Sci-fi worldbuilding idea of little interest to anyone other than me:
--Imagine that the space race had continued and accelerated after the 70s, perhaps due to the Outer Space Treaty not existing and there being a corresponding rush to grab territory, with the USSR and USA and later China planting flags on various celestial bodies and claiming them (e.g. imagine an alternate treaty that said when a human plants a flag, takes a photo, and brings back a regolith sample to a nation’s capitol, that nation gets the territory for 100km around the flag.)
--So by 2030, the AI race is about ~5 years behind schedule because for decades there has been less top talent going into software and computers and more top talent going into various space ventures. Silicon Valley isn’t a household name, instead there’s the Space Coast.
--The space ventures are like 15 years ahead of schedule though; even in 2015, there was the equivalent of fully reusable Starship + a very small moon base and a thousand people living in a large ISS. By 2030, launch costs have dropped even further, to something like $15/kg, and six million people live in space, as follows:
(1) LEO City (or LEO for short) is an international space station that houses about 4 million people. It’s the port city, so to speak, connecting the Earth to space and connecting space to the Earth. Optimized mega-Starships fly many times a day from various Earth cities to dock with LEO City and return home; from LEO City passengers and cargo transfer to other ships optimized for zero-gravity or low-gravity travel, that use different kinds of propulsion, fuel, etc. LEO city has almost a hundred million tourists visit it each year (indeed almost 1 out of the 4 million people in it at any given time is a tourist basically) plus it has a decent-sized high-tech sector (various kinds of manufacturing that are easier in zero gravity, low gravity, and/or vacuum) plus it has a nascent industrial base for e.g. refining asteroid ore and recycling various waste products. Most manufacturing, of course, is done on Earth since it’s so cheap to launch things to LEO. The exception is manufacturing of heavy simple objects that are mostly made out of asteroid ore, such as steel panels and girders and (more recently) a kind of solar panel. It’s a very well-run city with low crime, high average education and IQ, etc. Very few children or old people though. Every nation has a presence in LEO city, many corporations do too. There’s a chinatown, a ’muricatown, a sovietown, etc.
Structurally, it’s like a giant disk of solar panels and radiators, surrounding and connected by veins and branches to a a messy and growing blob of zero-gee habitat modules and structures. Viewing the disk as if it were farmland surrounding the city, there would then be a giant tower of rotating habitats of increasing size (so that the tower looks like an inverted pyramid, or maybe a tornado) rising from the center of the city. (This is because the bigger rotating habitats were added on later). Most of the people spend most of their time in the rotating sections, because gravity is comfortable.
(2) Moonbase Alpha is a city of a bit more than a million people on the south pole of the Moon. There, they strip-mine the Moon, getting water and various ores. They are more of an industrial city than LEO City, because they can dump waste heat directly into the regolith so they don’t need radiators, and because they can still get near 24⁄7 solar since they are on the south pole. (They get it from giant towers that turn to face the sun, scattered around in a 100km radius or so from the city) Also because it’s convenient to process the ore immediately rather than ship it raw. They also have a tourist industry, similar but smaller than LEOs due to being more difficult to reach. There’s a small resort town located by the historic Apollo landing site, which has been preserved in pristine condition. This of course is even more out of the way and expensive to visit.
(3) There’s another city on Mars and another city orbiting Mars, collectively they have a bit less than a million people. Basically no tourists; more like pilgrims or colonists. More motivated by national pride and the race to claim territory; economically it doesn’t make much sense right now to be on Mars, but the rules are the rules and it’s generally thought that a century from now the nation that claimed the most Mars territory will have a huge industrial advantage. (Well, some people think this. Others question it, saying that it’ll always be cheaper to live in space habitats. Still others say that AGI is coming which will render it all irrelevant.)
