[iamcurious]

Interesting, let's say it should be our first priority, how does that translate into action? Please remember that mobilizing large amounts of people towards a goal is hard problem, specially when the goal involves copious amounts of research and experiment.

[anon8764]

I personally believe people do not deserve to go to space yet.

They haven't mastered the ability to house, clothe, and feed the human family yet, despite having the technical ability to do so. As a result of this, you see the derivatives that exist today. Walk among Miami at night and you see homeless crackheads muttering to themselves while sipping on beer. The conditions that cause a person to do this would be probabilistically lower with a society that cares about one another more [designed-in] instead of fighting amongst each-other for paper slips.

If we absolutely need to go to space, we require research to determine the amount of materials needed to build this track length, and the renewability of those materials in reference to the earth. If this request for the materials meets a certain threshold, it will be dispensed, otherwise, the remaining materials can be reserved for further research to create synthetic alternatives. It helps to have a global database of known resources and their reserves, in fact, it might be a crucial requirement.

Imagine culling redis for this information, it sends a request to the global cybernetic hub, and it permits or denies the request, along with the terminal node you requested it to be sent to...

example: I request 13 Ounces of Gold (AU) at terminal #324-214-495-2341 to perform an experiment. (Since gold is currently in enough abundance for my request it is sent to my terminal as soon as technically possible, and any of the resource I do not use or can scrap back to the global hub, is done so)

[iamcurious]

So all resources are to be distributed from a central organization. Pray, who will be decide this? How will disputes will be solved when, inevitably, an armed group decides to use resources some other way?

Also, the whole point of leaving earth is leaving scarcity. There are meteorites with gold, we can and we should mine them as we see fit.

[anon8764]

By creating abundance, it lessens the need and purpose for armies to take resources from others. There are no armies I am aware of that invade and conquer for Oranges, but they do for Oil.

To complete your second statement, why do you believe we should mine them for gold when we cannot efficiently manage them here on Earth to begin with?

[anon8764]

Also keep in mind that Elon Musk is trying this, but as a bastardization of its potential. What do I mean by this? The shortest distance between two points is a straight line (currently). Look at a map. The cities that were cultivated where they are geographically located are influenced by (Water + Politics + Monetary incentives to build roads closer to smaller cities to draw business (corruption) ) So if this hyperloop does pick up, it will be a horrible expenditure of resources.

[iamcurious]

I didn't follow this. How is the hyperloop related to space? Also what exactly would it be a horrible expenditure of resources?

[anon8764]

The hyperloop could be related to space if they decide to experiment with slightly altering the trajectory to lead into space, giving it an edge energy-wise to break out of the atmosphere.

It would be a horrible expenditure of resources because when you look at a map of where humans designed and placed their cities, they are inefficient for travel and resource distribution.

Example: Manufacturing parts are created in Tennessee, shipped to Michigan, Manufactured in Michigan, and shipped to Florida to sell/distribute.

Instead, why not ship the raw materials to a equidistant manufacturing node/plant, create the material there, then distribute it. It's not done this way (most efficient) because money/corruption incentivizes backwards thinking of keeping "jobs" in sectors that are a waste of energy to complete and continue. Interesting times we live in.

Here is an example of an efficient and effective city design: http://i.imgur.com/shnIgHn.jpg