future. Gravitational differentiation of heavy elements is resource scarcity hell and escaping gravity well prisons is unsustainable. Almost all resources we currently use have total effective reserves less than 100k years at most. The only reason Earth has this level of resources is due to tectonic activity which is likely due to the Theia collision. We're not going to find another planet with the same combo as earth within 20 parsecs... I could go on and on. Once we effectively access a m-type astroid it will completely change the meaning of wealth and kickstart the colonization of places like cislunar space. A single planetesimal core based m-type astroid can easily dwarf all the resources humans have ever had access to on the surface of Earth.
Life stabilizes at in the most efficient configuration. The waste of the present is nowhere near the most efficient state, and it has lead to a lot of looming problems. The only thing holding us back from O'Neill cylinders in cislunar space right now is total accessible wealth. Once we have such structures in cislunar space, it becomes much easier to access many other resources that are even further away from gravity prisons. I strongly believe we will do everything possible to avoid the heavy costs of planets and in so doing we will learn to manage the complexity required to survive. This increasing complexity management and pursuit of efficiency mimics nature and it is the only way we have a chance to last for millions of years.