(4) There’s a lot of asteroid mining happening, mostly by robots / unmanned vehicles, but in some cases (especially the larger operations) with small human crews. It’s like living on an oil rig except it takes a lot longer to arrive and leave. The rest of the solar system has of course been thoroughly mapped by probes but few humans have ventured beyond the asteroid belt yet. Various nations and corporations are thinking about the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
(5) Earth orbit is packed with satellites, including various orbiting datacenters.
--Our story takes place in 2108, seventy-five years after a nuclear war that destroyed human civilization on Earth. The war happened as part of a standoff about imminent AGI development. Full on MAD between USA, China, and Russia, with a few other nations involved as well. The nuclear winter basically destroyed all civilization, though enough humans survived to rebuild at a lower tech level (maybe a few tens of millions total?) The EMP and Kessler syndrome took out basically all the satellites, as well. Due to some dramatic events—a secret plot, a revolution and declaration of independence—LEO City actually survived the conflagration. None of the great powers made it a priority to target it, since they all had substantial populations living there & since it would have enough trouble surviving on its own anyway given all the EMP and debris flying around. Though they initially started to fight each other, as per orders, the nationalities in LEO City ceased fighting, joined together and declared independence after the nukes started going off. (They lied and kept telling their homelands they were fighting and winning though, to be safe). LEO city took a ton of damage from debris and EMP but survived, partly because some of its leaders had anticipated this eventuality and hardened it in various ways. (Partly it survived by blowing its fuel reserves on getting to a higher orbit asap). By the time the earth leaders realized the treachery, they were out of nukes and more focused on figuring out how to survive.--
Over the next few years, LEO city detached a bunch of ruined heavy junk parts and a smaller, more functional version of it managed to limp out of Earth orbit entirely and into Moon orbit.--
After the war, launches from and landings on Earth basically ceased. None of the launch facilities on Earth were still functional, and the supply chain for producing new spaceships was obviously wrecked. People were living like cavemen or medieval peasants or at best post-apocalyptic New World colonists. Those in space still had hundreds of ships they could use to land; however, they wouldn’t be able to take off again if they did. Some people on Earth still had radios and could communicate with the people in space. They could exchange ideas and expertise but that was about it, so after twenty or thirty years they didn’t have much to talk about anymore.--
The population in space had a rough time initially. They were, thankfully, just barely able to become self-sustaining—Mars turned out to be useful now because it had some of the materials that the Moon and Asteroids lacked—at the cost of greatly reduced standard of living and somewhat reduced lifespan and increased child mortality. The population dwindled from six million to two million, stabilized, and now (in 2108) is back up to about six million. The amount of compute they have was cut by two orders of magnitude—one from the initial war, another one from degradation over the decades. They cannot make any new computers worthy of the name, so they are gradually redesigning all their machines to use Apollo-era computers, i.e. basically nothing. On Earth too, computing technology has been set back almost a century. Ironic; on some of the few surviving GPUs, they have proto-AGI systems (think: Claude Opus 5) but haven’t been able to meaningfully advance the frontier of AI capabilities due to (a) having only 1% as much compute initially and now more like 0.1%, compared to the hyperscalers right before the war, and (b) due to lack of talent and interest. (The smart people who could potentially work on it are instead e.g. trying to write new software to fix the aging recycling plants in LEO City on which the entire civilization’s survival depends, partly because that feels more urgent, and partly because there’s a bit of a Butlerian Jihad vibe going around given that the race to AGI was what caused the War.)
--So now it’s 2108 and there are several stable pre-industrial civilizations (population about a million or so each, e.g. on Tasmania and New Zealand and in Argentina) on Earth, plus various wild tribes of survivors from bunkers etc. scattered around. The radiation is mostly gone, the nuclear winter and its aftermath also gone. The Earth civilizations are starting to industrialize again and explore and contact each other and trade. In Space meanwhile there is a heavily industrialized, high-tech-in-every-way-except-computers civilization mostly on or above the Moon and Mars. It looks like it’ll be another century or so before anyone has good enough computers to get to AGI, if the existing norm against it has faded by then. The civilization in Space has radio contact with some (but not all) of the Earth civilizations, and could land a few ships on Earth at any time, but wouldn’t be able to take off again at least for now. In a decade or three that might change, though even then, it would be super expensive and probably not worth it. (The island of Tasmania would have to work really hard to build and power the facilities needed to produce the fuel etc., someone needs to pay for that.)
