Escape From Planet Wagie

Human migration into space is a form of escape; will it be competitive with others more established methods?

Wagie, wagie, get in cagie,
Boss needs help! Don't be lazy!
Zero breaks will make you crazy?
I'll tell the guards to get their tazie.

— “Wagie”, posted on 4chan, performed on YouTube

Often it’s asked what sort of person would colonise space. How many such people are there? What would they be willing to pay to get there? Essentially, a colonisation project needs to do a bit of market research. But nothing like this has ever happened, so how can we estimate how much demand there might be for living on another planet, or a space colony?

There is a possible way to gauge it - because there is a sense in which we live on two planets already. In broad strokes, there is a precarious class of people living from payday to payday, with no prospect of property ownership, suffering under debts that they won’t be able to repay, and alienated from their work which they consider useless and demeaning. This is Planet Wagie.

There is another planet occupying the same physical space, one of property owners, beneficiaries of interest instead of payers of it. Those who are masters of most if not all of their time, instead of surrendering the majority of their waking hours to maintaining a basic lifestyle. Those whose work is meaningful as well as gainful.

Whilst this is a bit simplistic - Marxist analysis tends not to work too well with the fuzzy class boundaries of the 21st century economy - it is a useful enough distinction for my purposes here. There is an obvious demand to move from one of these ‘planets’ to another - can we model migration between physical planets on this?

Selling Escape

There are lots of people offering escape. There are get-rich-quick schemes, offering “passive income”, and there is populist politics - demagogues offering everybody a way out, if only some pet political goal is achieved. There is also a market for escapism. TV and computer games are huge markets, as is social media which many times functions the same way by immersing us in the lifestyles of ‘influencers’. Here, though, I want to focus on genuine means to escape the daily grind rather than offering fantasy or false hope. Cynics may say that what I am talking about here is mere escapism, but I think the evidence will show otherwise.

Traditionally one means of escape has been education. The meritocratic ideal is that someone from any background can excel in the education system, gain recognition through a qualification, and that this would then open them up to increased economic opportunities. Their labour would be easier, more well paid, and perhaps most importantly it would be doing something that they felt is meaningful, rather than just doing whatever is needed to survive.

Another means of escape is more literal - migration. There are large flows of people from poor countries to wealthier ones, and for the chance of a better life they are often willing to pay substantial sums both to legal authorities and to illegal people smugglers. In some cases they seek to combine migration with education for the same purposes.

To compare this to moving into space we need to look at prices. I’ve done a deep dive here on getting cost to orbit down but the short version is that I take a range of estimates for the per launch price for Starship, and divide it by how many seats can be fit in. Here I compare that to a sample of terrestrial means of escape:

If Starship costs $20 million per launch, more than a partially expendable Falcon 9 likely costs internally, then it becomes cheaper per seat than 3 years of tuition at Harvard at 118 passengers. Note that this is for a seat to Earth orbit. Going on to Mars would require refilling the ship or transferring to another ship or cycler station.

If Elon Musk’s projection of $2 million per flight is realised, either through Starship doing better that most observers believe or through him simply subsidising flights through his own net worth, $20 million per flight to Mars is feasible. The cost to Mars is also much closer to the cost to LEO if you have a cycler in place, and you can source propellant from somewhere other than Earth at lower cost/kg.

Sticking with single flight cost for now, if a Starship flight costs $10 million then it would take 276 passengers for the per seat flight to be equivalent to 3 years tuition at a UK university. Still a comfortable number to pack in for a flight to LEO or to a cycler station. There are over 500,000 students starting courses each year, which is about 10x the rate needed for even Elon Musk’s ambitious numbers for populating Mars, and from a single country with about 1% of the global population. Assuming only the richest billion people in the world (about 14x the UK population) can afford such fees, only 0.7% of those able to change their circumstances through education would have to elect to do so through space travel instead to meet even the most ambitious goal on the table.

