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Space Science

Mining Asteroids@Home 110

Posted by Hemos from the pulled-down-from-space dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Like the lively discussion on mediation strategies for exterminating asteroids, a six-person expert panel is debating today whether humans exist because of big collisions or in spite of them. Interestingly Mexico's oil (and most of the rest of the world's resources) seem to have arisen from later mining of these byproducts: the luck of geography or the price at the pump for dead dinosaurs."
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Mining Asteroids@Home More

Mining Asteroids@Home

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  • Has been cancelled (Score:4, Funny)

    by QEDog ( 610238 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @06:15PM (#5275064)
    The discussion has been cancelled after a meteor crashed into the 6 panelists hotel...
    • best thing they could to do, considering it was OLD news: the article starts like: Blah blah blah... 4.6 MILLION YEARS AGO... blah blah blah . Boy, and I thought /. was famous for posting recent stuff????

  • Lets not rock the boat (Score:5, Funny)

    by EMiniShark ( 631279 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @06:16PM (#5275076)
    Regardless of whether we exist because of asteroid collisions, I'd rather not give space the chance to reinvent the planet again :)

  • At home ? They'll sue you know.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by MosesJones ( 55544 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @06:18PM (#5275093) Homepage

    I can just see the adverts now

    "Did you read an article that encouraged you to mine asteroids in your own home? Did you drag an asteroid out of orbit, or drive to a place in order to catch one, did this vapourise you, your loved ones and most of the state ? Here a Sue, Grabbit and Runne Associates we specialise in extra orbital and terrestrial accidents. Last year we helped Bob who strapped himself to 10,000 fireworks to get into space, Bob sadly died but were helped his widow sue Nasa for 100,000,000 dollars. Phone us now and we'll help you get over your stupidity"

    (quick voice over)
    "ActualAmountMayNotBeAsAdvertisedHereLevelO fClaimI sNotIndicativeOfAwardChargesApplyAndWeOnlyAcceptSt upidPeopleWhoDon'tReadInvoices"

    Your just building yourself a litigation hell Slashdot.

    • Make Material Fast! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10, 2003 @06:46PM (#5275338)
      Take five minutes to read this and it WILL change your life!

      All you have to do is send an asteroid to the planet at the top of the list. Then remove that planet from the list, move the rest up one space and add your planet to the bottom of the list. Pass this list around by radio transmissions to other solar systems. Eventually your planet will reach the top of the list, and you'll have more asteroids than you know what to do with!

      This really works. It is NOT a SCAM!

  • Stands to reason - we destroy practically everything else, it must be the Universe's way of protecting itself against us.

    • Re:Big collisions exist because of humans (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The problem is... we don't pose a threat to the UNIVERSE... at least not yet...

      sure we have fscked up the Earth almost to the point of no return, but thats such a small ripple in the big picture, no?
    • "Why does it have to be such a big deal? Why can't it be like, like Human Beings are a planetary disease. Like the Earth's got German Measles or Facial Herpes right, and that's why all the other planets give Earth such a wide berth and say 'Oh, don't go near Earth, it's got Human Beings on it, they're contagious'"

      "So you're saying Lister, you're an intergalactic puss-filled coldsore? At last Lister, we agree on something!"

  • Great Impact Debate I: Benefits of Hard Bodies (Score:5, Funny)

    by mikeophile ( 647318 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @06:18PM (#5275101)
    For a minute, I thought this would be pr0n.

  • Humans Would Never Have Survived Without Asteroids (Score:5, Funny)

    by Doctor Sbaitso ( 605467 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @06:20PM (#5275113) Journal
    Asteroids, without a doubt, helped our species survive. What else would have filled the immense void in the arcade hall in the years between Pong and Pac-Man?

  • Regardless... (Score:4, Funny)

    by AndroidCat ( 229562 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @06:21PM (#5275123) Homepage
    Regardless if asteroid impacts helped or hindered life on Earth (no so good for the dinosaurs, good for our proto-mice ancestors) I don't think that an asteroid impact would be a good thing today, thank you. Any future life forms that would be helped by an impact can kiss my grits.

  • Billions of factors... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by $$$$$exyGal ( 638164 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @06:23PM (#5275147) Homepage Journal

    Humans exist, today, because of billions and billions of tiny factors, and probably about a dozen large factors. If you took any of them away, you wouldn't be alive today.

    As a matter of fact, if you won't back in time 1 billion years and swished your hands around, and then came back, nothing would be the same. You guys know the Simpson's episode ;-)

    And from the article: We should bear in mind that 99.9% of all species that ever dwelled on Earth were wiped out, most likely, as a result of large impacts.

