On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 05:28:34PM -0400, Bryan Caplan wrote: > One idea he did not explore: Maybe there is no inter-stellar travel > because the benefits almost never exceed the costs. It takes years to > get anywhere, and at best you find some unused natural resources. If > Julian Simon's observation about declining resource scarcity holds, then > as inter-stellar travel gets cheaper with technological progress, it > also gets less beneficial because resources are getting cheaper at a > faster rate.
Given that the amount of natural resources in the solar system is finite, I don't see how resources could continue to get cheaper forever. The reason natural resources are getting cheaper is that the cost of mining resources is droping, right? But suppose the cost of mining were to drop to zero and no inter-stellar travel occurs. Then shouldn't the prices of natural resources rise at a rate equal to the interest rate until they're all used up?
