pcmcgeer (09/13/82)
Perfectly correct, Brad. But industries don't need a relative advantage in space to go there. All an industry would need is cheap transportation and cheap communications, so that it isn't inherently too expensive to manufacture things in space. The incentive for industries to go into space will come from enforcement of property rights here on earth: in particular, my property rights on the air I breathe and on the public waterways I use. Further, as Pournelle has pointed out (in Survival with Style), the pollution problem is merely another aspect of the energy problem. Since an L-5 colony, or an SPS, can provide power relatively cheaply modulo the initial investment, it'd seem to me that space solves that one for the groundhogs, too. Rick.