Protect Solar System From Mining 'Gold Rush', Say Scientists (theguardian.com) 229
An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian:
Great swathes of the solar system should be preserved as official "space wilderness" to protect planets, moons and other heavenly bodies from rampant mining and other forms of industrial exploitation, scientists say. The proposal calls for more than 85% of the solar system to be placed off-limits to human development, leaving little more than an eighth for space firms to mine for precious metals, minerals and other valuable materials.
While the limit would protect pristine worlds from the worst excesses of human activity, its primary goal is to ensure that humanity avoids a catastrophic future in which all of the resources within its reach are permanently used up. "If we don't think about this now, we will go ahead as we always have, and in a few hundred years we will face an extreme crisis, much worse than we have on Earth now," said Martin Elvis, a senior astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "Once you've exploited the solar system, there's nowhere left to go..."
Working with Tony Milligan, a philosopher at King's College London, Elvis analysed how soon humans might use up the solar system's most accessible resources should space mining take off. They found that an annual growth rate of 3.5% would use up an eighth of the solar system's realistic resources in 400 years. At that point, humanity would have only 60 years to apply the brakes and avoid exhausting the supply completely.
While the limit would protect pristine worlds from the worst excesses of human activity, its primary goal is to ensure that humanity avoids a catastrophic future in which all of the resources within its reach are permanently used up. "If we don't think about this now, we will go ahead as we always have, and in a few hundred years we will face an extreme crisis, much worse than we have on Earth now," said Martin Elvis, a senior astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "Once you've exploited the solar system, there's nowhere left to go..."
Working with Tony Milligan, a philosopher at King's College London, Elvis analysed how soon humans might use up the solar system's most accessible resources should space mining take off. They found that an annual growth rate of 3.5% would use up an eighth of the solar system's realistic resources in 400 years. At that point, humanity would have only 60 years to apply the brakes and avoid exhausting the supply completely.
We haven't even dug 10 miles into this planet (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the solar system will be safe for a while.
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Especially since right now it'd cost hundreds of millions just to bring a few hundred pounds of surface rocks back from just the moon.
Even if we were talking PURE GOLD, on the surface of the moon for the taking, we wouldn't come close to breaking even.
You don't bring the raw materials to earth (Score:3)
Regarding "precious metals", once found in large quantities in asteroi
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Only if you only use your reusable rockets once.
If a reusable rocket costs twice as much as a non-reusable rocket (per kg launched), then it works out to be more cost-effective with three or more uses per.
And based on SpaceX costs, reusable rockets are, at most, slightly more expensive than non-reusable rockets. So you come out ahead on the second use....
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There is only one planet in this solar system worth protecting, yet, Earth. Once Mars has been terraformed, it should be protected to ensure a healthy environment for the humans living there.
In the future, sure planets with highly evolved organisms should be protected but those with primitive should be terraformed, not just for us but all those critters that evolved with us. A simple reality, allergies will keep us off many worlds and live will be just replacing life on other worlds. We kind of do owe it t
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You're headed in the right direction.
Premature objections by the lay have never come to pass in the progress of applied science.
The uninformed stress over insurmountable problems that scientists call "speed bumps."
As Galileo muttered, "And yet it moves."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Is that unalterably true? India's moon probe was only $56M.
And how many kg of Moon rocks is it bringing back to Earth ?
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Re:We haven't even dug 10 miles into this planet (Score:5, Insightful)
"lets kick the ladder out from ever developing the infrastructure to leave our solar system"
yeah, no.
I would rather mine the rest of the solar system (Score:5, Interesting)
And declare chunks of the Earth as a nature preserve.
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Two different skill sets. There's little to gain by poking holes in our living quarters. We've always gathered resources on the surface like stones and sticks, or just subsurface like ores and a little deeper for oil and water.
It's much easier to mine surfaces than dig holes. Solar objects have plenty of surface area.
That's our next pollution stop. We already have garbage on the Moon and Mars, right?
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"its primary goal is to ensure that humanity avoids a catastrophic future in which all of the resources within its reach are permanently used up."
How is it catastrophic to use up resources we've never had before? Wouldn't all the gold we mine from the asteroid Zibnotz stay on Earth? Why would we need to leave it in the sky for future generations?