    If those species wouldn't have died, we also wouldn't be here today.

    --naked [slashdot.org]

    • Re:Billions of factors... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10, 2003 @06:37PM (#5275265)
      If you'd finished reading the article, most of them disagree with the fact that spieces died out "most likely, as a result of large impacts."
      First of all, in contradiction to Benny Peiser's remarks, Peter Ward has presented data showing that while it is true that the majority of species that have ever existed are now extinct, only a minority of those, a few percent in fact, were victims of mass extinctions. Instead, most extinct species have come to an end at some random time between mass extinctions.

    • Re:Billions of factors... (Score:5, Informative)

      by blair1q ( 305137 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @06:38PM (#5275273) Journal
      Maybe.

      Chaos theory doesn't say that every change will result in a vastly different outcome.

      It just says that some changes can result in vastly different outcomes.

      What it rarely points out is that most change results in only a minor difference. But then, it wants to be ***Chaos***Theory*** and not just the instability section of the chapter on metastable systems.
      • I have a friend from Boston that helped me on a Lorenz Equations assignment. Towards the end of the assignment, there was a question asking what we had learned from the lorenz equation. He wrote the following:
        The Lorenz Equations show that a small change at the beginning _CAN_ drastically alter the ending, just like the title of the assignment. Basically Lorenz showed that weather is random. What I don't understand, however, is why it took a tenured mathematician at a prestigious university to figure this out when all that is needed is a New Englander!
        The professor, a native Masshole, gave him full credit on the problem.
    • cockroaches may never have evolved to the vast interstellar empire we have today.
    • Humans exist, today, because of billions and billions of tiny factors, and probably about a dozen large factors. If you took any of them away, you wouldn't be alive today.

      Im a big believer of the concept that "the reason it looks this way is because if it was any other way, we wouldnt be here to look at it." as well.

      It seems a slight waste of time to debate if they made a difference or not, when there are so many other questions that are more relevent, such as 'are we alone?'.

      Oh yea, and I had to fight REALLY REALLY hard to not comment on "billions and billions" Carl Sagan style comment. :-) God I miss him.

    • Re:Billions of factors... (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Or, it was going to almost exactly this way no matter what. See above comment about metastable systems.

      If you killed Newton and Leibniz before they invented calculus, someone else would do it for them. Maybe a few years later, but you don't even know that, and either way the small bubble it creates could be smoothed out inside a generation. If you look at the history of science, things happened about when they were ready to. Individuals were merely the agents of their predecessors.

      You could interrupt the evolution of any trait or species, but would it greatly change the state of the biosphere 100,000 years later? It really might not.

      At least, that's what my father told me on my wedding day - "go hog wild, son - nature'll sort it out!".
    • As a matter of fact, if you won't back in time 1 billion years and swished your hands around, and then came back, nothing would be the same. You guys know the Simpson's episode ;-)

      That episode was an homage (or ripoff) of Ray Brabdury's A Sound of Thunder [muohio.edu] (soon to be a movie [yahoo.com].

  • Role in planetary forming (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nairnr ( 314138 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @06:24PM (#5275154)
    A few interesting points from this article. One is that a number of impacts helped in creating some of the earths key resources. As evidenced by Canada's nickel deposits around the Sudbury impact crater, and Mexico's oil deposits around the Chicxlub impact.

    In addition, the major impacts may not have contributed that much to mass extinctions. While there may have been a momentary spike in extinctions, the vast majority of extinctions were not related to a major event.

    It is difficult for us to fully understand the effect of asteroid and comet impact on the earth, as we are so dynamic that much evidence gets lost..
    • There are other events that might cause a mass extinction. A gamma ray burster within our galaxy could cause quite a problem. Or a nearby star goin supernova. Now there would probably be some evidence of these things happening... does anyone know anything about this?

  • Bruce Rules (Score:3, Funny)

    by sbillard ( 568017 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @06:25PM (#5275167) Journal
    strategies for exterminating asteroids

    Just send up Bruce Willis, Steve Bushemi, and, Ben Afleck. Billy-Bob will coordinate the whole she-bang from the ground.
    Good luck and God speed gentlemen

    • Re:Bruce Rules (Score:3, Funny)

      by Niadh ( 468443 )
      Just send up Bruce Willis, Steve Bushemi, and, Ben Afleck. Billy-Bob will coordinate the whole she-bang from the ground.
      Good luck and God speed gentlemen


      I'll vote for launching Bruce Willis, Steve Bushemi, and, Ben Afleck into space anyways.

  • And I thought it was a new client... (Score:3, Funny)

    by nairnr ( 314138 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @06:27PM (#5275184)
    I was all excited, I was going to work on a new project Seti@home, meet Asteroid@home...

