[panick21_]

10x is very very optimistic. Practically it would be more.

Even if you assume launch cost = zero its most expensive and less practical.

And the moon is even worse. Still you can assume launch cost = zero. But energy is one part, to actually reliably land on the moon with your whole infrastructure. Connecting all that infrastucture up with power and everything else.

Your basically doing a gigantic civil engineering project all with only roboitcs, while we can't even do a civil engineering project on earths with only robots.

And if your going moon, nuclear is clearly the better option then solar towers. And if you go nuclear anyway, just do it on earth.

[ben_w]

I basically agree with you. Even where I said 10x, because I am indeed an optimistic person.

The other stuff… well, I think it's worth the analysis, even when the answer ends up not just "no", but "hell no!".

Analysis is much cheaper than actually going to space, after all.

[godelski]

I mean tbh the problem was that Nevermark was making strong claims without the actual analysis. There's a lot of analysis out there already but he wasn't even doing the simple ones. There's a lot of armchair experts on space.

Look, I'd love to do more things in space, but we'll never be able to do them if we lie our way and aren't realistic at the costs, and benefits. It just creates strawmen that are trivial to tear down. The armchair experts aren't helping, they're hurting.