--Another interesting time to set the story might be 2158, when the population in space is more like sixty million and landing on Earth is looking more economically viable. By this point also the spirit of unity might have worn off and there might be more factions and conflict in Space e.g. between the various cities or between factions within them.
I hope one day (today? this year?) creating writing AIs get good enough that I can plug in worldbuilding sketches like yours and get stories worth reading (without needing to be Gwern). This is great, my only gripe is the humans all seem baseline instead of KSR-esque or Diaspora-esque etc, probably the nuclear war of 2033 stunting transhumanization. Also re: factions I’d be keen to see how highly contingent extreme founder effects play out, you do mention chinatown etc but maybe it’ll be corporations or weirder collectives:
I used to play Alpha Centauri, a computer game about the colonization of its namesake star system. One of the dynamics that made it so interesting was its backstory, where a Puerto Rican survivalist, an African plutocrat, and other colorful characters organized their own colonial expeditions and competed to seize territory and resources. You got to explore not only the settlement of a new world, but the settlement of a new world by societies dominated by extreme founder effects. What kind of weird pathologies and wonderful innovations do you get when a group of overly romantic Scottish environmentalists is allowed to develop on its own trajectory free of all non-overly-romantic-Scottish-environmentalist influences?
I feel like this timeline runs into something that bothers me about a lot of space colonization scifi: why are there millions of people living in space colonies when in our timeline, there aren’t millions of people living in Antarctic colonies? Antarctica is a lot more habitable and resource rich than the moon or Mars, building cities there would require a pretty small fraction of the cost of doing so in space, and the standard of living for residents would be a lot higher. The same seems to be true of cities on the ocean floor and underground. Shouldn’t we expect to see a lot of colonization like that first, before moving to space becomes economically sensible?
Granted, there is the old idea of space colonies as a sort of “backup civilization” in case something happens to civilization on earth, which your setting touches on- but I think that probably has the same issue. A city underground would be a lot less vulnerable to nuclear war than a moon colony, and an Antarctic or ocean-floor city probably no more so. These settings also often involve things like moving asteroids, which would be new existential risks in their own right.
I guess it’s true that the drama and mythos of space exploration might drive initial investment in a way that an Antarctic or underground city couldn’t- but if that’s the only advantage it has, I feel like it runs into pretty extreme diminishing returns- a Mars colony of six million is only a bit more dramatic than a colony of 100.
Maybe you could have the space colonization be driven by the discovery of some incredibly valuable resource that doesn’t exist on Earth, like ancient remnants of alien nanotech?
Or maybe the alternate timeline actually could involve people building lots of cities in less habitable areas on Earth before going into space. Maybe there’s a limited nuclear exchange in the 50s that kills 20% of the global population and leads to a widespread belief that living aboveground is unsafe. Then there’s another limited exchange in the 80s, which doesn’t do as much damage because so much of the population and infrastructure has already been moved underground, but which leads to a strong demand for even safer cities deep under the crust of Mars and the moon- which is a smaller step for people in this timeline, since lots of people are already surviving on hydroponics and in cramped, enclosed living spaces.
I think that the reason is a precise point of bifurcation in Daniel’s scenario: we have treaties that ban colonization of Antarctica and Outer Space Treaty does effectively the same.
That’s true, but we also don’t see a rush to build cities similar extreme environments on earth where treaties aren’t a barrier, such as the interior of Greenland or the coastal shelves. I’d argue that the treaties remaining in place are probably a result of very low demand to colonize these areas rather than the opposite.