What of the rest of the world though? For that we can look at how many pay how much to get into the Western world. To get smuggled into Europe through Italy, according to Europol, costs €12,000 (page 12). To equal this cost, a Starship flight would have to cost $5 million - low but not inconceivable - and each Starship would have to take 379 people. This would be a bit cramped, even in future stretched versions of Starship, but then again so are the boats used to make the crossing to Italy. The numbers going on this route vary from year to year, but when it is busy there are about 150,000 per year.

There are about a billion people living in Africa, so if we use that continent - the poorest on Earth - as the conservative standard for the 7 billion humans excluded from the above calculation, that means comfortably over a million people a year able to make such a journey. Only 0.5% of those would have to chose the off-world option to fully meet the maximum contemplated rate of colonisation, even without any contribution from the rich world. At this price point though it would strictly be to Earth orbiting habitats - although that doesn’t preclude people working for their passage onward to Mars.

These estimates are obviously not a thorough analysis, but do indicate that the number of potential applicants vastly exceeds even the most bullish projections for space colonisation. So, now we know the market for escape is large, whats the particular pull of space?

Energy and Economics

The current means of changing your circumstances work (to an extent… more on that later) and some might say there are places on Earth that are uninhabited better suited to colonisation and much easier to access and live on. I’ve refuted that point before and in summary all the proposed places are already under some form of control by a nation state or international treaty, poor in resources and most criticially at the bottom of the same deep gravity well as the rest of us, limited access to the rest of the solar system and its vast resources. It isn’t that Earth is short of resources - it is simply that there is intense competition for those resources between 8 billion people.

The reality of this is often denied or swept under the rug by those citing “dematerialisation in the economy”. This notion that we can continue to grow on mere ideas is a notion that often comes from wealthy westerners with ample material consumption. We should be clear though - you cannot eat intellectual property, heat your home with music, or construct a building out of scientific papers.

I have seen the claim made, against the notion that we ought to increase energy supply or find new raw materials, that resources are just 3% of global GDP and thus not important. This point is incorrect for multiple reasons. First, tracking down the source it appears to be this World Bank figure which measures resource rents i.e. how much a government gets from selling extraction rights, and not the amount resources contribute to GDP. If you look at the chart you will also see that this figure has wobbled about but been basically flat for half a century - indeed, in 1970 prior to the invention of the first microchip, it was 1%. Was this a less resource intense economy?

A better way to try and make this point would be to cite the reduction in energy use per $1000 dollars of GDP, which has steadily declined from about 140kg of oil equivalent to about 100kg of oil equivalent since 1990. Even then there have been some local reversals of the trend, with some economies getting more energy intensive over time, not less:

Chart from “An exploration of energy cost, ranges, limits and adjustment process” linked above

But even then there is a problem - because over the same time period the per capita consumption of energy jumped from 1,700kg to 1,900kg of oil equivalent. Economists understand what is happening here - its called the Jevons paradox. Noticed in the late 19th century in regard to coal use, it is the phenomenon where increased efficiency leads to increased consumption.

Ideas can and do improve the efficiency of physical processes, but decoupling is a scientific impossibility. The laws of both economics and thermodynamics are unsympathetic on this point. I do not subscribe to a “limits to growth” theory per se, because the actual limits are far in excess of anything we would reach in the real world. There are however trade-offs to growth. A planet whose ecosystem we want to protect, populated with many people competing often for the same scarce goods, premium land and positions, can create severe economic pressures long before any “limit” is reached.

So how does this raw material and energy abundance translate to the prospects for the individual migrant?

Life Out There

To model moving to another planet or colony as a movement between nations or social classes on Earth, we have to see it as being an improvement (at least in the eyes of people who want to go). Lots of critics of space colonisation make a very big fuss about it being hard and terrible.

One aspect they tend to bring up often is that nowhere outside of the Earth has breathable air, and that colonists will have to manufacture their own oxygen. On Earth, small scale oxygen manufacture can produce the gas for $0.1/kg. In an atmosphere containing oxygen, this isn’t terribly hard though. What if your input is the CO2 atmosphere of Mars, or waste CO2 in a free space colony? Fortunately, we have already done that experiment.

