[Spaceships] Million Merchant Marathon

[Witchking]

Originally Posted by Varyon

It would depend on a variety of factors, but that's probably not a bad assumption. The real question is how much of a startup cost there really is, at least for later farms. If you can mine and transport the raw materials for building and maintaining the farms from asteroids for less than you can ship them up from Earth, you would be able to get the startup costs down, potentially low enough to make it competitive with Earth. But that's probably not the way to bet.

IMHO the most likely scenario to make orbital farms shipping food down a feature/fixture in the OP's world is environmental degradation.

Depending on the path of Earth's downward slide vast tracts of currently productive farmland (hello Kansas, Alberta, and Ukraine) could see temperature changes and drought.

We have a historical precedent for the rough outline of the results.

Imagine the Oklahoma Dust Bowl but more on a continental scale than a regional one. Possibly also lasting longer than the 8ish years of the 1930's but for decades (or longer).

In that scenario of massive reduction in the ability of Earthside farming production it is conceivable that exo-farms would be a way (massive upfront costs not withstanding) to avert massive famine. Assuming of course there is enough lead time to start spinning up new farming plexes.