Space Colonization Economics, Part 2

[chris_gerrib]

So, in Part 1 of my continuing saga on Space Colonization, I talked about the economics of Antarctic "colonization." Basically, once the research to be done reaches a certain level, setting up a base, as opposed to flying in and out, makes sense.

Today I'll talk about oil rigs and colonies on the ocean floor. Actually, let's get the ocean floor out of the way first. We'll have sea-bed colonies after space colonies. Simply put, it's easier to keep a modest pressure in then to keep a massive pressure out. On Mars or the Moon, taking an inflatable building and covering it with local dirt is a perfectly viable construction technique. You can't do that on the ocean floor - at a certain (fairly shallow) depth, the amount of oxygen in the air needed to keep the building inflated is toxic to humans.

But that's not a problem, because we do have oceanic colonies - they are called "oil rigs." After all, the business end of the oil rig isn't at the ocean surface, it's at the sea floor. So, economic things to note about oil rigs:

1) They run short shifts - usually two weeks on, two weeks off. This is because travel time to and from is measured in hours via helicopter.

2) Again, they do live off of the land - nobody ships water to them, they make their own.

3) Being close to the work matters. Even though work at the bottom is done by remote vehicle, logistical support for the vehicle and time lag for the operator means that the human behind the screen needs to be close.

4) Oil rigs also bake their own bread. It's cheaper to ship flour via boat and hire a person to bake on 3rd shift than it is to have more frequent runs and bring in fresh bread.

What the observant reader should note is that shipping costs matter. They should also note that ocean shipping is cheaper than air freight. What's not clear is how much cheaper.

My dad, in his working days (he retired a couple of years ago) had call to air-freight aluminum castings from China to the US. The cost? $2 a pound. I recently had call to ship medical supplies to Zambia. The shipping company never asked how much my shipment weighed. They asked how much volume of stuff I had. I could have shipped as much as 56,000 pounds for $3150.

That's $0.0625 per pound. That's two orders of magnitude cheaper than air freight.

Yet even at six cents a pound, it's cheaper to hire a guy to bake bread than ship it to an oil rig. Part three - what this tells us about how self-sufficient any manned colony would have to be, and the (unfortunate) importance of failure. Part four will be my vision of how we get "true" colonies in our solar system. (whole series)

Comments

[ford-prefect42.livejournal.com]

Agreed, I wasn't staking out a position that sea-bed would happen before lunar or martian, I was pointing out that it's closer to even odds. There is also the point that while "deepwater" habs would require insane structures, the continental shelf is still "seabed". and the continental shelf has a maximum depth of 460 feet, which corresponds to 13 atmospheres, or 200 psi. Still a bigger challenge than 15 psi, but not a particularly daunting one. Remember also that that is the maximum depth for the continental shelf.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

That's true -- colonizing the continental shelf is much more easy than is colonizing the deep ocean floor. For one thing, humans can safely scuba-dive at most continental shelf depths, especially if they remain at that depth throughout -- by comparison, this is possible only in the shallowest oceanic floor depths.