(August 29, 2014 at 1:03 pm)Tonus Wrote:(August 29, 2014 at 10:26 am)Godslayer Wrote: New technologies are always expensive at first, but usually the prices level out over time the more available they become.This. Most technologies are expensive at first, as the inventors and investors seek to recover development costs and as supply is low at first. As the technology is improved and becomes easier to mass-produce, prices come down and it becomes more widespread and available to more income classes.
That depends on the nature of the technology, and what it must consume in order to function. Cost of technology only goes down dramatically over time if it is the application of the technology that had been scarce in the beginning, not what the technology must consume to function. An example is chemical rocket technology. In the beginning both the technology and what it consumes had been scarce. But since Sputnik chemical rocket technology is no longer scarce. Everyone and their uncle can now make a workable chemical rocket to put something into space. But what the chemical rocket technology consumes, prodigious quantity of chemical energy, remains scarce. This is why while cost of chemical rockets have come down, they remain frighteningly high, and while they will probably come down some more in the next decades, there is no prospect of their ever coming down dramatically.
