[ryanmercer]

>Space is a waste of time unless you're a government or a bored billionaire.

Unless you are 100% self sufficient, you rely on space to live. Freight logistics are reliant on space (GPS), farming (GPS optimized planting and harvesting), air travel (GPS), using your phone to get directions somewhere (GPS). Then all of the weather satellites, satellites are rapdily gaining use in archaeology revealing unknown sites far faster than boots on the ground can, etc etc so on and so forth.

Gobs and gobs of money are waiting to be made in space with current and future technology. Some quick near-future possibilities:

- Space tourism

- Seed vaults on the moon for companies and countries

- Archival data storage on the moon

- All matter of material sciences research and possibly production of materials with qualities that we can not replicate in an Earth-based production facility (think crystals and crystalline structures)

- Extremely isolated biological related experiments, such as genetic engineering, which could be be done in complete safety in a self-contained habitat remotely, with no chance of any of the material spreading outside of the lab unlike on earth

[jfk13]

> Unless you are 100% self sufficient, you rely on space to live. Freight logistics are reliant on space (GPS), farming (GPS optimized planting and harvesting), air travel (GPS), using your phone to get directions somewhere (GPS).

Perhaps you don't recall, but we somehow managed to deliver freight, grow crops, fly planes and find our way to places long before GPS satellites were a thing.

Space-based systems may be a great convenience at times, but they're hardly essential to my life.

[ryanmercer]

>Perhaps you don't recall, but we somehow managed to deliver freight, grow crops, fly planes and find our way to places long before GPS satellites were a thing.

Yes and if you are older than 30 you likely remember when everything said "4-6 weeks delivery" not "same day" or even "2-3 day delivery'. That's right, even in the 1990s if you ordered something 4-6 weeks was a perfectly acceptable (and realistic) delivery time frame.

You also had a fraction of the flights that you do now. GPS for aviation right out of the gate increases fuel efficiency of any given flight as well as safety.

GPS went fully operational in 1995, with 2 billion less mouths to feed as well. Take GPS away from farming and you'll plant less efficiently and crop losses will increase both of which will drive prices up. A lot of the larger farms actually heavily rely on automation, assisted by GPS, for both planting and harvesting.

This is a single technology using 24 satellites that is space-based, that has affected virtually every industry in the world.

Imagine what other space-based or space-derived technologies might one day exist. Imagine what amount of change they might make on civilization. Imagine what sort of profits they might generate.