by wasoxygen

Neal Stephenson wrote the definitive essay on cybertourism when the first internet-dedicated oceanic optical fiber cable was laid, all the way back in 1996. His characteristic sharp prose ably describes the sheer cost and difficulty of building these wretched lolcat pipes. For much of the 2000s, so much cable was being laid that the rate of deployment, combined across multiple ships, was supersonic.

More from the Countering misconceptions in space journalism series:

There are no known commodity resources in space that could be sold on Earth

Let’s consider a representative list of the most expensive materials in the world. In descending order, they are:

Antimatter, currently $62.5t/g.

Californium, $25m/g.

Diamond, $55k/g.

Tritium, $30k/g.

Taaffite, $20k/g.

Helium 3, $15k/g.

Painite, $6k/g.

Plutonium, $4k/g.

LSD, $3k/g.

Cocaine, $236/g.

Despite their high value density, none of these make good candidates for commercial extraction from the Moon or asteroids, for a few different reasons....

Space-based solar power is not a thing

the fundamental problem with space-based solar power is that it’s obtaining a commodity, power, somewhere where it’s expensive and selling it somewhere where it’s cheap.... What are the extra costs? Broadly, they fall into the following categories: Transmission losses, thermal losses, logistics costs, and space technology penalty.