Yes, plus also, there are three good economic reasons Space > Antarctica: (1) Tourism. I think there would be tens, maybe hundred million people wanting to visit LEO every year, if the cost was $15/kg. That’s enough to support a city of millions on tourism income alone I think. Antarctica would be somewhat cheaper to visit, but much less exciting. (2) Asteroid mining and zero-G manufacturing. While Antarctica probably has some nice mineral deposits or whatever, it’s not anything that doesn’t already exist on Earth elsewhere in large quantities, whereas e.g. a single asteroid might have a ginormous amount of rare elements in it. (3) Solar power is significantly cheaper in space than on earth, due to being more efficient / less intermittent. Antarctica meanwhile basically can’t use solar power. In a world where solar power is the cheapest form of power in general, this is a pretty big deal.
I suspect that the reason is that a colony in Antarctica would also receive less sunlight per square meter (and, therefore, have lower harvests or outright fail to produce food) than a colony in space where one can, for example, gather light by mirrors.
As for Kokotaljo’s world itself, I don’t think that it is of little interest. How close are already existing sci-fictional worlds to the one described in the post?
However, these mirrors could also be used to direct sunlight toward photovoltaic or solar thermal power stations in Antarctica, deserts, or at sea. The advantages of space colonies in this regard seem difficult to offset against the disadvantages of material scarcity and high logistics costs.
Perhaps a more plausible scenario is that human colonies in space were initially established to maintain the mirrors/space power stations, and after a nuclear war broke out, these space stations took in many refugees and became independent?
I think the most fragile part of this scenario is replacement of IT/electronics with space colonization, because progress in electronics is arguably the reason for current space progress. It’s much harder to manage Starship with 70s electronics. Modern electronics got in modern state because it is profitable to create enormous consumer electronics industry and only under enormous scaling it is profitable.
I can imagine that bifurcation in tech is not about shift from electronics to space, but about changing culture around it. I see something like modern Japanese attitude, where software jobs are low-status, therefore everybody goes into space instead of SaaS.
imagine an alternate treaty that said when a human plants a flag, takes a photo, and brings back a regolith sample to a nation’s capitol, that nation gets the territory for 100km around the flag
So what I’m hearing is that it’s time to play high stakes interstellar capture the flag
Sci-fi worldbuilding idea of little interest to anyone other than me:
--Imagine that the space race had continued and accelerated after the 70s, perhaps due to the Outer Space Treaty not existing and there being a corresponding rush to grab territory, with the USSR and USA and later China planting flags on various celestial bodies and claiming them (e.g. imagine an alternate treaty that said when a human plants a flag, takes a photo, and brings back a regolith sample to a nation’s capitol, that nation gets the territory for 100km around the flag.)
--So by 2030, the AI race is about ~5 years behind schedule because for decades there has been less top talent going into software and computers and more top talent going into various space ventures. Silicon Valley isn’t a household name, instead there’s the Space Coast.
--The space ventures are like 15 years ahead of schedule though; even in 2015, there was the equivalent of fully reusable Starship + a very small moon base and a thousand people living in a large ISS. By 2030, launch costs have dropped even further, to something like $15/kg, and six million people live in space, as follows:
(1) LEO City (or LEO for short) is an international space station that houses about 4 million people. It’s the port city, so to speak, connecting the Earth to space and connecting space to the Earth. Optimized mega-Starships fly many times a day from various Earth cities to dock with LEO City and return home; from LEO City passengers and cargo transfer to other ships optimized for zero-gravity or low-gravity travel, that use different kinds of propulsion, fuel, etc. LEO city has almost a hundred million tourists visit it each year (indeed almost 1 out of the 4 million people in it at any given time is a tourist basically) plus it has a decent-sized high-tech sector (various kinds of manufacturing that are easier in zero gravity, low gravity, and/or vacuum) plus it has a nascent industrial base for e.g. refining asteroid ore and recycling various waste products. Most manufacturing, of course, is done on Earth since it’s so cheap to launch things to LEO. The exception is manufacturing of heavy simple objects that are mostly made out of asteroid ore, such as steel panels and girders and (more recently) a kind of solar panel. It’s a very well-run city with low crime, high average education and IQ, etc. Very few children or old people though. Every nation has a presence in LEO city, many corporations do too. There’s a chinatown, a ’muricatown, a sovietown, etc.
