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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Binder Fred" data-source="post: 6099006" data-attributes="member: 63746">Well, three quick points before I shut up on this:1. We *are* presently using up the vast majority of our planet's easily obtainable non-renewable ressources (the words in italic are key here). I'm a geologist, so I have a fair undestanding of these things, and the fact is that new discoveries are harder to find (all the easy ones, near surface, etc having been found), harder to put into production (farther away, deeper, more refractory to processing) and cost more to operate once they are in production. If exploration methods ever stagnate for a decade or two, we're in deep sh*t.2. Sure, technicaly the entire center of our planet is a giant ball of fe-ni-cu, but the important thing in base ressources is not the size of the ressource, but at what cost you can get it per unit of the substance in question. A nearby system with a lot of space-borne volatiles and desirable substances will always beat out a far system with resources stuck in gravity wells plus under X km of rock, no matter if that system is already inhabited or not. And if that first system happens to have all its extraction infrastruture already in place *and* a supply of trained personnel *and* be inhabited by barbarians that probably won't be able to resist much, well...3. If a system is truly always ressource independant (and population pressures being closely tied to space+availability of ressource as they are), what's the point of creating an empire? You gain litterally nothing except huge war and then occupation expenditutes. If you gain nothing, people don't do it. People *are* busily building stellar empires in our present universe - case in point, the victorians - so they must be gaining something. What is it?</blockquote>

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