Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen
With optimism, fully self-sufficient small space habitats (mobile or not) can be achieved at TL9. More reasonably at TL10. I think it might be just barely defensible to postpone full self-sufficiency to TL11, though, and that is roughly the case in my space opera setting.
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The problem is the number of nines after decimal dot and before the first non-nine digit the on the self sufficiency %.
Basically in today's economically hyper-interdependent world there are a lot of rare things that are only produced in few places either because that is cheaper(normal reason), because the construction facilities are stupendously expensive or because the actual production contains things like trade secrets.
Our daily lives today are filled with things that are manufactured that way and where even the manufacturing requires other things manufactured that way and so on.
For increasing self sufficiency you need to be able to do more and more of those locally.
That increases both the complexity of what different types of things you need to be able to manufacture, and thus both the machinery and the library of things to manufacture.
Today the processes and machinery to manufacture say a drug compared to say a computer chip are very different. This is the machinery aspect.
Also the leading companies in different businesses want to keep their manufacturing processes secret so as to not give competitors an edge to catch up. So even if you had the machinery capable of building the newest Inter processors you would not know how to program them to do that. That is the library aspect.
You would have to postulate a very different society if small manufacturing is competitive with large and all manufacturing technology is easily available.