CAPITALISM IN SPAAAAAAACCCEEEE

Juan Dávila (Political Officer) is a second year reading Engineering Science at St. John’s College.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, and China’s emergence into world markets it seems like capitalism has little place to go on earth, unless we start selling water to the fish, what now? If we want continued growth, continuing to find efficiencies and new technologies can keep us going for only a while: instead we must boldly go…

Yes, the solution to where we are going to get more ‘stuff’ is that eternal nothingness. This should not come as too much of a surprise, ultimately outsized value comes from providing things no one else can, and that has to be driven by some core difference in the production process. We will be hard pressed to find a place with more of these differences than space.

This still sounds quite abstract, and the fact that there may be value in theory means little if we can’t get to it in practice. In fact this is one of the biggest problems of confining ourselves to the earth, it’s the wrong shape. A sphere is volume efficient, which for us means that most of the earth’s resources sit there, useless. However, this is very much not the case with space, to which I would like to dedicate most of the rest of this piece.

The first step requires no foresight: Starlink (Elon Musk’s internet provider) already has a constellation in orbit. It has been tested including in disaster situations and will launch in America later this year, with most of the world following in 2021. Though hardly the future most imagine, this is an important first step as it provides the first large scale profitable operation based around space infrastructure. Now that space has value as a connector, the next step should be to create some value in space, something that the world couldn’t have without it. It will be… Mission Impossible 7 tom cruise has got himself a ticket on a starship to go to space, and… thwart terrorists or something. What they’re doing isn’t really clear but it’s one hell of a step to provide the first wildly available commercial product, where space was not only integral in R&D, but also in production.

The next step is a space station, one that dwarfs the ISS, and somewhat disconnected from the rigidity of being run essentially by a consortium of governments. There are 3 credible initiatives looking to do this. Firstly there is axiom space, who have already supplied modules to the ISS, and are looking to use those as a basis for their own station as the ISS is abandoned. Bigelow Aerospace, with their inflatable model, which also has already been proven as a cargo hold, though they are facing covid related financial troubles. Finally, the Gateway Foundation, which although the most unproven may have the most potential. They effectively want to skip a step and build a rotating space station, with modules rented out to just about anyone; governments sure, but also private researchers and hotels. In-built into the design are attractions that are unique such as an “impossible dunk” where the basketball hoop is 20ft in the air. Tourism has worked before both to kick start and sustain economies: The Mediterranean, Caribbean and now space.

There is still more that space can provide; still, we lack examples of industry in space. However here too we will find a gold mine, in many ways literally, as once the infrastructure is set up large quantities of easily accessible resources become accessible. Most importantly however is the fact that industry will be able to experiment with zero gravity manufacturing. Moore’s law has pushed transistors to the point where every atom must be placed with atomic precision, and this may be easier to perform without the constant pull of gravity. In medicine, we can expect research and production of new families of drugs (comforting considering the existence of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhoea).

Now that we have a space industry in place, we can take advantage of its single biggest feature, the sun. Ultimately, it’s energy production that will place a hard cap on our standard of living. World oil and gas reserves are estimated at 1e22J (22 zeros), but we would rather stop global warming, so what about the daily solar power, it’s 1.5e22J but the total daily solar output is 3.5e31J, nine orders of magnitude above what we could ever get on earth. This number written like this does not seem as large as it quite is. Ultimately, it’s not “we can have 10 times more stuff” its, think about everything that’s available for you to consume, multiply that by ten, then multiply this new amount by ten, and so on and so on… nine times. The jump in prosperity that is offered by becoming masters of space is truly unparalleled and we are on the cusp of seeing it come to fruition.

This is the point at which humanity becomes unrecognizable, a revolution on par with the invention of agriculture. Millions of times more humans, and enough “slack” in the system, so that sending entire armadas to distant stars causes no more relative effort than the creation of a single fishing ship today. The creation of a giant hall of mirrors in space to propel people between planets and beyond. Telescopes with openings that would dwarf some current countries, and homes built by and for us (O’neill Cylinders), at first surely mimicking your ancestral home, but after that, we are free to explore how we really want to live. 100m tall trees, houses in the sky, the key is that we will no longer be limited by this planet of ours, which has given us so much but will soon limit us in our journey.

There is a point at which a bird must fly, leave the nest and grow into its own. We are at the cusp of jumping from the shoulders of giants, and I for one can’t wait to make my home amongst the stars.