  • Not dead bodies, dead world. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Angelwrath ( 125723 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @06:35PM (#5275256)
    It would have been the remnants of the entire world, representing far more mass than dinosaurs, that would have turned into the "fossil fuels", and not merely dinosaurs. Come to think of it, the vegitation alone would dwarf the collective mass of the dinosaurs, not to mention insects, which can breed and grow on high geometric curves.

  • Bah! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Rayonic ( 462789 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @06:36PM (#5275261) Homepage Journal
    I've been mining asteroids at home for the past twenty years! How is this "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"?

    Wait... hemmaroids are the ones in space, right?

  • Bush Administration (Score:4, Funny)

    by sterno ( 16320 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @06:40PM (#5275294) Homepage
    At the conference, the Bush Administration is expected to seek support for a pre-emptive strike against the Universe. Administration sources were quoted as saying, "The Universe has a long history of unpredictable agression and deterrance of its threats is simply not an option." Donald Rumsfeld went on to state that the US military strategy would bring about a swift and clean victory over the Universe.
    • That sort of attitude, or rather the serious and thoughtful equivalent thereof, specifically the development of a NEO monitoring program and an SDI shield that points up rather than down, would be too enlightenned for the current administration.

  • Mining asteroids@home (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Could this be a distributed computing project that combines dig dug, searching for alien intelligence, AND lets me pilot a vector-based shooting triangle through an asteroid field?!?!

    Where do I sign up?

  • Praise to the dinosaurs. (Score:4, Funny)

    by kkkalen ( 146405 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @06:51PM (#5275372)
    Since some of us figure we owe our petroleum resources to dead dinosaurs, it stands to reason that the next form of life on this one-day-to-be-post-apocolyptic planet will filling their gas tanks with dead humans.

  • Whether humans exist because of collisions (Score:4, Funny)

    by willpost ( 449227 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @07:04PM (#5275453)
    Most Definitely.. Collisions of men and women produce people all the time.
  • George Zebrowski wrote a book about mining asteroids. The book was called Brute Orbits. Strange and alarming part is what that did with the asteroids after they had been mined. They shot prisoners into a timed orbit....God only knows what the Bush administration will do.

  • 'Fossil fuels' are not! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Cognitive Dissident ( 206740 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @07:25PM (#5275589)
    There is a growing realization that the source of petroleum is not 'dead dinosaurs' or even dead plants and/or bacteria as had been believed for so long. It seems that what we consider 'organic' chemistry (in chemistry btw, 'organic' just means carbon containing compounds)) might be quite common in the natural world even without what we would recognize as life to create it. Some Google searches on terms like 'non-organic', 'inorganic' and 'petroleum' will turn up lots of articles about the new theories. This one, for example. [cartage.org.lb] Or This one in a respected journal of geology. [agiweb.org] It's looking more and more like the term 'fossil fuels' is a misnomer. That's not to say that the supply isn't limited, however...
    • Thanks for making the point I was about to make. Unfortunately when a baseless idea is repeated enough times it becomes fact. Given the depth oil deposits are found at I guess the first person to propose the idea assumed dinosaurs lived in burrows deep under the earth. They must have also have had amazing lungs given the fact that the richest oil deposits tend to be in areas that were under oceans at the time of the dinosaurs. Deep diving dinosaurs that dug burrows thousands of feet deep. A sound scientific theory if I ever heard one.

  • Why not just outlaw Asteroids (Score:4, Insightful)

    by EvilTwinSkippy ( 112490 ) <yoda@nOSpAM.etoyoc.com> on Monday February 10, 2003 @07:26PM (#5275596) Homepage Journal
    I seem to recall that prior to WWI a panel conviened to discuss the problems of warfare. The concluded that we should outlaw warfare entirely.

    I don't understand this obsession with panels. We really need action. We need someone to invent the mass driver in their back yard. Think of flight.

    Before the Wright Brothers, flight (when attempted) was perilous and uncontrolled. You could control your Yaw motion well enough, you place a rudder on the tail of the aircraft like the rudder on a boat. Pitch was easy, you take a rudder, turn in sideways, and you can control up and down movement. The tricky part was Roll. The Wright brothers developed a technique called "Wing Warping", where they altered the geometry of the wing to control roll motion.

    Think of radio. Deforest clodged together a bunch of parts and created the precursor to the modern Diode. He never really understood how it worked, but the invention (and the name escapes me) is the one missing piece that allows radio transmissions.

    The nautical clock, a stepping stone that allowed ships to calculate their longitudinal position, was invented be a sole crazed inventor.

