Breaking Out of the Solar System With an Interstellar Fleet

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There are many people who have the opinion about interstellar travel being impossible. They are looking at our current immature economy and immature space capability. They then extrapolate about some one off interstellar mission. We need to look at how humanity broke out of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea with a fleet of exploration ships.

There is the current Breakthrough Starshot program to make actual hardware for the actual first missions.

There is work to improve the critical hardware and systems for a tiny but capable unmanned flyby mission to Alpha or Proxima Centauri. These would be using laser arrays to send 1 gram but 1 square meter sails at up to 20% of light speed.

There is not enough economic scaling and not enough economic benefits from this. I would equate this to a system of messages in a bottle on earth. Messages in a bottle are able to cross the oceans on Earth but this does not make the successful backers of the mission more economically capable. Messages in a bottle are not activities that can scale up economically.

The people and nations around the Mediterranean Sea had developed active and advanced commerce in the 1300s and 1400s.

The Vikings had a maximum force of 700 ships and 40,000 Viking warriors. A more conservative estimate of 300 ships with an average of 50 men each puts the expected number at 15,000 soldiers. This sizable force was still just 3% to 8% of the population of Denmark at the time. They did travel to North America around 1000 AD. According to the Saga of the Greenlanders, Leif’s brother Thorvald made first contact with the natives. Thorvald and his crew were exploring the coast, likely in the Markland area, and found nine natives asleep under boats. They attacked the natives, killing eight of them, while one escaped. Shortly after, in an apparent reprisal, Thorvald was killed by a native’s arrow. Later, Thorfinn Karlsefni led a group to colonize Vinland and encountered natives, who they initially traded with, but relations soured when a native was killed attempting to steal weapons from the Norse. In retaliation, the natives attacked and Karlsefni decided to abandon the colony.

How do I interpret this? There needed to be a critical mass of ships. Ocean crossings seemed to need hundreds of large ships actively performing local trade or economic activity. Those large ships needed a large local economy that sustained the ships. There was a need for sustainable economic activity at the other end that brought benefits to the groups sending out the longer missions. The ocean going fleet was about 1-10% of the overall local merchant fleet. The overall merchant fleet was about 5-10% of the overall economy.

Some Other Details of the State of the World 1300-1650

Around 1300, Venice began to develop the great galley of commerce, the galea grossa. It grew to carry a crew of more than 200 and weighed as much as 250 tons. These galleys took passengers and goods to Constantinople (now Istanbul), and to Alexandria in Egypt, and returned to Venice carrying luxury items. A sea route to the Indies discovered by Portugal signaled an end to the glory days of Venice’s merchant galleys and spice trade, but the war galleys (or fighting galleys) lived on. The war galleys were mostly manned by prisoners of war or convicts, who were chained to benches, usually three to six per oar. More than 3,000 Venetian merchant ships were in operation by the year 1450.

The Portuguese caravel was a small, maneuverable sailing ship used in the 15th century. The caravel was invented by Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal for long distance trade. The caravel was used by the Portuguese to explore the West African coast and the Atlantic Ocean. The caravel’s main advantage was its ability to sail into the wind. The caravel’s rounded bottom made it faster than other vessels of its time. The caravel’s top speed was about 8 knots, but its average speed was 4 knots.

The Age of Exploration, also known as the Age of Discovery, lasted from the early 15th century to the early 17th century. The economic factors that drove Europeans to explore were:

* Improving their economy
* Getting additional spices
* the fur trade
* Searching for minerals
* Developing the European nation through cheap labor from slaves in their colonies

The Age of Exploration led to the growth of capitalism. In this system, merchants gained great wealth by trading and selling goods from around the world. They could then use their profits to finance other voyages and to start trading companies.

China’s Ming Dynasty had a great treasure fleet of 300 large ships and 28000 sailors. This fleet made seven trips around Asia and collected ambassadors, projected China’s power. However, there was not enough economic and political benefit to sustain the activity.

Creating a Massive in Solar System Space Economy

As I previously concluded, there needs to be large local economy that sustain a large number of ocean going capable ships. For large scale interstellar travel, there needs to be a massive in solar system space economy. There needs to be an overall large human economy.

The ocean going fleet was about 1-10% of the overall local merchant fleet. The overall merchant fleet was about 5-10% of the overall economy. How would this apply to interstellar space economics?

