[Sci-fi] Plausible scenarios for the evacuation of Earth at TL10-11

Michael Thayne · 08-31-2018, 03:28 PM

Without a lot of warning, the prospects for getting very many people at all off-earth are pretty grim. The most economical near-future methods of getting stuff into orbit require expensive infrastructure that would be almost impossible to scale up quickly: space elevators and laser lift systems. In a setting with roughly the THS level of development, I'd guess you're looking at being able to move somewhere on the order of ten million people per year—even with many years of warning, you're only evacuating a fraction of Earth's population.

But that's nothing compared to the problem of housing all those people. In a setting with THS-like rapid terraforming of Mars, maybe you could set all the minifacs to crank out very basic survival gear (CO2 filter masks and such), but otherwise the actual number of people you save is going to be much less than the number you could theoretically get into orbit in a year. (This makes sense if in your setting the orbital population is dominated by tourists and people who work in orbit for stints of weeks or months rather than years.)

08-31-2018, 03:28 PM	#10
Michael Thayne Join Date: May 2010	Re: [Sci-fi] Plausible scenarios for the evacuation of Earth at TL10-11 Without a lot of warning, the prospects for getting very many people at all off-earth are pretty grim. The most economical near-future methods of getting stuff into orbit require expensive infrastructure that would be almost impossible to scale up quickly: space elevators and laser lift systems. In a setting with roughly the THS level of development, I'd guess you're looking at being able to move somewhere on the order of ten million people per year—even with many years of warning, you're only evacuating a fraction of Earth's population. But that's nothing compared to the problem of housing all those people. In a setting with THS-like rapid terraforming of Mars, maybe you could set all the minifacs to crank out very basic survival gear (CO2 filter masks and such), but otherwise the actual number of people you save is going to be much less than the number you could theoretically get into orbit in a year. (This makes sense if in your setting the orbital population is dominated by tourists and people who work in orbit for stints of weeks or months rather than years.)