Structurally, it’s like a giant disk of solar panels and radiators, surrounding and connected by veins and branches to a a messy and growing blob of zero-gee habitat modules and structures. Viewing the disk as if it were farmland surrounding the city, there would then be a giant tower of rotating habitats of increasing size (so that the tower looks like an inverted pyramid, or maybe a tornado) rising from the center of the city. (This is because the bigger rotating habitats were added on later). Most of the people spend most of their time in the rotating sections, because gravity is comfortable.
(2) Moonbase Alpha is a city of a bit more than a million people on the south pole of the Moon. There, they strip-mine the Moon, getting water and various ores. They are more of an industrial city than LEO City, because they can dump waste heat directly into the regolith so they don’t need radiators, and because they can still get near 24⁄7 solar since they are on the south pole. (They get it from giant towers that turn to face the sun, scattered around in a 100km radius or so from the city) Also because it’s convenient to process the ore immediately rather than ship it raw. They also have a tourist industry, similar but smaller than LEOs due to being more difficult to reach. There’s a small resort town located by the historic Apollo landing site, which has been preserved in pristine condition. This of course is even more out of the way and expensive to visit.
(3) There’s another city on Mars and another city orbiting Mars, collectively they have a bit less than a million people. Basically no tourists; more like pilgrims or colonists. More motivated by national pride and the race to claim territory; economically it doesn’t make much sense right now to be on Mars, but the rules are the rules and it’s generally thought that a century from now the nation that claimed the most Mars territory will have a huge industrial advantage. (Well, some people think this. Others question it, saying that it’ll always be cheaper to live in space habitats. Still others say that AGI is coming which will render it all irrelevant.)
(4) There’s a lot of asteroid mining happening, mostly by robots / unmanned vehicles, but in some cases (especially the larger operations) with small human crews. It’s like living on an oil rig except it takes a lot longer to arrive and leave. The rest of the solar system has of course been thoroughly mapped by probes but few humans have ventured beyond the asteroid belt yet. Various nations and corporations are thinking about the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
(5) Earth orbit is packed with satellites, including various orbiting datacenters.
--Our story takes place in 2108, seventy-five years after a nuclear war that destroyed human civilization on Earth. The war happened as part of a standoff about imminent AGI development. Full on MAD between USA, China, and Russia, with a few other nations involved as well. The nuclear winter basically destroyed all civilization, though enough humans survived to rebuild at a lower tech level (maybe a few tens of millions total?) The EMP and Kessler syndrome took out basically all the satellites, as well. Due to some dramatic events—a secret plot, a revolution and declaration of independence—LEO City actually survived the conflagration. None of the great powers made it a priority to target it, since they all had substantial populations living there & since it would have enough trouble surviving on its own anyway given all the EMP and debris flying around. Though they initially started to fight each other, as per orders, the nationalities in LEO City ceased fighting, joined together and declared independence after the nukes started going off. (They lied and kept telling their homelands they were fighting and winning though, to be safe). LEO city took a ton of damage from debris and EMP but survived, partly because some of its leaders had anticipated this eventuality and hardened it in various ways. (Partly it survived by blowing its fuel reserves on getting to a higher orbit asap). By the time the earth leaders realized the treachery, they were out of nukes and more focused on figuring out how to survive.--
Over the next few years, LEO city detached a bunch of ruined heavy junk parts and a smaller, more functional version of it managed to limp out of Earth orbit entirely and into Moon orbit.--