If a robust interstellar space program needs the equivalent of $10 trillion per year, then the in-solar system space economy needs to be $100 trillion to 1000 trillion per year. The overall human economy needs to be 10 to 100 times larger than the space economy or the space economy has become the majority of the overall human economy.

The overall economy would need to be 100 to 10,000 times larger than it is today.

The world economy did grow by 200 times from 1820 to today and it grew by 100 times from 1870 to today.

The size of our GDP economy is the number of transactions times the average size of transactions we all have in a year.

Moving and making things faster and cheaper means more transactions and thus more wealth.

This will be a bigger impact than the internet and it is a special extension of computers. The internet and digital economies are on top of the physical world of moving and making things. Expanding and speeding the physical world expands the physical foundation of the digital world.

I believe this will be the decade that starts replacing the industrial age with an exponential industrial age.

Transportation will become two to three times cheaper and faster and labor will become vastly cheaper, faster and abundant. This will because of robotaxi (Tesla FSD) and humanoid robots (teslabot).

The 1836-1845 rail boom and the 1911-1921 car booms were not the end of the story for rail and cars but they were clearly the strong beginning where change was established. 2023 to 2032 self-driving car and humanoid bot booms will establish the beginning of the biggest transformation in human history.

Space development will explode with the Super Heavy Starship and Mechazilla launch towers. This will enable thousands of Starships flying around the world every day and every week and to orbit delivering cargo and putting up communication and other satellites. 20-30% of all global communication revenue will be provided through Starlink satellites. This will be high speed internet communication and low bandwidth satellite to cellphone communication. The global telecommunications market is estimated to be worth $3 trillion in 2023.

Plasma Magnets could use variations in the structure of the solar wind to reach 2% of light speed. There is other technology that can enable fast travel around the solar system.

Those technologies would need to be leveraged into a robust in solar system economy. There would need to trillions of dollars made each year from development and activities around orbit, the moon, Mars, the asteroid belts and the gravitational lensing points.

The overall economic growth from 1820 to 2023 can and should be replicated. This would enable an overall human economy to be 1000 times what it is today. After establishing the SpaceX Starship economy and space activity, we would then need to go next level with affordable in solar system and near solar system travel at 2% or more of light speed.

I have videos explaining how it could be possible for this (2024-2034) to be the decade of change. The decade where the true space age starts.

The importance of the launch tower rocket catching to get to near airplane like operations.

The ramping of SpaceX revenue.

I describe how this can lead to the economic development of the solar system.

Economic Model for Interstellar Exploration

There needs to be sustainable economic activity at the other end that brought benefits to the groups sending out the longer missions. This might depend upon a very large human economy have the curiousity and desire to spend 0.1% or so of the overall economy getting the videos, pictures and information from a robust interstellar space development and exploration program.

There are estimates that the Creator economy is $20-100 billion today. This is the Instagram, youtuber and other social media sharing of experiences. This could be on the edge of about 0.1% of the overall economy.

19 thoughts on “Breaking Out of the Solar System With an Interstellar Fleet”

  1. Count me among the naysayers. The distances are beyond vast (those historical Earth distance analogies are off by many orders of magnitude) and the energy and engineering requirements, while not completely infeasible, are not economical.

    Consider that if you could actually to the TRAPPIST system at light speed, it would take 40 years to get there, and almost no one alive at launch on Earth would still be so in time to receive the first transmission from the system.

  2. I’ve been thinking about this, well … years, decades? … and also quite a bit since Brian put forth this article. My handle is ‘GoatGuy’, which was loosely coined to reflect that I tend to bûtt-heads with whatever the point of RahRah article content is, just as a matter of goatish spirit.

    However, even though I could make several arguments as to why this is kind of a not-in-the-next-century projection, it still serves to praise the thinking of exponentialism-will-bring-it-on that it shows.

    Exponentialism (Malthusian growth) is always heald out either as the most marvelous future probable, or the most scary case of running out of every resource thinkable. In truth, ALL exponential growth — without exception — all becomes the so-called “S” curve as resources and opportunities run dry. Even today, the exponential growth of the Human population is diverging from the Malthusian curve, and is beginning to ‘S’ off. Demographic realities are in play, along with industrial means to keep from limitlessly making new babies.

