Would you pay a tax to fund a space colony?

[Aerozord]

Ok so hypothetically your government realized that expanding into space is a smart idea and decides to build an O'Neil Cylinder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_Cylinder) over the next few decades. Would you mind them taking, lets say 3% of your income to make one?

[Magus]

Would you mind them taking, lets say 3% of your income to make one?

Yes.

[phil_]

I don't think my $250 would make much of a difference.

[Flarecobra]

Depends on what the colony is for.

[Bells]

The entire Nasa budget comes from 4/10th of one penny on the tax dollar.

7i2QDpGRQKc

With that funding you guys went to the moon and to mars.

Triple it. You'll have two space colonies and a winter garden in 10 years.

[Aerozord]

so what you are saying Bells is I vastly overestimated how much the tax would even be?
Depends on what the colony is for.

Literally colony for human habitation. Research and space traffic is likely the economic base. Because of the design you can do experiments and testing from anywhere between 0g and 1g, would also be an excellent way-station for space exploration. Be alot cheaper to resupply at the colony instead of loading everything onto the shuttle before lift off. If space travel becomes commercial it would be at worst a tourist trap and at best a vacation destination that rivals Vegas

Bottom-line is it would still be a civilian platform

[Magus]

Yeah, the tax would not have to be near 3%. For example the entire NASA budget in say, 2008 when it was still a public program, maxed out at about 18 billion dollars a year. It's now going to slowly decrease over time now that it is becoming privatized. Which is why I always laugh when I hear people (including my own father) complain about "how if they only cut that stupid space program and that foreign aid, they could get this debt under control" when the military budget is something like a trillion dollars a year and the Bush tax cuts are going to be 700 billion dollars over the next ten years...

And I'm basically same as Phil, let's say I make 10,000 dollars, my 300 dollars is not going to add up to much.

[Flarecobra]

Eh, if it was for a mining colony, I'd say yeah...


But now, I would not pay anything additional.

[Aerozord]

Eh, if it was for a mining colony, I'd say yeah...


Mine what? With no infrastructure like colonies its impractical to mine anything in space. I mean where are these miners and their families going to live? What are they going to do about food, water, recreation? You will get alot more people willing to start mining the Moon if there is a place to dock (and much safer then risking re-entry and earth launch every single time) only about a day away with supplies and entertainment venues.

[Magus]

Moonoil. They refine it into moongas for our mooncars.

[McTahr]

I'd pay any remotely reasonable tax for education and science endeavors period. Imagine what we could do if universities weren't resorting to gouging students in every way possible and forcing their labs to scrape by on duct tape and ingenuity.

(Also imagine if we could do that shit in space.)

E: (Oh, and the part where say 5% of my income matched by the country to make higher education reasonable would have knocked off a very sizable portion of my student loans compared to the, you know, tens of thousands of dollars of debt we willingly jump into currently. But hey, I just do numbers to things for a living, what do I know?)

[POS Industries]

Eh, if it was for a mining colony, I'd say yeah...


But now, I would not pay anything additional.
For me, it would be opposite. I view the moon like I do protected wildlife preserves: I don't care what's under there, we only have the one moon and I don't want to completely fuck it up. Colonization for research and as a platform for further exploration is fine, but I'm not down with strip mining it like a lot of other people seem to want to do.

I'm down with mining Mars' moons or whatever. It doesn't need two. It doesn't even have oceans!

[EVILNess]

Moonoil. They refine it into moongas for our mooncars.

We can use the moonoil to build a moonorail (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQz_lqOBhZA).

[stefan]

in all seriousness there's a huge amount of thorium and a large amount of iron on the moon, both of which would be fantastic for second-stage space exploration (end-costs for building a structure on the moon would be less than transporting the resources to space from the earth and building it in orbit)

[POS Industries]

in all seriousness there's a huge amount of thorium and a large amount of iron on the moon, both of which would be fantastic for second-stage space exploration (end-costs for building a structure on the moon would be less than transporting the resources to space from the earth and building it in orbit)
And if all we did was use the moon resources to build moon stuff then I wouldn't mind so much, but you know we're going to just have rich fucks try to become richer by plundering the moon of all that shit and just bringing it back to Earth and not actually get us anywhere as a species.