After the war, launches from and landings on Earth basically ceased. None of the launch facilities on Earth were still functional, and the supply chain for producing new spaceships was obviously wrecked. People were living like cavemen or medieval peasants or at best post-apocalyptic New World colonists. Those in space still had hundreds of ships they could use to land; however, they wouldn’t be able to take off again if they did. Some people on Earth still had radios and could communicate with the people in space. They could exchange ideas and expertise but that was about it, so after twenty or thirty years they didn’t have much to talk about anymore.--
The population in space had a rough time initially. They were, thankfully, just barely able to become self-sustaining—Mars turned out to be useful now because it had some of the materials that the Moon and Asteroids lacked—at the cost of greatly reduced standard of living and somewhat reduced lifespan and increased child mortality. The population dwindled from six million to two million, stabilized, and now (in 2108) is back up to about six million. The amount of compute they have was cut by two orders of magnitude—one from the initial war, another one from degradation over the decades. They cannot make any new computers worthy of the name, so they are gradually redesigning all their machines to use Apollo-era computers, i.e. basically nothing. On Earth too, computing technology has been set back almost a century. Ironic; on some of the few surviving GPUs, they have proto-AGI systems (think: Claude Opus 5) but haven’t been able to meaningfully advance the frontier of AI capabilities due to (a) having only 1% as much compute initially and now more like 0.1%, compared to the hyperscalers right before the war, and (b) due to lack of talent and interest. (The smart people who could potentially work on it are instead e.g. trying to write new software to fix the aging recycling plants in LEO City on which the entire civilization’s survival depends, partly because that feels more urgent, and partly because there’s a bit of a Butlerian Jihad vibe going around given that the race to AGI was what caused the War.)
--So now it’s 2108 and there are several stable pre-industrial civilizations (population about a million or so each, e.g. on Tasmania and New Zealand and in Argentina) on Earth, plus various wild tribes of survivors from bunkers etc. scattered around. The radiation is mostly gone, the nuclear winter and its aftermath also gone. The Earth civilizations are starting to industrialize again and explore and contact each other and trade. In Space meanwhile there is a heavily industrialized, high-tech-in-every-way-except-computers civilization mostly on or above the Moon and Mars. It looks like it’ll be another century or so before anyone has good enough computers to get to AGI, if the existing norm against it has faded by then. The civilization in Space has radio contact with some (but not all) of the Earth civilizations, and could land a few ships on Earth at any time, but wouldn’t be able to take off again at least for now. In a decade or three that might change, though even then, it would be super expensive and probably not worth it. (The island of Tasmania would have to work really hard to build and power the facilities needed to produce the fuel etc., someone needs to pay for that.)
--Another interesting time to set the story might be 2158, when the population in space is more like sixty million and landing on Earth is looking more economically viable. By this point also the spirit of unity might have worn off and there might be more factions and conflict in Space e.g. between the various cities or between factions within them.
I hope one day (today? this year?) creating writing AIs get good enough that I can plug in worldbuilding sketches like yours and get stories worth reading (without needing to be Gwern). This is great, my only gripe is the humans all seem baseline instead of KSR-esque or Diaspora-esque etc, probably the nuclear war of 2033 stunting transhumanization. Also re: factions I’d be keen to see how highly contingent extreme founder effects play out, you do mention chinatown etc but maybe it’ll be corporations or weirder collectives:
I feel like this timeline runs into something that bothers me about a lot of space colonization scifi: why are there millions of people living in space colonies when in our timeline, there aren’t millions of people living in Antarctic colonies? Antarctica is a lot more habitable and resource rich than the moon or Mars, building cities there would require a pretty small fraction of the cost of doing so in space, and the standard of living for residents would be a lot higher. The same seems to be true of cities on the ocean floor and underground. Shouldn’t we expect to see a lot of colonization like that first, before moving to space becomes economically sensible?
