[ben_w]

> And if you think, as Morgan Stanley seems to, that the only money to be made in space is selling launch of earth orbiting satellites, you’re going to miss out on the boom that is going to make the first quadrillionaire.

I was with you up to this point.

Quadrillionaire? Seriously? On species-wide economy of 0.1Q/year? On a timescale short enough that SpaceX remains a coherent entity and you don't have to account for things like the sum-total risk of nuclear war? Or even just of Musk dying of old age given he's 55?

[adastra22]

The material wealth of the Earth is only a small, small fraction of the accessible material in the inner solar system, let alone the universe.

Starship fundamentally changes the game in ways people aren’t paying attention to because it pattern matches to sci-fi. But the economics are real: power and material far beyond what is available on Earth, on many cases at lower marginal price than terrestrial sources, and 1000x to 100000x reserves.

[ben_w]

> The material wealth of the Earth is only a small, small fraction of the accessible material in the inner solar system, let alone the universe.

And you think you can access that in 30 years?

That's the problem here. Market valuations for, say, the USA, do not count the entire value of the nickel and iron down to the planet's core.

> Starship fundamentally changes the game in ways people aren’t paying attention to because it pattern matches to sci-fi. But the economics are real: power and material far beyond what is available on Earth, on many cases at lower marginal price than terrestrial sources, and 1000x to 100000x reserves.

No, it doesn't. I've done the maths here. At best, and with a better track record than Musk has actually demonstrated, if we use the USA as a metaphor for a the K2 civilisation Musk talks about with lunar-tiling factories making nothing but data centre satellites (done the maths on that too, that's what it would take and even then be borderline on thermodynamics grounds), Starship can be the Mayflower. Not even the Oregon Trail, certainly not the railroad network.

And fundamentally it isn't coherent to talk about "lower marginal price" when space mining has a TRL of 1 or 2. Might be cheap eventually, but pricing that in right now would be an error of judgment (aside from anything else, the tech to make it cheap may also make stuff here cheaper).

The only way this happens in my lifetime, and I'm younger than Musk, is if someone solves for von Neumann replicators. Which I won't rule out, but Musk hasn't demonstrated any special sauce for this to make me think he'd do it before anyone else.

[Hikikomori]

We don't even go for available materials on earth if they're slightly hard to get.

[aczerepinski]

Can’t rule out hyperinflation doing some heavy lifting :)

[ben_w]

Yeah, indeed, I was assuming in constant today-dollars. :)

[rithdmc]

In which currency? 1 billion Rupiah is less than 60,000 usd ;)

A quadrillionaire would only need $60 billion or so.