Comment on Space colonization would create so many jobs for everyone. Not great jobs but jobs.
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Only if you ignore the opportunity cost—i.e., the number of terrestrial jobs that could have been created with the same investment.
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
Depends on the time frame. In the period immediately following such a venture, sure, but if you actually properly establish settlement off earth, the total resource base and thus carrying capacity of civilization as a whole increases and continues to increase until we either hit the limits of that part of the universe one can theoretically reach (which is so big as to make the entire earth less than a speck of dust by comparison), you decide to just stop space colonization (which gets more difficult the further on you go, because the number of potential polities to launch a new mission increases the more space is populated), or you find yourself boxed in by alien civilizations in all directions (since we haven’t seen any, they’re most likely far enough apart on average for this to still leave an extremely vast chunk of space). A hypothetical spacefairing civilization should be able to reach sizes so vast that it would be physically impossible to create enough jobs on just one planet to equal it, even with just this solar system even.
Job creation by itself is not exactly the best motivation to pursue this though, since the jobs created will after the initial period be generally far away and therefore not likely to be worked by anyone except the people that end up in those colonies, who wouldn’t even exist otherwise.
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah—“job creation” only makes sense in the timeframe of making incremental changes to industry to adjust to changes in the labor pool. On the timeframe of decisions that alter future demographics, job creation is a distorted and detrimental lens to look through.