The MOXIE experiment on board the perseverance rover consumes 300W and is designed to produce 10 grams of oxygen from CO2 per hour, although it has exceeded that in practice. That equates to 30 kWh of electricity per kilogram of oxygen produced, which is a bit more than a human typically breathes in a day. At a unit electricity price of $0.1 that gives a marginal cost on Mars of $3/day. This doesn’t account for maintenance, or periodically replacing the electrodes it uses, but it also doesn’t account for the inefficiencies of MOXIE being a small prototype either (a UK company is also working on a new version of this technology which requires less maintenance). Even as a rough estimate though, it shows that creating oxygen from CO2 is not going to be a major expense. People regularly spend more on lunch.

The MOXIE experiment has also operated autonomously on Mars beyond its expected capabilities, so the argument that such a unit would be fussy and require a lot of labour seems weak also. We operate gas boilers in our homes that could, if malfunctioning, kill us with carbon monoxide - and keeping them in working order does not unduly occupy our time. The Total Recall scenario of a tyrant using a centralised oxygen supply to oppress the people will, I believe, remain a science fiction trope.

I could go through individual items needed for life in this way (and I may elsewhere as it is interesting) but that diverts from the central point here. There may be some minor additional costs to living off world, but the abundance of natural resources and the reduced competition for them will, in the long run, provide advantages over Earth.

This can be shown using a popular chart produced by the American Enterprise Institute, showing differential inflation between various categories of goods and services. Their intent was to show the impact of overly meddlesome government, as is their goal as a free enterprise think tank. It can do double duty for my purposes though.

An early settler will not need or be able to go to college, and if he has outstanding debt he may be able to just ignore it given the cost of sending people to collect. Medical care will be cheaper primarily through being rudimentary, so that is probably a wash - although having a generally younger and healthier population by selection means less demand for the system overall and probably better value for money for what you do get. Housing should be straightforward - bricks aren’t subject to huge inflation so what is really pushing this is land, and that will be readily available. Construction costs may be higher, but not crazily so. A colony able to produce inflatable volumes and pile rocks on top of them can create basic accommodations fairly quickly.

So with a lot of the big inflation drivers not being relevant or being mitigated, and others (such as childcare and food) not needing to be so tightly regulated due to the smaller scale of the colony i.e. everybody know each other, its conceivable that the same money might go further on an an off world colony - once you’ve got there of course. The ample supply of raw materials would mean that the things which can be produced at a colony will be relieved of at least one of the inflation pressures comparable things on this planet feel.

Some of this might seem like hand waving - unavoidable given the uncertainties of a future off-world economy - but it serves the purpose to show that living out there is not necessarily terrible and costly. There are clear upsides.

Will you go?

Living on another planet or a space colony would, initially at least, be physically tough. It would be risky due to limited medical care. Food choices would be limited by what could be produced. You would not have access to true outside spaces without an EVA suit - although in both cases it would be easier to construct extremely large indoor spaces than it is on Earth.

But on the flip side, many of the economic and social pressure present on Earth would be left behind. Once the routes out are established it may be more credible to dream of home ownership on another planet or a free floating colony than home ownership in a city like London or San Francisco. These places would be teeming with opportunity while the saturated graduate job market continues to disappoint many people.

And crucially, early colonists would be getting a first mover advantage. Entrepreneurial, high agency types on Earth will endure risk and material deprivation for the chance to create a company. How much physical discomfort would such people be willing to put up with for the chance to create an entire civilisation?

Could you do it?

---

This is the end of the article. This one is free for all readers, but some of my work is for paid subscribers only. Upgrading gets you full access to articles like these:

• An analysis of Japan’s contribution to the Artemis program and what the UK can learn from it.

• The history and current state of the art of partial gravity research, important for building human colonies on Mars or the Moon.

• How the threat of ASAT weapons and satellite constellation technology could lead to a militarisation of space.

• And my overarching philosophy for human expansion.

…and many more, including my regular monthly Mass Value Report where I apply a unique analytical lens I developed in this paper to the launch and space industries.

To subscribe costs about the same as a cup of coffee every month. Would you buy me a coffee to hear a complete set of my insights each month?