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Old 11-24-2020, 06:34 AM   #31
RogerBW
 
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Default Re: The Emptiness of the Deep Beyond

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You can do that in terrestrial mines too. You just have no reason to want to. The only reason to live on an asteroid is because you have a job that requires you to be there.
That was my reaction too.

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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Old 11-24-2020, 06:47 AM   #32
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: The Emptiness of the Deep Beyond

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That was my reaction too.

It depends on travel time and cost, . If it's six months, bars and brothels are probably enough.
Those are probably virtual anyway.
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Old 11-24-2020, 10:06 AM   #33
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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.
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Old 11-24-2020, 11:00 AM   #34
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Default Re: The Emptiness of the Deep Beyond

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As for the idea of a virtual brothel, it is just even sadder on some level.
Given TM92, I'd say the at-large opinion in THS is probably the opposite.

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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
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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Old 11-24-2020, 11:09 AM   #35
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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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Old 11-24-2020, 12:57 PM   #36
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: The Emptiness of the Deep Beyond

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What is the fun of a virtual bar? It seems somehow sadder than just drinking alone at home.
When you wake up the next morning you don't have to have a virtual hangover even though you got virtually drunk.

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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Old 11-24-2020, 03:11 PM   #37
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Default Re: The Emptiness of the Deep Beyond

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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.
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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Old 11-25-2020, 06:42 AM   #38
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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.
People move there because there is work. A company can easily hire young people from some impoverished Third Wave nation for a ten year contract, ship them out in nanostasis, and train them up after they thaw them out in the Main Belt. If you ship out as many women as men, communities will develop as people get into relationships and have children.

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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Old 11-25-2020, 09:01 AM   #39
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Default Re: The Emptiness of the Deep Beyond

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People move there because there is work. A company can easily hire young people from some impoverished Third Wave nation for a ten year contract, ship them out in nanostasis, and train them up after they thaw them out in the Main Belt. If you ship out as many women as men, communities will develop as people get into relationships and have children.
The fact remains, though, that the only revenue-generating employment in that community will be jobs that you provide with salaries you pay. You can doubtless claw large chunks of those salaries back by running company shops, bars, and brothels, but the community won't extend beyond your operations. This won't be like an Old West mining town, which could acquire a penumbra of farms and have freelance prospectors coming through; it'd be more like an oversize cargo ship, with a crew who are, in the end, a net expense to the company, however you cut it.

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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Old 11-25-2020, 10:25 AM   #40
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Default 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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