    But OK, so what, right? Who’s to say that the next round of revolutionary growth can’t happen with a fixed or even declining world population. The growth of the world’s GDP (taken from the table given above) would appear to be 100× or so from 1870 to 2023, extrapolating a bit at the end. What part of that is demographic? Quite a bit! 1.4 billion then, and what, 8.04 billion now. 5.7x the number of people.

    So, divide 100× ÷ 5.7x = 17.5x ‘per person’.

    While we’re on ‘1870’, what was the economy like back then, worldwide? Well … there were a LOT of water mills, and also quite a few coal-fired steam (Watt) engine mills. These mills were the ultimate driver in the 1870 economy, turning cotton and woold into thread and yard; powering the textile mills that turned that into fabrics. And machine made rugs. And canvas, for sails (still big in 1870) and for ‘coachwork’. The ‘plastic’ of the day was not vinyl, but LEATHER. Millions upon millions of cattle were raised almost exclusively for their hides. Ships went around the world carrying those hides, literally ‘to the gills’ and ready to capsize … for the unsatiable demand of the leather.

    Apart from that, mills and coal-steam engines were revolutionizing metals (mostly steel) manufacture. Rolling mills were making H (I) beams, plates, rolld forms. Making stuff that literally could NOT be made by hand. Mills sawed logs into lumber, mills powered machine shops to make farm implements, to forge hoists and blocks (pulleys), to make seeminglylimitless mountains of plate glass, window glass. Mills and artisans perfected making cups, goblets, saucers out of glass. Other mills industrially produced ceramics ‘china’ and things like toilets (commodes), sinks.

    Basically, without mills there wouldn’t have been an ‘industrial revolution’. THEY were the revolution. The idea of powering rotary spindles with water and coal power, basically without halting, 24 hours a day if need be. Lighting was really the problem, and electricity was just making its debut. So, mills didn’t work at night. And worked more in Summer, less in Winter. Mills and TRAINS. Rail: revolutionizing the transport of far heavier and bulkier loads than could possibly be done by Horse or Oxen.

    Mills and Rail. Mills made the rail, and railroads took the products to far-flung markets. This was the source of at least 75% of the ‘prosperity’ or GDP of the day.

    Contrast that to 2023. Mills still produce a whole lot of stuff, but now almost invisibly. There are precious few mills working in America or Europe compared to what 1870 carried. Instead, we have ‘industry’ and distribution, we have manufacturing in insanely clean facilities. We’re making chips like crazy, and we’ve got millions of programming professionals harnessing all that computing power to remarkable end, as invisible as it is. Our dentist no longer pull teeth as cure to a cavity. Our physicians try to repair badly broken limbs instead of cutting them off. We (I!) can be ‘cured’ of arterial blockages by way of almost out-patient super high-tech procedures. Angioplasty. We work on brains with remote controlled mini robotic fingers, we are masters of remedying all sorts of systemic shortcomings. Our clothing has become so inexpensive that it is basically disposable.

    Our ‘economy’ is basically 17× larger per person than 1870s. And this ‘biggerness’ is informed by just looking around: we all have devices not even imagined by those people in 1870, let alone in 1970. ‘Smart’ phones (really just computers that allow us to have banal 2-way video and audio connections), which connect us to a world-spanning Internet from most-anyplace in any city, anywhere. Our cities have skylines that are astounding at some level, product and evidence of a technological mastery over materials which is unparalleled in Human history. We travel on roads at blistering speed, doing so at a small proportion of one’s income. We have a distribution network for food, medicine, textiles, appliances, cars and trucks, for tools, lumber, electricity, natural gas, gasoline and diesel, which are INVISIBLE to most-everyone, but are critically working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, almost without fail.

    ________________________________________

    What’s the point? Well … basically that there isn’t a whole lot to improve that’d get us another 14× in per-person GDP. RoboCars — as nice of a concept as they seem — really aren’t strategic game changers. If 100% of them (not 90%) were automated completely, it could really speed up the bane of modern living: commute traffic and nasty old freeway traffic jams. Would that revolutionize one’s life? Sure. To some small degree. But not really add much to the 14×.

    I’m trying in fact to get my mind around what the ‘next 14×’ would be. Clearly the 5.7x of demographic isn’t going to happen: we’re demographically at the S point of the curve. And the Earth’s resources are thankful. We have to remain vigilant that our ‘consumption’ and its dark byproduct ‘waste, pollution and poisonous emissions’ are failsafed. Or mined for recycling. Every bit of it. That really would seriously be revolutionary: except not 14× worth.

