Reply To: Space Flight

[dennisp]

There’s nothing else remotely that cheap. Of the other capabilities, there are subsets, sure. But it’s the combination of features that allows for new possibilities.

A power source that requires neither a lot of land nor external inputs, but produces a lot of power cheaply, is a new capability. The only thing remotely like it is Hyperion nuclear, but that’ll cost a lot more.

Small scale is important for ocean colonies, unless you only want to build huge colonies. It’s hard to go directly from nothing to huge.

Cheap is important for things like plasma torches or indoor hydroponics. Right now recycling is expensive and farming is best done on lots of land with free sunlight. FF could make recycling cheap and farmland more expensive than grow lights.

The way we produce energy drives a lot of our social organization. FF is fairly unique in being cheap enough to decisively outcompete everything else, and working only at small scale. You could pile a lot of them up at a centralized plant, but that wouldn’t give you any significant economies. It seems likely to me that this would have a dramatic effect on the way we organize ourselves.