Granted, there is the old idea of space colonies as a sort of “backup civilization” in case something happens to civilization on earth, which your setting touches on- but I think that probably has the same issue. A city underground would be a lot less vulnerable to nuclear war than a moon colony, and an Antarctic or ocean-floor city probably no more so. These settings also often involve things like moving asteroids, which would be new existential risks in their own right.
I guess it’s true that the drama and mythos of space exploration might drive initial investment in a way that an Antarctic or underground city couldn’t- but if that’s the only advantage it has, I feel like it runs into pretty extreme diminishing returns- a Mars colony of six million is only a bit more dramatic than a colony of 100.
Maybe you could have the space colonization be driven by the discovery of some incredibly valuable resource that doesn’t exist on Earth, like ancient remnants of alien nanotech?
Or maybe the alternate timeline actually could involve people building lots of cities in less habitable areas on Earth before going into space. Maybe there’s a limited nuclear exchange in the 50s that kills 20% of the global population and leads to a widespread belief that living aboveground is unsafe. Then there’s another limited exchange in the 80s, which doesn’t do as much damage because so much of the population and infrastructure has already been moved underground, but which leads to a strong demand for even safer cities deep under the crust of Mars and the moon- which is a smaller step for people in this timeline, since lots of people are already surviving on hydroponics and in cramped, enclosed living spaces.
I think that the reason is a precise point of bifurcation in Daniel’s scenario: we have treaties that ban colonization of Antarctica and Outer Space Treaty does effectively the same.
That’s true, but we also don’t see a rush to build cities similar extreme environments on earth where treaties aren’t a barrier, such as the interior of Greenland or the coastal shelves. I’d argue that the treaties remaining in place are probably a result of very low demand to colonize these areas rather than the opposite.
Yes, plus also, there are three good economic reasons Space > Antarctica:
(1) Tourism. I think there would be tens, maybe hundred million people wanting to visit LEO every year, if the cost was $15/kg. That’s enough to support a city of millions on tourism income alone I think. Antarctica would be somewhat cheaper to visit, but much less exciting.
(2) Asteroid mining and zero-G manufacturing. While Antarctica probably has some nice mineral deposits or whatever, it’s not anything that doesn’t already exist on Earth elsewhere in large quantities, whereas e.g. a single asteroid might have a ginormous amount of rare elements in it.
(3) Solar power is significantly cheaper in space than on earth, due to being more efficient / less intermittent. Antarctica meanwhile basically can’t use solar power. In a world where solar power is the cheapest form of power in general, this is a pretty big deal.
I suspect that the reason is that a colony in Antarctica would also receive less sunlight per square meter (and, therefore, have lower harvests or outright fail to produce food) than a colony in space where one can, for example, gather light by mirrors.
As for Kokotaljo’s world itself, I don’t think that it is of little interest. How close are already existing sci-fictional worlds to the one described in the post?
However, these mirrors could also be used to direct sunlight toward photovoltaic or solar thermal power stations in Antarctica, deserts, or at sea. The advantages of space colonies in this regard seem difficult to offset against the disadvantages of material scarcity and high logistics costs.
Perhaps a more plausible scenario is that human colonies in space were initially established to maintain the mirrors/space power stations, and after a nuclear war broke out, these space stations took in many refugees and became independent?
I think the most fragile part of this scenario is replacement of IT/electronics with space colonization, because progress in electronics is arguably the reason for current space progress. It’s much harder to manage Starship with 70s electronics. Modern electronics got in modern state because it is profitable to create enormous consumer electronics industry and only under enormous scaling it is profitable.
I can imagine that bifurcation in tech is not about shift from electronics to space, but about changing culture around it. I see something like modern Japanese attitude, where software jobs are low-status, therefore everybody goes into space instead of SaaS.
So what I’m hearing is that it’s time to play high stakes interstellar capture the flag