    SO LOOK UP, right? The Heavens, Space, the planets, the asteroids and so on.

    ________________________________________

    And that then is Brian’s and other Futurist’s promotional strategy. UP. Massive growth of an exoplanetary economy. (remember … ‘massive’ if 10,000× of something which is as big as an apple, is only a truckload of apples). Enormous growth of launches, of near-earth and further-out space stations. Sure … just like The Economy of the here-and-now has ‘minted’ jobs for millions of professional bean-counters (accountants), just the same, an enormous exoplanetary economy would also spin off 5× to 100× more jobs unrelated to the actual jetting around in space.

    Still, I’m left with the plausible-purpose conundrum. Building space stations? Check. In order to house people, to act as ports for shipments of stuff. People, food, stuff, parts, and more people. Space stations AND a large-scale program of mining stuff that’s really spare here on Earth? OK, check. Maybe. Helium–3 on Luna might be good, if ever we figure how to actually do Fusion copiously and cheaply. Explore Luna deeply … not just the superficial bouncing around we did in the 1970s? Sure! Hopefully we discover the ‘ore’ that makes further conquest possible. Water. Abundant water, if mined right. Ores … crashed metal meteors that leave great hulking blobs of the stuff around, albeit covered with grey cement dust. Electricity? Maybe! There’s a lot of direct sunlight up there.

    Science… big. Astrophysics would love Lunar mounted ginormous telescopes. They would. Yet, once installed, it’d hardly take more than a skeleton crew to deal with fixing their inevitable problems. And maybe those would be robotic anyway. Zero-G (re-labelled as microgravity) chemistry, manufacturing. Maybe Zero-G chip-manufacture! This I could really see as being a big win. Growing school bus sized silicon crystals and keeping them dust free in the vacuum of space seems like a big fat WIN.

    Entertainment! Of course so! People by the thousand today march like mindless ants through endless queues in order to board Cruise Ships. Which, once aboard, are festive enough, but ultimately kind of empty. Oh well, the illusion of Love Boats. I could also see though a very solid tourist avenue for the Space Exo-economy. Solid. Millions of people per year. Solid enough that they alone would justify the space hotels, the stations, all the to-and-back ferries of the passengers, food, yada, yada. Would be a great place to start a brewery and a distillary. Get some of that Asteroid Brandy, bub! And millions of kids would have their own precious Moon rocks. Yay. Banal. To the core. Oh, so Human.

    And the whole support infrastructure, doctors, surgeries, spas. Grocery vendors, entertainment, revues. Accountants, banks, Echoes of Old Earth eateries. A myriad of places to spend one’s slightly abundant excess cash. And for equally millions of people to LIVE up there, entertaining us all. Pirates? Very probably!!! Why not. All the vessels coming up from Earth would most certainly contain a lot of valuable goods, and wealthy people. The ultimate car jacking. Give us all your money and jewels, or we’re pepper itty-bitty holes in your ship’s hide! They would win, that.

    ________________________________________

    Imagining thus, then we come back to the ‘but, but, but … interstellar?’ problem. Seriously, so. Ferrying millionso f people to Space Dock 1 and back would be quite the economy. But what exactly is the pull for traversing The Stars, when the time cost at the very least exceeds anyone’s lifetime … one way? As Brett Bellmore said, there is NOTHING of sufficiently high value that we’d send off ‘mining’ missions to anywhere outside our solar system. At least not without a profound revolution in space-ship acceleration at levels high enough, long enough and safe enough to get to serious fractions of lightspeed in less than a lifetime. Physics (so far) has no answer in this department. We’re stuck ‘flinging rocks’ out our anteriors in exchange for a few kilometers per second of forward speed. That’s our present tradeoff.

    The exo-Solar System economy would have to be built from something really compelling. Something like “Planet Earth is on a collision course with a Black Hole in 177 years”. Yep, that’d be a great reason to pick up and go on a one-way to someplace far, far off. A little dialed back on the Totality of Death idea, we might reasonably find highly attractive exoplanets around reasonably nearby stars, and accept one-way trips to them … on the hopes that they might be colonized by our Library Ships full of tasting seeds and crâhppy animals. Why not?

