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Originally Posted by TLAM Strike
Launches could be done cheaply if in place of a rocket a magnetic catapult was used. Think Railgun with human cargo. Fling it in to LEO and have a trans-lunar shuttle pick it up. Then use a cycler to send the people to Mars. BTW a cycler is basicly a space station in a parabolic orbit that goes between Earth and Mars orbit. If we ever get a space elevator working off loading people from Earth would be dirt cheap, they could even live on the elevator much like in Clarke's 3001 and The Fountians of Paradise.
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Think "crushing G-forces killing everyone on board and destroying most of the cargo". You could use a railgun to launch payloads from orbit at sufficiently low velocities, but not from the ground. The speed required to escape Earth's gravity is too great. Rockets are punishing enough, and they have a constant source of thrust.
It might be wiser to invest in an aerodynamic vehicle that flies as close to space as possible before using rocket propulsion. Very simple, very effective, and we have the technology to do it relatively cheaply right now.
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Originally Posted by Zachstar
There is NO such thing as population reduction in most democracies the ones with supposed population decline are mainly due to local conditions or other things that do not reflect on the rest of the world.
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As far as the overpopulation thing goes, it's best to start with this misconception. While
democracies do not neccessarily have negative population growth (if indeed one exsisted, anywhere, but that's nitpicking) first-world nations do. Any positive growth is generally due to immigration. The U.S. is a good example. Most net population growth in the U.S. is from immigration and the families of first-generation citizens. Even then, the birth rate is about 2.1 children per woman or less. Hardly enough to cause a population crisis. Since each child replaces a parent that eventually dies, the net effect is not that drastic.
However, poor countries, which almost always have high birth rates, contribute the most to global overpopulation. They also consume fewer resources, in every instance I am aware of. They also have a lot of famines and wars.
The cruel reality is that there will not be a need to introduce population-control measures or export people to space in the forseeable future. The "excess" population will simply die off. It's certainly a terrible fate, but it is one that will happen nonetheless. Eventually, we will come to the point where first-world nations are no longer willing to increase foreign aid to poor countries because of economic stress or production shortfalls. At that point, their high birth rates will be offset to at least an equal degree by high death rates and infant mortality rates.
In a worst-case scenario, like say, a bunch of idiots demanding that we transform our agricultural products into expensive and inefficient petroleum supplements, the supply of agricultural products to third-world nations will reach its' apex much more quickly, resulting in mass starvation and war. It's happening right now, and getting worse evey day. Of course, every third-world nation is also a primarily autocratic state, with very limiting trade policies.
Overpopulation
is going to happen and space exploration isn't going to solve it. A government that simply has the
ability to blow a bunch of money on space exploration, or any other dubious enterprise, is going to blow a lot of money. That money has to come from somewhere. If it is from taxation, it destroys market incentive and creates a market-government complex, and we all know what that does. It also removes currency from efficient use.
The much more common example involves the state borrowing or printing money, which artificially inflates the currency.
The result of either policy is that a nation is made less wealthy. Obviously, if people don't have disposable income to spend or invest, the economy suffers, yes?
If the economy suffers, the tax base and the supply of investment capital suffer. When an economy is suffering, the people that comprise it aren't very inclined to worry about overpopulation or space exploration or anything other than making ends meet.
The means to solving the problem of overpopulation is not in space. It is on this planet, and it involves economic freedom and prosperity, not taxing a suffering economy with wasteful expenditures on space travel/exploration/colonization. Those will come when the time is right.