Re: We haven't even dug 10 miles into this planet (Score:5, Insightful)
More to the point, since the resources in question are mostly metals, minerals and water... how would they be "used up"? You can reuse those kinds of materials basically infinitely.
And if they're not used, they're practically wasted. It's not like you're destroying much of anything mining an asteroid.
=Smidge=
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You can reuse those kinds of materials basically infinitely.
Two words: "reaction" and "mass"
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Well, in the case of oil, I don't think anyone really objects to us getting it out of the Earth, per se. But in that particular case it can cause problems if it spills on a massive level, or it'ss burned and converts to excessive carbon in the air.
But the gold mined from an asteroid is not the same thing. It's not the same argument.
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You haven't been paying attention. http://leave-it-in-the-ground.... [leave-it-i...ground.org]
"the key is that we dig and pump up oil, gas and coal and burn it."
This says exactly what I said. Do I agree with their agenda? I dunno. Maybe not.
But they're clearly against burning the shit we pull out of the ground. Not the act of getting out of the ground. When they say "Leave it in the ground." they're not saying 'leave it there because we want it there'. They're saying 'leave it there because we don't want it burnt above ground'.
If you disagree with this (as I might), that's fine. But, if you s
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Oil is the easy way out of the energy problems we have... but it causes problems of it's own. Which is why a more diverse engery supply base should be established... that way people can run their classic engines for many years to come, we'll probab
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Oil is not going away for many of it's uses.
It isn't just for energy. Also, it's suitable for a lot of plastic to be stored in landfills for a hundred years or so. The obsession with obliterating plastic waste is ill thought out. It shouldn't end up in the ocean. It shouldn't be burned. It should be stored for the future in landfills.
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Problem: What about the plastication of water tables? How well do flowers grow in plastic? While plastic lasts a long time, it crumbles into powder that's showing up everywhere.
Who's going to be gathering all this plastic? What kind of machinery will be hauling it, placing it into holes dug by what kind of machinery?
I suspect the answer is fossil.
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look up how long a set of $1600 tires lasts on a Tesla due to the added weight... 15k miles or less.
That's NOT how it works. Get cheaper, harder tires, they'll last longer. They just won't be as nice in the corners. 1 ton, four door pickup trucks don't weigh any more than a Tesla, and you can keep your rubber 30-40k miles.
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Extracting oil, and especially burning it, causes both short and long term environmental damage to the planet we live on; on both local and global scale.
=Smidge=
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Oil is not everywhere.
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Asteroids? The moon? I think you need to research the origin of oil. They don't call it a "fossil fuel" for nothing...
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mark_reh observed:
Asteroids? The moon? I think you need to research the origin of oil. They don't call it a "fossil fuel" for nothing...
No, they don't.
You have to pay them to call it that ...
;>
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Do you not know what a 'fossil' fuel is?
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Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
I'm stealing this and I'm going to claim that I thought of it all by myself.
Well done.
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Or have a planetary government that claims ownership and sells it off according to a plan.
Facebook?
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I kid, I kid; that shit's the reason for going there... and short of orbital billboards and lunar neon, we need our heavy industry up there.
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And yet we have your post, proving that things can be even stupider.
Space Malthusians (Score:4, Insightful)
This article would make a good satire. At least we know we'll never run out of this kind of limited thinking.
Peak Oil goes to infinity and beyond.
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There's no peak oil because there never was. It was a myth, easily debunked by anyone with even the slightest knowledge of economics or the oil industry.
In terms of this proposal, it's essentially a proposal to slow down or stop space exploration by removing much of the incentives. It's also ridiculous. It's bad enough that most of the western United States is claimed by the government to prevent local use, but to extend an extreme version of that sort of thing to the rest of the solar system is crazy.
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Per Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
According to the original prediction, the peak and start of the decline would come for the United States in 1970, which it did.... until it didn't any longer 30 years later, confirming the theory as nonsense, because the maximum rate of extraction of petroleum depends on far more than just a snapshot in time of the current technology and know
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According to the original prediction, the peak and start of the decline would come for the United States in 1970, which it did.... until it didn't any longer 30 years later
Peak oil still holds, but as you find more oil, the date of the peak will shift accordingly. Basically, you have to apply the peak oil theory to each individual well, and then add up all the little peaks. Find a new well, create a new peak. At some point in time, you're going to run out new wells.
including interstellar locations
You're joking, because it's totally pointless to get a barrel of oil from someplace that requires more than one barrel worth of energy. The same applies to oil on Earth, you have to take into account energy requir
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We reached what would be peak oil if we were sane. To get more oil, we started fracking. Fracking causes earthquakes, and contamination of water sources like aquifers. Permitting fracking is fucking crazy, but we live in a fucking crazy world.