    But that’s about it, really. The desire for SCIENCE to be done at those remote possibly-planetary locations is the other driver, so long as the cost of the space exploration isn’t prodigeous. It is what will drive our interstellar designs, from now until the medium future. Certainly for hundreds of years. Supposing Humanity survives itself. Hoping.

    ⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

  3. “We need to look at how humanity broke out of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea with a fleet of exploration ships.”

    Our model should not be the European Age of discovery (or even the Chinese treasure fleets of Admiral Zheng He).

    It should be the Polynesians hopping from island to island across the vast Pacific.

    And we don’t need a vast initial fleet of interstellar ship.

    We only need one self replicating ship that will arrive, explore, colonize, build two more ships from local materials and send them off.

    With a mere 37 doublings we can explore and colonize every star in the galaxy.

  4. I´m sorry, but only 19% of the US GDP comes from industrial sector. A wopping 80% of GDP comes from service. So how could we finance and build a real space economy with only changing money?

    • The US economy only works because the dollar is the international reserve currency. Now that Saudi, and other oil producers are accepting non-dollar payment for oil, the dollars days are numbered. The US will have to return to making most of the products it uses, and exporting things other than dollars.

  5. The required size of the economy is relative to the cost of production. If it takes X money to produce an interstellar mission, you could either grow the economy by 1000 times to afford it, or you can drop the production costs by a factor of 1000. Or, since the two are not decoupled, you could drop the production costs x20 and grow the economy x50.

    The self-replicating tech that Brett talks about could also drop the production costs significantly.

  6. Awesome piece, Brian! I don’t have enough energy right now to write out everything else in my head but awesome piece!

  7. “The overall economy would need to be 100 to 10,000 times larger than it is today.”

    It will be at least 10 000x larger in 2030’s (thanks to ASI)

  9. Probably worth including Antarctic and the deep sea in your analysis.

    These are both areas that we could spend more resources exploiting, but have found better alternatives.

    And a discussion of time is necessary. If the interstellar mining mission takes 50 years to return, what are the odds that you return with something valuable enough to justify the trip? How many financial bets placed in 1970 pay out today?

    • Nobody is going to be doing interstellar mining, never mind idiot plots like Avatar. There’s virtually nothing conceivable that’s valuable enough to justify transporting it across interstellar distances.

      Scientific exploration and one way colonization missions, and that’s it.

      • Correct, time and empty space travel will most likely kill anyone or life before arriving. Today’s tech is smart, but unless we develop warp drive you might as well forget traveling out of the solar system anywhere. If anything we need advancement of fusion power generation to even think of travel.

      • Scientific exploration and colonization don’t pay bills. Neither will scale. Claiming these will be the foundation for expansion is basically saying that we won’t expand.

        If the trips don’t make lots of money nobody will fund them, beyond proof of concept stuff like we do in Antarctica and the deep sea.

      • Well, I mean, if there WERE such a thing as anti-gravity matter, that MIGHT be worth mining and bringing back… (Avatar is clearly set in a post-singularity zoo for the progenitor biological people, created by the ASI that resides down in the gas giant, that also created anti-G rocks and fun animals and other toys to amuse its pets.)

  10. The key to this is self-reproducing technology. That divorces industrial production from population numbers, and allows an extremely fast exponential growth of resources. We can estimate this growth rate by looking at the amount of energy that goes into producing stuff, and how much stuff it takes to provide that energy.

    It’s estimated that current solar panels generate the energy that went into them in a bit under 4 years. In space you might reduce that to a year, because you don’t need heavy supporting structures, and can run at full output 24 hours a day.

    But, of course, a factory isn’t just its power supply. Let’s say half the factory is solar panels, and that every part of the factory takes the same energy per kg to produce. You’d be able to double the factory in 2 years.

    In 20 years you’d have 1024 factories.
    After 40 years, over a million.
    After 60, over a billion.

    Your 1820-2023 period was 203 years. In that time such a system would grow by a factor of 10^30.

    Relativistic travel requires absurd amounts of energy per gram of payload, and if you want to be launching a manned colonization wave, you’re going to be launching a LOT of grams of payload. But self-reproducing factories would make that possible, without even any breakthroughs in physics.

  11. Your up and to the right projections are going to run face first into world wide demographic decline. Not saying it wont happen but it wont happen any time soon. I suspect the US will be laying the foundations of space exploitation for the next 20 years. The Millennial’s retirement funds will be providing most of the capital.

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