Re: The Price of gasoline - was: Re: Ben Franklin dollars arrived

Cliff <cliff50@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:0a9v429snq3f379htblqrmo4rdld16tt26@xxxxxxx:

On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 16:32:53 GMT, someone@xxxxxxxxxxx (e) wrote:

In article <Xns97B14EB355AABWQAHBGMXSZHVspammote@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, bz
<bz+rcps@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


.....

and getting stuff down is so much easier and cheaper than
trying to get it up.

Yep. Drop in, like the mars rovers.

the old idea of using linear accelarators is very valid and
the fuel would be free. the moon is an ideal freight
terminal. minerals from all over the system could be
transhipped cheaply to earth.

There is no reason to go into the moons gravity well with anything. You might
be able to come out of it with some stuff, but most stuff would be cheaper to
refine/manufacture _in_ orbit and ship directly down.


How can anyone ignore the lesson of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9?
http://www.seds.org/sl9/sl9.html
if that shotgun blast had hit the earth, the planet would
still be virtually uninhabitable.

If ANY one of them had hit earth, the earth would have been uninhabitable by
life as we know it, for millions of years at least. A few pockets of life
might have survived. Some bacteria, some cockroaches....

If they had all hit, whatever remained of the earth would look rather like
the moon, if not worse.

.....
everything we as a species need is waiting for us to go and
get it.
yes, ocean research is important. but there is NO reason we
can't do both.

Agreed.

ps. a linear acceleratior is nothing more than an electric
motor with the coil laid out flat instead of round.

Some don't even need coils. Google 'rail gun'.

OK, I concur that we can do both. It would be great if we could take
all the contamination and toxic waster from the earth and shoot it
into the sun or the moon or someplace neat like that.

Once we stop pouring MORE out into the environment, we can 'mine' the dumps
and refine those materials in space also. Why waste them? Once energy is
free, it will be worthwhile to recover the wasted resources.

There time,
money and trained people to explore both. Both sides seem to have
their share of overpaid, and underqualified companies making essential
parts, which, when they fail, get tons of money to figure out what
went wrong with all the parts around the parts they made.

Be that as it may, what would happen to the value of gold if we were
to mine a million tons of gold on another planet and get it back here
for a cost of say $2 an ounce. Would make for an interesting market.
Then perhaps Mars magma gens might be the new holy grail of rare
minerals.


The ONLY scarce resource will be the human mind. Our current way of setting
value by how rare something is will go away. Oh, collectors items, like coins
from the pre-industrialised-space age will have value to collectors, but
gold, diamonds, Mars Magma gems? Naw.

As an aside, I've been running SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial
Intelligence) in the background on my computers for at least 4 or 5
years.

Total credits 7,237.10
work units 6,974
CPU hours 163,340

It's a great project and I enjoyed watching that as well as
some of the medical projects that also run the same Boinc software.

yep

But, I have gotten several emails from SETI saying they have lost
their funding and now, not only do they want free computer time but
want me to send them money to keep the research going. I don't mind
giving up computer time (my computer is fast and the SETI didn't slow
it down that much), but I don't have extra money for that. So, is
that another of our space programs that's going to go away?

So what's new?

So much research has come and gone and I really wonder if we have
wrung out the last drops of information from all that had gone before.

Of course not.


--
bz

please pardon my infinite ignorance, the set-of-things-I-do-not-know is an
infinite set.

bz+nanae@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
.

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