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No, you make no sense. You say it is incalculable by you and you also give a date. Those two statements are nonsensical.
By that standard, so is Quantum Mechanics.
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In the Seventies there was no detailed science focus on the greenhouse gas issue, either. We can fault oil companies for many things, but lack of extrasensory perception is not one of them.
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There's no peak oil because we keep finding other things like shale oil.
That's just dumb. How many more forms of oil do you suppose there are left to find? No, there is a peak, it just wasn't the peak we first thought.
More to the point, the time will come when there is no need to mine hydrocarbons from the ground because it is more efficient to manufacture them ourselves. And by that time it is unlikely that we will still be burning hydrocarbons for fuel, except possibly rocket fuel.
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Speaking of which, stop being such a temporay limited thinker [juliansimon.com].
A free humanity adapts to shortages and needs for change faster than they become problems, and the net quality of life and costs of rsources drops. But only if free to do this without government jumping in and rationing, or being corrupt and demanding kickbacks.
We've had hundreds of century-long experiments involving billions of test subjects demonstrating this as conclusively as anything ever has. As a resource gets scarce, people adapt and be
Exponential growth (Score:5, Funny)
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Lol, I love that one. It does seem like some of their data goes that way..
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They found that an annual growth rate of 3.5% would use up an eighth of the solar system's realistic resources in 400 years.
An annual growth rate of 3.5% is an exponential curve. In practice, that kind of growth is impossible, and not even desirable (how many tons of aluminum can each person use per year?)
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In practice, that kind of growth is impossible, and not even desirable (how many tons of aluminum can each person use per year?)
Depends. Do we get space ships?
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Any exponential growth that doesn't slow down will use up all the resources in the universe
This assumes that the universe is finite, which is by no means assured.
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This assumes that the universe is finite, which is by no means assured.
No, you hit the wall when the resources needed to go to the next star exceed the resources you have available.
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Any exponential growth that doesn't slow down will use up all the resources in the universe, and more.
Every one of these exponential resource curves is an S-curve whose asymptote we can't see yet.
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Every one of these exponential resource curves is an S-curve whose asymptote we can't see yet.
Well-said.
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Every one of these exponential resource curves is an S-curve whose asymptote we can't see yet.
Or something more like the curve from the stock market in 1929.
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That would kill colonization (Score:4, Insightful)
Antarctica is still just a remote base, because exploitation has been prohibited by treaty.
An intelligent approach would be to consider the kind of governance that would prevent companies from being reckless.
Not everyone feels that asteroids are there for their own sake, and that no rock may be turned over. Indeed, if we felt that the Earth and solar system should remain as they are, then we humans would have to exterminate ourselves, in order to avoid any human footprint.
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Antarctica is still just a remote base, because exploitation has been prohibited by treaty.
The reverse is the case. The minor prospects for profitable exploitation made it relatively easy to create a protection treaty. No one forced any nation to join the treaty, and it only binds the nations that chose to join it - currently 54 out of about 200 nations on Earth. Even signatories could withdraw and begin exploitation of some kind (what?) if they chose to do so.
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Interesting. Yes, I see that you must be right.
It seems that the Arctic is another matter.
Have you seen the National Geographic series "Mars"? It is, IMO, a really thoughtful dramatization of the issues that we will likely face - including the political ones.
Why? (Score:2)
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If we could mine all our needed resources from another place, why wouldn't we? We know we can live relatively easily on Earth; living on any other body in the solar system would require massive amounts of resources to even be possible, let alone easy. Why not mine everything off-Earth, and keep the conditions here even better?
And we have a winner. Of course to do this, we need really cheap energy that doesn't produce GHG emissions. Also, we would need a space elevator to make this cost effective and because a rocket launch produces lots of GHG emissions. Mining is environmentally damaging and ranges from mildly damaging to destroying entire ecosystems. Why would we want to do that on earth long term? Also, entire planets worth of resources are out there. Not sure how they think we could use it all somehow. That seems like
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Or not. LH2+LO2 is perfectly fine rocket fuel. And produces no GHG emissions of any kind....
