http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity says: On the surface of the Earth the escape velocity is about 11.2 kilometres per second. You have: 100 kg * (11.2 km/sec) * (11.2 km/sec) / 2 You want: kilowatt hours * 1742.2222 / 0.00057397959 So 1700 kWh per (large) person, to lift them out of Earth's gravity well (assuming perfect efficiency, as with a space elevator.) http://www.ecoworld.org/energy/EcoWorld_Energy_Resid_KWH_Prices.cfm lists average US residential electricity prices from 6.5 to 14.8 cents per kWh, with an outlier at 33.3 in San Francisco during the California energy crisis. It also claims that the cost of the fuel alone amounts to about 0.5 to 1 cent per kWh. So if we have to pay 10 cents per kWh, lifting a person into space should cost around $170 --- an energy cost that could in theory be recovered if they came back down. (At present this energy is mostly dissipated thermally.) Evacuating the entire human race to an extraterrestrial habitat prepared to handle them should then have an energy cost around $1 trillion. This is roughly 2% of annual world GDP ($55.9 trillion) at PPP. (See http://www.worldbank.org/data/databytopic/GDP_PPP.pdf for details.) Current world energy usage is around 354 exajoules (http://energy.er.usgs.gov/products/Papers/WMC/17/) or 400 exajoules (http://www.pugwash.org/reports/pac/agra/agra_reports_wg4.htm) or 375 exajoules (http://www.globalfuture.com/0002.htm) or thereabouts. 1700 kWh per person is You have: 1742 kilowatt hours * 6 billion You want: joules * 3.76272e+19 / 2.6576519e-20 38 exajoules, a significant fraction of world yearly energy usage, but far from unimaginable. It would probably be enough to raise the unit price of energy. I conclude that, while technical obstacles currently make evacuation of Earth's population to extraterrestrial colonies impossible, the energy cost of the evacuation itself is within reason.


