lsparrish comments on Why space stopped captivating minds ? - Less Wrong

10 Post author: kilobug 29 July 2012 09:58AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (54)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: lsparrish 24 June 2016 11:27:55PM 0 points [-]

A quick process like that is pretty much insignificant compared to a month or two, let alone 15 years. Unless there are tens of thousands of other steps in the chain of comparable length, it doesn't come close to explaining it.

As I see it, there are roughly four steps:

  1. Excavating.
  2. Refining.
  3. Power collecting.
  4. Manufacturing.

The ones towards the end seem to be the biggest time sinks. However, power collection should not raise it by more than a factor of two or so. I don't think it takes many months to mine enough coal to pay for the energy costs of coal mining equipment, for example.