11-24-2020, 06:34 AM | #31 | |
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: near London, UK
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Re: The Emptiness of the Deep Beyond
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It depends on travel time and cost, I think. If you're going to be on a five year shift, then sure, having family on site might be worth the cost of shipping them out there. If it's six months, bars and brothels are probably enough.
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Podcast: Improvised Radio Theatre - With Dice Gaming stuff here: Tekeli-li! Blog; Webcomic Laager and Limehouse Buy things by me on Warehouse 23 |
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11-24-2020, 06:47 AM | #32 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: The Emptiness of the Deep Beyond
Those are probably virtual anyway.
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Fred Brackin |
11-24-2020, 10:06 AM | #33 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: The Emptiness of the Deep Beyond
What is the fun of a virtual bar? It seems somehow sadder than just drinking alone at home. As for the idea of a virtual brothel, it is just even sadder on some level.
Anyway, there is an economic value that comes from building a society in space. Robots, even ones with SAIs, consume very little, so they are not very good customers (especially if they are owned by a corporation). Adding 800,000 customers per year though increases the local economy by over $50 billion per year, and they all need clothing, food, shelter, etc., which the corporations who are building the habitats will be glad to provide them. It many ways, the mining of precious metals is only the first step for corporations to take advantage of new lucrative markets. Within a quarter century, the precious metal mining would only be a fraction of the earnings of the mining companies. With an economy of over $1 trillion, the precious metal mining would only account for a large fraction of economic activity. |
11-24-2020, 11:00 AM | #34 | |
Join Date: Jan 2014
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Re: The Emptiness of the Deep Beyond
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Sure, a company town could be a cost saver. But compared to just buying a bunch of AI slaves, it's at best wasteful. |
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11-24-2020, 11:09 AM | #35 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: The Emptiness of the Deep Beyond
It is not a cost saver, it is a revenue generator. Within a quarter century, the revenues from rent alone would exceed the revenues from mining.
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11-24-2020, 12:57 PM | #36 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: The Emptiness of the Deep Beyond
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Also, though Billy Joel probably doesn't make it to the uploading period you could have a really good eidolon of him at the virtual piano. So sharing a drink you call loneliness (TM) actually might be better than drinking alone. When you're both working and living in a hole in the ground (and it's the only "ground" in millions of miles) your life is going to be pretty sad no matter what you do and even memetically empowered real estate developers aren't going to chnge that..
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Fred Brackin |
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11-24-2020, 03:11 PM | #37 |
Join Date: Jan 2014
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Re: The Emptiness of the Deep Beyond
And everyone will move there because...? Even if you can find enough qualified human space miners (big if), there's no reason that means all the other necessary businesses will be staffed by humans or have large parts of the labor done somewhere else.
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11-25-2020, 06:42 AM | #38 | |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: The Emptiness of the Deep Beyond
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Alternatively, you just create your workforce. You use biogenesis and deep learning to produce a generation of female bioroids. In addition to working for the company, the female bioroids gestate human embryos and raise human children, creating families and communities. If you have the female bioroids a weekly allowance and allow them to earn their freedom after a quarter century (minus five years per child that they willingly gestate and raise), you give them an incentive to work and to reproduce. When they earn their freedom, hire them as normal workers with normal wagea, just like you hire their 'children'. You can even combine the two methods, perhaps bioroid workers and human supervisors, at a ratio of 4:1. The human supervisors could even supply the embryos for their bioroids workers, meaning that they become one large extended family. With a total of one human man, one human woman, and eight bioroid women, the extended family could produce dozens of human children, meaning that communities could grow very fast. |
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11-25-2020, 09:01 AM | #39 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: U.K.
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Re: The Emptiness of the Deep Beyond
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As for the possible entertainments being a bit miserable and depressing -- actually, TL10 VR could make them rather more convincingly fun than the entertainments laid on aboard, say, offshore oil rigs, and yet those recruit workers okay. By all accounts, most rig workers are counting the days until they can fly home, despite the rather good canteens and doubtless adequate video theatres, by they still take the work, because the money is pretty good and anyway it's certainly a living. But I bet the companies would jump at the chance to replace some of them with robots who don't demand the nice canteens.
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11-25-2020, 10:25 AM | #40 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: The Emptiness of the Deep Beyond
The mining could be worth hundreds of billions though, meaning that the company could afford to create a large community. Like every other large community, the economic activity generated starts to multiply. While the company should not try to capture everything, otherwise it kills the goose, it can capture a significant amount through rents.
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