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oh-propagandhi t1_iwminsg wrote

Reply to comment by Pharisaeus in Ask Anything Wednesday - Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science by AutoModerator

I was slightly mistaken, it was "Enough to get everyone off the earth comfortably" like a Wall-e type scenario.

Thanks for the insight!

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noiamholmstar t1_iwq9yje wrote

In addition to the other poster, you have to think about how much other stuff you need to lift into space per person. If each person needs about a metric ton of stuff in order to survive once they're in space, then we would need to launch 8 billion tons of stuff into space. And that's not counting the mass of the vehicle to get them into space. Even if we figured out how produce enough antimatter and how to reliably contain it and use it as a fuel, thats still an epically large amount of mass to lift into orbit. Just building the ships and infrastructure to fuel and launch them would be a monumental task. It's as much an economic/labor/political challenge as an engineering one.

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oh-propagandhi t1_iwqcsxg wrote

Thanks for the insight. That's more what I was talking about. It's the thing that made me realize that space exploration is neat and important, but it's currently statistically meaningless to my life and the life of even my kids as far as a sci-fi type scenario where we all just kick around in space with our space dogs or whatever.

That's before you get into all the "not supporting life" problems of every other body in our solar system, and the "can't get out of the solar system with current tech" problem.

It's a hard splash of reality and I'm mostly curious about any new news on breaking that barrier where jet setting around space becomes a reality.

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