Relax wrote:Let me quote Honor:
"Or, rather, it wasn’t a habitat for people. She watched the herd of cattle graze across a knee-high meadow on what had to be one of the most expensive “farms” in the explored galaxy,"
Here on planet earth, whoever has the most expensive FOOD, has the poorest people.
Say what?
I lived in Norway, where food was extremely expensive to buy. I don't think we'd consider Norway a poor country.
I live now in the US, which is the biggest economy on the planet. Food here is not cheap, neither to produce nor to end customers.
In many agriculture-driven economies on this planet, food is cheap, but the agriculture-driven countries are usually the poorest (not all).
I'm not going to accept this argument. I can be wrong and just citing anecdotes when you meant something different, but if that's the case, then please provide some links to researches that corroborate your argument. It may be that the wording is imprecise.
Poor people do not invent anything as they have no funds to persue their inventions. Worse, those who do have funds are FEW and generally hereditary(unwilling to change status quo) further inhibiting innovation. No innovation = no industry. No industry = no way in Hell did Grayson actually build all those ships or have ability to keep them repaired etc. Did they build most of them? Obviously yes. But the super technical portions? Hell no.
That I can agree: poor and usually uneducated people don't aggregate much value because they need to take low-paying jobs and so forth. This argument goes with the other part about Grayson still being rather poor, as in "Letters from Home." I'll address there.
Food grown in greenhouses here on earth are INSANELY expensive. You have to import all of your minerals etc. It only works in desert regions trying to grow vegetables such as Australia where Tomatoes have a hard time growing and maximizing their growth for a plant like the Tomato requires a near constant temperature anyways. Also you might notice the country with the most number of greenhouses(be they dirt cheap plastic ones) is China(Going on ~2million acres) as they will immediately go on rations/are starving if their outside food source gets cut off.
I'm not going to dispute the argument because I don't think it's relevant.
Even assuming that, in absolute costs, food produced in space habitats is expensive, the question is the relative cost. There is no other food source for Grayson. So it's neither cheap nor expensive: it just is the real cost.
I also think it would be misleading to measure how much of their GDP they had needed to spend on food production. Until the Manticore investments, they were a backwards system with little else for industry, so spending a large fraction of that GDP in food production isn't necessarily good or bad. The question is what's the case
now.
and both countries are on earth where water/dirt/air is FREE.
That's again a very planet-centric view (admittedly, it's the only one we have). But in a space-based economy, you may mine water from nearby ice comets, breaking it down with hydrolysis to produce oxygen, and mine asteroids for minerals. If it is cheap to lift them from the ground with counter-grav, then you do so, otherwise just get them from space.
And we should agree that a thriving, modern economy in the HV will have lots of space-based industries. That's where the biggest added-value heavy industry should be (Manticore is also rich because of its service sector, which doesn't need to be in space). And if you have to have space-based industry, then having space-based farming isn't so bad either, since you reduce the cost of transportation, in particular up the gravity well. Whether that's cheaper than lifting food produced on the ground where, as you say, water and dirt are free, is unknown and will probably vary.
Moreover, water and dirt may not be free on every planet, not even on Earth in the future. On many planets, they may be of difficult access, and arable land may be very limited. We know of the situation on Grayson, but look also at both Sphinx and Gryphon.
I truly expect that, in real life, we'll find that agriculture in space will be much cheaper that on the ground, to support a thriving space-based economy. There's no hint that cheap counter-grav will ever exist, and there's no hint that there will be as many readily-inhabitable planets as we see in the HV.
However, in the HV, in particular after that quote above on Honor's musings on how it was expensive for Grayson, I have change this position. I might dispute the quote, saying that Honor was not an economist or high-tech farmer, and did not comprehend what she was seeing. We've got more than one instance, especially in the early books, where what we were presented as her musings were not reality, but instead were coloured by her perceptions and interpretations. For an economist, she was a good ship commander.
You cannot possibly have industry if you are constantly half a step away from starvation and pouring ALL of your $$$ into ultra expensive "habitats" to grow food.
I agree with the first part (industry if you're staving) but not on the second.
Forget exactly where quote in said book, but Honor Fought not only for the Honor of her Queen, but also because if ANY warship got into the orbital farms and destroyed even a few of them the population would be starving immediately.
That just means they have little surplus of food. There's such a thing as having reserve capacity, should there be a loss of crop for any reason. But that's entirely different from having a huge excess thereof.
And the Masadans were literally trying to commit genocide. A space farm being compromised as a collateral effect is very different from intentionally destroying a large fraction of them.
)
) that the only relevance of this argument is that Grayson should worry not only about being conquered, but also about being attacked and suffering unacceptable damage to its orbital infrastructure without causing decisive damage to the enemy. So yes - I should take this account when predicting the outcome of such battle. This is why I mentioned above that maybe the pods would have to be too dispersed in order to protect also this infrastructure, and maybe this could be the decisive reason why Grayson could not succeed in what I keep suggesting - I don't know.