Posted June 04, 2016
No, man, this is Critical Thinking 101. Check it out:
It costs about $40,000-$50,000 to get one kilogram into geosynch, which is probably where you would want your factories to be. But even if you only wanted to go as far as geotransfer, that's $20,000-$25,000 per kilo. That means it would cost about $1,200,000 to send a 60kg naked person into lower orbit. Now, for purposes of this thought experiment, we'll ignore the cost of all the stuff a person needs to survive (let's say that economies of scale are in action and infrastructure has already somehow magically been put into place).
Once you're in space, you have no protections at all. They stop paying you completely, because HAHAHAKORPORATIONZ mirite. Also, since you have nothing else to do, you're working 80 hours a week. If your terrestrial counterpart is making $20USD an hour, that means these scary skynet corps are saving about $1600 a week. They would need to work you 750 weeks, or about 15 years, just to recover the cost of getting you up into space, assuming they are able to get zero-interest loans to cover the cost of putting you up there. If not, then the opportunity cost of that 1.2 mil is so great that they won't break even in your lifetime. And all of THAT is assuming that they for some reason don't need to pay for the things you'd need to live.
This isn't optimism, it's just knowing basic economics and physics, man.
It costs about $40,000-$50,000 to get one kilogram into geosynch, which is probably where you would want your factories to be. But even if you only wanted to go as far as geotransfer, that's $20,000-$25,000 per kilo. That means it would cost about $1,200,000 to send a 60kg naked person into lower orbit. Now, for purposes of this thought experiment, we'll ignore the cost of all the stuff a person needs to survive (let's say that economies of scale are in action and infrastructure has already somehow magically been put into place).
Once you're in space, you have no protections at all. They stop paying you completely, because HAHAHAKORPORATIONZ mirite. Also, since you have nothing else to do, you're working 80 hours a week. If your terrestrial counterpart is making $20USD an hour, that means these scary skynet corps are saving about $1600 a week. They would need to work you 750 weeks, or about 15 years, just to recover the cost of getting you up into space, assuming they are able to get zero-interest loans to cover the cost of putting you up there. If not, then the opportunity cost of that 1.2 mil is so great that they won't break even in your lifetime. And all of THAT is assuming that they for some reason don't need to pay for the things you'd need to live.
This isn't optimism, it's just knowing basic economics and physics, man.
