The high frontier

What Hacker News says

1. philwelchFeb 2026
   > I'd love to hear about your economical plan to extract resources and populate the rest of the solar system.

   A good starting point is Gerard O’Neill’s 1977 book The High Frontier.

   > It currently costs approximately $4,000 per kg to transport anything into space, that's current bargain basement SpaceX pricing. It also consumes non-renewable fossil fuels to do so.

   There are plenty of materials in the solar system that aren’t at the bottom of a gravity well. It’s just a question of developing ISRU infrastructure. The fossil fuel problem is already solved; all of the newest rockets use methane fuel, which can be produced without fossil fuels.

   > Let me know how you plan to figure out planetary terraforming, gravity manipulation (so we can live on planets with vastly different gravity), planetary climate management, off-earth mining. How many of these problems have been solved even with 1-5% progress?

   Half of those aren’t serious problems. You don’t need to terraform anything to fit quadrillions of people into the solar system because you can just use small bodies like the moon as material for space colonies. You stated yourself how expensive it is to get out of the gravity well; why go back down into another one? The space colonies—which can be built with known materials, at scales approximating that of a US county—would rotate, providing artificial gravity through centrifugal force. ISRU (“off-earth mining”) is a very active field of research.

   The obvious next step is to industrialize the Moon and build a mass driver out of lunar materials that we can use to ship lunar materials into cislunar space for construction. The best discussion of how to do the practical next steps that I’ve encountered is Ian Long’s YouTube channel, Anthrofuturism. (https://youtube.com/@anthrofuturism). The best starting point there is “How To Develop The Moon” (https://youtu.be/WZN2xXMb28g), largely based on his book, also titled How To Develop The Moon (https://a.co/d/0dn84hJa).

   There’s a beautiful future available to us if we can escape the bucket crabs.

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2. bckrFeb 2023
   Are you familiar with the writings of Malthus? Predictions of humanity’s growth-fueled demise are not new.

   > is there any future in which the humans race does not choke itself with its own overgrowth?

   There are three primary ideas that give me hope in the future of humanity.

   The first is space settlement, especially on orbital colonies. The books The High Frontier and Mining the Sky are great introductions to this concept. And after a long “space winter”, it’s gaining steam.

   The second is the humble concept of recycling. I believe technological progress will allow us to recycle the vast majority of materials that we use to build our civilization. Current directions in this field are enzymatic decomposition and AI-enabled visual separation of matter.

   Finally, I have hope in the future of humanity based on the fact that those with higher quality of life and education tend to have fewer children.

   These things together paint a picture of a next century with fewer total humans on earth living with much higher life quality and efficiency, with an expanding frontier of orbital colonies of adventurers. This frontier will in turn become a comfortable civilization that can sustain trillions, before we even discuss the possibility of life outside our solar system.

   Lofty? Yes. But look at how far we have come and note that indications for high QOL and high tech are accelerating, not slowing down. There will be challenge after challenge, but we will get to a fundamentally brighter future with different problems, make no mistake.

   That is, we will get there if we have engaged citizens of democracies all over the world who believe in and act on their power. Political will is the bottleneck.

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3. bckrJul 2022
   I recommend checking out O'Neill's book The High Frontier where he lays out a plan for how to do this.

   Keyword: regolith

   Mars is at least 10x harder. The path to space settlement is in our own backyard.

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4. peytonJun 2022
   I dunno, OP’s approach seems pretty common for serial founders.

   The High Frontier is a fun book.

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5. 0xffff2Sep 2016
   For some more concrete reading, try The High Frontier by Gerard O'Neill[1]. He makes the opposite case; arguing that orbital habitats could have a net positive economic return in fairly short order.

   [1]: https://www.amazon.com/High-Frontier-Human-Colonies-Apogee/d...

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6. perilunarApr 2016
   I don't understand why Musk is so focused on a Mars Colony. Why go to all the effort of climbing out of one gravity well just to drop yourself down another?

   It be a lot easier to mine asteroids and build colonies in Earth or solar orbit. And potentially hugely profitable if they choose a platinum-rich asteroid.

   See further: 'The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space' by Gerard K. O'Neill

   'Mining the Sky' by John S. Lewis

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