    Einstein did not have a panel to work out relativity. Hell how many theorums do Newton, Fermat, Fourier, Laplace, and Liebnitz have to their names. And don't forget loonies like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

    Face it, geeks rule. They always have. All of human history was more or less worked out by one crackpot at a time. We need crackpots working on this problem.

  • The A.T.A.R.I. Asteriod Extermination System (Score:4, Funny)

    by ShinmaWa ( 449201 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @08:27PM (#5275908)
    Many years ago -- I exterminated thousands of asteroids at home using the Asteroid Targetting And Removal Instrument 2600.

  • Sinistar, the best asteroid mining 'simulation' evah! =P
  • I've been to Sudbury mines. It's a spooky place. Miners many decades ago were careless in their smelting practices, and as a result, most plant life in the Sudbury crater was exterminated by toxic fumes. Today, it's still best described as a "moonscape" with blackened rocks and few trees able to grow. It's not hard to imagine the way it looked when life first began to return, years after the impact.

    But for me, the sleeping Yellowstone caldera [google.com] ranks much higher on the heebee-jeebees scale, when it comes to ELEs.

  • Consider this:

    Titan is said to have an ocean of hydrocarbons.

    Carbonaceous asteroids and meteorites contain asphalt-like material (I guess the lighter hydrocarbons just boiled away into space).

    And we're supposed to believe that the source of terrestrial petroleum must be organic? We know better now. It's time to revise the old theories.

    • And we're supposed to believe that the source of terrestrial petroleum must be organic? We know better now. It's time to revise the old theories.

      No, it's time for people to learn things like geochemistry, tectonics and petroleum geology. You may be shocked to hear it, but there is this thing called the 'Oil Industry'. It is surprisingly big and quite likes to find oil. The amount of money available to people who can help it find more oil is quite large. And it will happily spend money - serious money - if there is even a small chance of a payoff. Yet it relies entirely on very detailed theories - backed by huge amounts of geochemical evidence, it has to be said - on the origin of oil via the thermal breakdown of a small class of organic deposits. Why do you think this is?

      • Not everyone in the oil industry thinks that all petroleum is biological. Thomas Gold wrote a book called "The Deep Hot Biosphere" and he says there may be significant amounts of oil from the mantel.

        Personally, I don't know enough to say if he might be right. But if some day oil is found say under the basement of the Peace River Arch then I won't be too suprised. There was a well planned to be drilled BTW but they ran into problems and ran out of money and then the promoter ran out too - and is now being extradited back :-)

        If people want to invest a few schekles that well can probably be finished for only say about 1/2 million.

        • Thomas Gold is not, of course, in the oil industry.. he's an astronomer. I have had a look through his work; all I can say is that if he wants to get taken seriously, he should take an undergraduate course in Geology first..

          Although it has to be said that the existance of a deep, hot biosphere (down to about 3-6 km, depending on the thermal gradient) does seem pretty likely; in some special circumstances in Russia, natural gas deposits appear to be generated by deep bacteria acting on source rocks, and oil will biodegrade if it gets in contact with oxygenated water (see the canadian and venezealean heavy oils/tar sands).

          It's also possable to produce oil in the lab by heating the source rocks with water in the absence of oxygen - this is basically what 'oil shale' projects try; this oil is idendical to that found in association with the source rocks.

          Oil will also crack fairly quickly to methane under temperatures >150 degrees centigrade. [doe.gov] This alone severely limits the depth at which oil can accumulate. Methane will tend to 'crack' to carbon dioxide at greater depths, although a greater problem is the low porosity and permability of the rocks at depth.

  • So where did the asteroids come from? Where did all the stuff in space come from? I mean, if you really think about it, shouldn't there be nothing? Well, less than nothing, actually. Not nothing that no one sees, but nothing nothing. Not emptiness...but nothing. Not empty space...but nothing.

    My head hurts.
  • Here I saw the title and thought that someone else had come up with my idea: to reduce the danger from planet-killer sized debris, locate all the troublesome objects and mine them out of existence. We save the planet and get valuable materials besides.
  • Didn't the Apollo moon rocks show that the moon was created 4 billion years ago when something the size of Mars hit the earth? The moon ended up with most of the rock (with perhaps a small metal core) and the earth ended up with most of the metal with just a wafer thin coating of rock. The effoect of this is the earth is able to slowly and safely relieve internal stress through vulcanism, earthquakes, and plate techtonics while planets like Venus, with a crust much thicker than Earth, has outbursts every couple of hundred million years that cover half the planet in lava. If the moon hadn't been blasted off the earth, it would have been impossible for complex life to even begin to evolve.

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