Quote:Hmm. To me, though, elegance is irrelevant.
Maybe it's just the Fan Panther side rearing its ugly head, but to me using precious Jovian hydrogen needed to keep the ecosystem running to make organics for export to Earth says "if they do this, then they'll fail, and they'll deserve to fail."
The question is, I repeat, economic. What costs more? Hydrogen on Venus or Water on Earth? And what is the cost of petroleum products on Earth, relative to those?
My... guess, evaluation, opinion... is, that the profit margin of making hydrocarbons is greater than the cost of shipping them to Earth and water back in return.
Say, Moondance starts at Jupiter. She pumps her holds full of a slurry of metallic hydrogen dust or pellets suspended in a liquid of your choice - liquid hydrogen is easy to get but has handling problems; water is simple to work with but has to be shipped in from the moons. Goes to Venus. Sells that and loads oil - net profit. Goes to Earth. Sells, recovering costs and covering the next step and a little extra. Loads foodstuffs, luxuries, electronics, cultural goods. Goes to Luna, sells those and buys hydrogen wire. Takes that back to Earth and sells it to all the thousand and one groups finding uses for a room-temperature superconductor. Loads seawater for a nominal fee, then to Venus. Cha-ching. Graphite from there to Mars has a low profit margin but is doable. From Mars, take food and some luxuries and wavetech sky mining gear to Jupiter.
Seriously, unless you're willing to accept subsistence living conditions and a total, unadulterated dependance on handwavium technology - with all that entails - the idea of excluding Earth from the Fenspace equation is about like expecting the Conch Republic to ignore the United States.
The fact that most of the more interesting aspects of the history of the times are happening in Fenspace doesn't change the fact that its inhabitants are, in a very literal way, the lunatic fringe of society as a whole. That group might well entertain the same delusions of self-sufficiency that affects most of the world's demographic groupings (China, the USA, India, Kuwait, etc.), but saying it don't make it so.
Ja, -n
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