Today’s NYT reports that Iraq and Afghanistan if they drag on for another five years will comprise, “The Trillion Dollar War”. World War 2 was a multitrillion dollar war. Every war with more than a million casualties is a trillion dollar war if you take the value of a life at a million dollars. That might not be reasonable some time and place where the median income is less than ten thousand dollars, but I would call for measuring by purchasing power parity. While the article is a pretty poor analysis considering opportunity costs. First, that veteran’s health costs would have been big without the war. Second, that salary and so on would have to be paid without the war. Third, that there would be some major price to pay in blood and coin keeping the prior regimes in place in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Seen in that light, a trillion dollar war is a bargain. Especially if it results in friendly economies (if not friendly polities) in Iraq and Afghanistan going forward.

As I have stated before, we should step up to the plate and spend the next trillion colonizing the Moon and Mars. $50 billion a year could launch 20 times as much stuff into orbit as was launched last year and colonists could pay for their own payload. With the long bond rate at 5%, the net present value of $50 billion a year forever is a trillion dollars.

There are a bunch of good reasons why the Moon would be a better bet than Iraq. Colonizing the Moon would not face any guerilla warfare. There are no existing users of Lunar resources. There is no government worthy of note to displace. There are no Lunar sympathizers that would start violent revolution if we went. (If you are out there, keep quiet until after the colonization gets going so you can have your fifteen minutes while I have my colonization.)

No air on the Moon? Oxygen is there and nitrogen costs $0.50/gallon on Earth. Let’s say we imported 11,000 liters of air a day and just vented it into space. A liter of air weighs about 1.25 grams. Importing your 14 kg of air a day is not a big deal. $50 billion a year could deliver enough air for 1,000 people to just vent every single breath to space at today’s launch rates. Don’t you think a thousand people could work out a way to recycle and replace air from local materials? There are 4000 kilograms of nitrogen in every 1000 tons of regolith. At 1300K, some of it will come out as Nitrogen gas (a ton worth of various gases). If I could get $50 billion a year for selling air on the Moon, I would sure as heck work hard to figure out how to do it for less.

So we could have our lunar colony and if people consumed two pounds of earth imported food per day (which should be plenty) and we can get air and water recycling down pat, we could support 7,000 folks. If we can get food production going then we can support a lot more for $50B/year. We would need to get the cost of the mass to the Moon down to $100,000 per year if we wanted to support 500,000 on the Moon like we have in Wyoming for $50 billion/year. That would either mean just 5 kg in Earth imports at $20,000/kg to the Moon or about 20 kg at $5000/kg to the Moon which is roughly what Elon Musk is promising by 2010.

By Sam, not Rand