Bear Ribs
Well-known member
I disagree. You have no way of knowing this, much less proving it. And it's not a silly rhetorical battle, you're shifting the goalposts like crazy.No, don't shift it to silly rhetorical battles. It's not "they might have a sufficient mass and delta v budget". It's "if the technological-economical situation allows such colonies, then any government willing to pay for it *will* have sufficient mass and delta v budget". It will be just a matter of funding at that point.
The defender's advantage in space is immeasurable compared to a mere ocean. Given there's no stealth in space, they would literally know an invading force's exact makeup, size, and position weeks to months in advance. Merely throwing chunks of their mining tailings in the way could destroy an invading force or force it to waste so much Delta V dodging as to render any invasion a non-starter. Your presumption that a space colony could be dismissed as "a few thousands of weirdos" is also a heck of a presumption.Sure, you can argue that the defender's advantage in space will be considerable, much like in American Revolutionary War, but that won't help much when the colony in question is just few thousands of weirdos and the economic advantage of the founding country is measured in orders of magnitude.
In that analogy, just because the British Empire couldn't crush the rebellion of the 13 colonies, doesn't mean it couldn't crush a rebellion on the Pitcairn Islands.
And similarly, sea colonization always seems to get struck down by The Powers That Be, not actual technical issues.Yet. I'd like to inform you that the same applies to space resource extraction so far.
In fact sea colonization is often something that is used as a comparison for the engineering challenges and economics to space colonization, in which some factors are very similar, minus the launch costs\tyranny of rocket equation.
Republic of Minerva: Attacked and captured by Tonga military... twice.
Rose Island: Invaded by Italian government and blown up with explosives.
Principality of Sealand: Invaded by Germans and Dutch, the UK expanded its territorial waters around it.
MS Satoshi: Boarded and confiscated by Thai Navy
Project Atlantis: Okay this one actually had a mechanical failure, also a failure due to choosing to name their project after an island most famous for sinking.
The point being we haven't seen that it's a tech issue, we've seen that powerful monied interests don't want to allow it and maneuver against it.
I didn't say mutually exclusive, I said you undermined your own position, and yes, you did so by pointing out how these projects keep failing to social manipulation, not actual technological barriers.How are those mutually exclusive?
When technology barely allows the endeavor to function at all (or as currently it is, technology isn't there, in which case no effort is needed at all), even tiny, token efforts from the powers of status quo are enough to derail it. When technology and economy allows colonies to get bigger and more economically powerful, then it takes a lot more effort from the founding powers to hold them, and the colonies may slip away if they are in crisis or have better things to do.
And the fact that colonies would take more effort if they get going is the point, that's why the founding powers don't want to form them or allow them a chance to slip away in a crisis and prefer robots.
My dude, we literally just watched the US shut down their own critical oil pipeline and hose their own energy production right before a massive spike in gas prices purely to spite another political party. Countries are not remotely the highly logical Rationalist Engines you're imagining.No they aren't competitive, because the sufficient engineering isn't even there yet? If they were feasible, screw economics, world powers would absolutely want powersats because they are strategic scale weapons doubling as innocuous energy infrastructure, and they wouldn't hold back under the threat of competitors building their own first.