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I mean there’s a pretty big opportunity cost to things like mars colonies. I’d give a conservative estimate that it would probably cost several trillion dollars a year to build human colonies on Mars. Keeping in mind that it’s going to cost that per year as everything they need is probably coming from earth. Now if we’re spending $10 trillion a year just think of some of the other much more useful projects you could fund for that amount of money. The NHS costs about £3000 per person which is roughly $4050 per person. At ten trillion dollars, you can give everyone on planet Earth access to first world health care. Or we could give every human on earth clean water and electricity. Or work on carbon scrubbing technology to mitigate global warming. Send every child on earth to not just through K-12 but through university.
I honestly don't believe that, since after a certain point the bottleneck STOPS being money, and starts being skilled practitioners, specialized machines, and increasingly rare chemicals/materials.
There's a finite number of people on the planet smart/dedicated enough to become an actual doctor. We're probably not utilizing them optimally now, but the more we throw into the medical field, the fewer we have to throw into other industries where they could have more impact. Tradeoffs.
There's probably not enough of them to give everyone access to true 'first world' healthcare, sans leaps in Robotics (although... LLMs are giving us a tool that can somewhat replace doctors).
Which is also why sending EVERY child on earth to University would be akin to lighting the money on fire, incidentally. Not all of them are going to learn much.
If I was going to throw money at something, it'd probably be at trying to gene edit some significant portion of the population to bump their intelligence up more. Not to make more geniuses, but to just reduce the number of violent idiots ruining things for everyone else. Raise the floor so we aren't spending as much money cleaning up their messes for them.
And being clear, I do not give two FUCKS about 'opportunity cost' of space exploration. The benefits, in the long term, are so ridiculously asymetrical in favor of doing its hilarious.
We could spend trillions on food to simply grow the population of hungry people until we can no longer keep up... or we can spend trillions putting up O'Neill cylinders that enable literally optimal conditions for growing food crops, and can be scaled up endlessly so our population never outpaces our productivity.
This choice should be easy, if we weren't the type of species that we are.
When literally EVERY OTHER watt of energy, every kilo of rare earth metals, every other possible ounce of water is OUT THERE and not on the surface of our planet, do me a solid and try to calculate the 'opportunity cost' of leaving all those valuable resources floating in space, unused, for hundreds of years.
The sooner we make it viable to get to those things and use them, the more problems we are actually capable of solving.
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