Comments on Selenian Boondocks: Public Space Utilities

That's not what it started with. It started with ...

2008-03-31T19:35:00.000-07:00

That's not what it started with. It started with the protagonist kidnapping the Emporer's cousin because she had made sweet love to him so must have wanted to marry him so off to Texas. The Chevy over the Pentagon was a bit further in.

Definitely a fun read.

"For Texas and Zed"I loved that book. Didn't it st...

2008-03-31T11:14:00.000-07:00

"For Texas and Zed"

I loved that book.

Didn't it start with some guy from Texas inventing an anti-gravity device and when no one paid any attention he installed it in a 1956 Buick and hovered over the Pentagon?

That, and "Pandora's Planet"

Pulp fiction at its finest.

You actually want a private monopoly, for the firs...

2008-03-27T15:23:00.000-07:00

You actually want a private monopoly, for the first decade or two, because that greatly increases the return to investors, and thus the incentive to invest in the building it in the first place. We have patents to create artificial monopolies for this reason, but we can get the same effect without patents for natural monopolies such as those you posit here.

That said, no space industries currently are and very few in the future will be a natural monopoly. Mining, solar power satellites, etc., nothing you've mentioned is a natural monopoly. The only true public utility I can think of is a sunshade to combat global warming.

Given Ceres' density, it's a reasonable guess that...

2008-03-27T15:13:00.000-07:00

Given Ceres' density, it's a reasonable guess that it has vast ice deposits. At least one scientist suggests it may have a liquid ocean deep underground, like Europa. We've also seen a number of main-belt asteroids that turn out to be "comets" in the sense that they've been seen to spew out volatiles. All much easier to haul water from than the Martian surface.

I like what you said about public utilities that i...

2008-03-18T15:42:00.000-07:00

I like what you said about public utilities that it's nice if they can be provided by private markets, but they have a high reliability requirement that can't always be met by private markets because of imperfect information.

But I disagree with you about the source of the imperfect information problem. I think it's a fundamental aspect of the product being traded, not something imposed from the outside by bad regulations.

Reliability is a property with very poor visibility. Usually, you don't know if something is reliable or not until it is too late. If I switch electricity providers will it increase my chances of suffering from blackouts next summer? That's a hard question to answer with any accuracy. But deciding if I will pay less on my next electric bill is easy.

So there's a motivation for the seller to skimp on the invisible property to improve the visible property even if the invisible property would be more valuable to the customer because the customer can't tell.

Back to space stuff. I think in the near- to mid-term the primary value-added on Mars is going to be immigration. People going there to live because they want to.

I think Lunar GPS/early comm network could be a go...

2008-03-17T20:06:00.000-07:00

I think Lunar GPS/early comm network could be a good candidate for a public utility.

Well spoken.In response to your statement:Moving o...

2008-03-17T20:04:00.000-07:00

Well spoken.

In response to your statement:

Moving out to Mars, I have to honestly say that most of the economic value-added I see in the early days is going to be cultural/entertainment, the kind of stuff that can be easily digitized and sent back home, but can you colonize Mars on a Hollywood budget?

I agree that Mars would be much more difficult to colonize, mainly due to the lack of "mega resources" (as in worth in the billions).

However, I do think the only thing Mars could offer the solar system would be its water, which may be easier to extract from the surface to the asteroid belt (since its much closer and its gravity is weaker than Earth's).

Provided Ceres is discovered to be as dry as a bone that is. ;-)

~Darnell