[Aerozord]

in all seriousness there's a huge amount of thorium and a large amount of iron on the moon, both of which would be fantastic for second-stage space exploration (end-costs for building a structure on the moon would be less than transporting the resources to space from the earth and building it in orbit)

reason no one does this is because the cost of getting the infrastructure to the moon, not to mention the practicality of getting it off. People always talk about lower gravity making it easier to transport stuff off the moon. While its gravity is like a 1/6 of Earth's, fuel is several magnitudes more scarce.

For a long time mining on the moon will only be good for building on the moon. Than we'd have to use some mass drivers or sky elevator to get it off because our conventional hydrogen rockets aren't really an option.

Mars thats more practical. Vastly larger supplies of iron, water, ect. But expecting to jump straight from "a few space stations" to "martian mining colony" is too huge of a jump. We need increments. No one is going to commit resources like that to colonize a celestial body thats several light minutes away and takes years to get to when we haven't even proven we can establish habitats a few days from Earth.

[Bells]

Actually, for my thoughts, the proper road would be to put something similar to Curiosity on the Moon. Making advantaged from the speed up communication to cover larger amounts of data gathering to really get a larger scoop of information on the moon. That's something that has not been done with current tech...

Maybe that could define what the moon is truly "good for" without having to put people there (and deal with THOSE logistics).

THe main thing is that you need some way to sustain life in larger groups for longer periods. That's what's really key for space exploration... you can build all sorts of structures and go to all sorts of places, but if the tech only allows 4 people for 4 months, you're severely limited on all aspects.

[Aerozord]

THe main thing is that you need some way to sustain life in larger groups for longer periods. That's what's really key for space exploration... you can build all sorts of structures and go to all sorts of places, but if the tech only allows 4 people for 4 months, you're severely limited on all aspects.

which we can greatly expand with a space colony where they have food, shelter, entertainment, place for civilians, and are reasonably close in the event of an emergency. The moon is especially easy if the colony is at the L1 Lagrangian point. Then set up a space elevator on the moon, which is thankfully tidal locked so the colony will always be directly above it. The only real factor energy will play is how quickly you want it there.

It would all take awhile but the point I am trying to make is that a space colony is a good first step to lunar ones. Lunar ones are in turn good step towards Martian colonies

[edit] ok I found out the moon does have sufficient water, and even trapped oxygen. Real issue is nitrogen, carbon, ect. Still think orbital colonies are more practical but I wanted to be fair.

[Azisien]

I would opt in for more than 3% probably. Best case scenario a bunch of awesome shit happens like space colonies and new technologies available to the masses. Worst case scenario, it's handled like shit like all other pools of tax money in the world and we still eventually get a space colony that's quadruple over-budget and 15 years late and a couple head scientists on the funding committee all mysteriously have yachts.

A friend and I were just talking about how much money a Kickstarter could raise if it was like, NASA's Mission to Mars. If some shitty Android console can raise over 10 million, I'm sure it would do pretty well. And the $5 million pledge can be "You're Janitor on the crew to Mars!"

[Ecks]

problem with building a permanent habitation in space though: we still haven't solved a couple of human biology problems like bone loss due to living in zero gravity, etc. gotta make sure it's safe to live out there for extended periods of time.

But would I pay a tax to fund it? Hell fucking yes I would, we're all gonna have to go somewhere when the corporations fuck the planets climate beyond the point of no return (if we already haven't reached that point).

[Aerozord]

A friend and I were just talking about how much money a Kickstarter could raise if it was like, NASA's Mission to Mars. If some shitty Android console can raise over 10 million, I'm sure it would do pretty well. And the $5 million pledge can be "You're Janitor on the crew to Mars!"
I personally considered starting one myself for a space elevator (cause that would make the subsequent colony a heck of alot cheaper) but we'd need like a thousand times more than that console got.
problem with building a permanent habitation in space though: we still haven't solved a couple of human biology problems like bone loss due to living in zero gravity, etc. gotta make sure it's safe to live out there for extended periods of time.

Yes we have, the O'Neil Cylinder uses rotational energy to generate 1g of gravitational force. Its size is also large enough that only the very sensitive would experience motion sickness, you know like those that feel sick on skyscrapers