Why not? Build a big enough habitat (say, a ring 1000km in diameter, 10km wide - which is 3,000,000 hectares of new land) using nickel-iron asteroids as the base material, and we have more land. Do it 1,000,000 times, and we have multiple worlds worth of new land. Soon? Not hardly. But certainly not impossible...
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building an Earth-like habitat would most likely be orders of magnitude more expensive than simply figuring out how to mine the other celestial bodies and shipping the output back to the Earth.
The two do different things, and are not directly comparable. Building earth-like habitats off of the surface has benefits which are not otherwise represented.
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seem silly. (Score:5, Informative)
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85%? Fuck that.
We must protect he barren wasteland! (Score:2)
Think of the huge variety of wildlife and vegetation that will be lost if we start mining asteroids, the moon and Mars! Think of the vast areas of nothing that will be destroyed! We must protect these barren wastelands so they can continue their valuable natural function of...er...that's not important!!!
If there were any trees in these barren wastelands I'd go and chain myself to one right now to protest the horrific destruction. Instead I'll have to superglue myself to a rock because rocks have feelings
Human needs are limited by the size of Earth. (Score:2)
I can envision a future where most of humanity's resource needs are mined off-planet, while substantially all of humanity lives on Earth. While I've been a science fiction lover for 40 years, I still have real troubles imagining more than a rounding error worth of humanity living off-planet - if we get to a million humans living off-planet in the next 500 years, I think that will be impressive. I'm not saying it's not possible, but I do think that in practical terms, it's neither necessary nor desirable,
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I can envision a future where most of humanity's resource needs are mined off-planet, while substantially all of humanity lives on Earth. While I've been a science fiction lover for 40 years, I still have real troubles imagining more than a rounding error worth of humanity living off-planet
Life expands to consume resources. There are enough resources in the asteroids for far many people than we have on this planet. Humanity has no needs that can't be met with renewables, if only we had the will to implement sustainable solutions. Unfortunately, greedy people who don't care about the future have seized the reins of capitalism.
Umm.... no! (Score:2)
Considering the fact that Earth is actually populated by billions of people who have a use for the resources, and all the other bodies we've been able to observe in space so far have none? I say we should absolutely obtain whatever natural resources we're able to get from them!
It's not going to matter that we kept some meteor or planet all "pristine" if we're not even around to see it because we DIDN'T take the opportunity available to use to collect resources we needed to survive.
Nobody's suggesting we tr
Greens contradicting each other, as usual (Score:2)
The Green line is that space exploration won't work and that man will be perpetually confined to Earth because God says so. Remember, Elon Musk is nothing but a scam artist and those videos of cheap access to orbit using reusable boosters are fakes. Therefore, no extraterrestrial resource exploitation problem will ever exist.
I see space as being more like the American West, with a few more orders of magnitude higher ratio of hostile desert to settleable areas. Fortunately, we're not riding horses into it, b
Backwards (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Backwards (and retarded) (Score:5, Insightful)
So we are going to ban the use of this precious resource, so that nobody can benefit from it!
Please Shut Up (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just wannabe intellectuals in wannabe story.
Not to worry (Score:3)
Not to worry, they're only talking about what's readily available in loot chests. Don't forget, those chests respawn.
"Once you've exploited" (Score:2)
"Once you've exploited the solar system, there's nowhere left to go..."
That's odd. I remember the Malthusians saying much the same about Earth just a few years back.
Give it time, though.
"Once you've exploited the galaxy, there's nowhere left to go..."
"Once you've exploited the Local Cluster, there's nowhere left to go..."
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"I do not wish it to happen even after billions of years. Universal AC! How may stars be kept from dying?"
Dee Sub Wun said in amusement, "You're asking how entropy might be reversed in direction."
And the Universal AC answered. "THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER."
Zee Prime's thoughts fled back to his own Galaxy. He gave no further thought to Dee Sub Wun, whose body might be waiting on a galaxy a trillion light-years away, or on the star n
what morons (Score:2)
In space there is enough constant solar energy to power a billion Earth civilizations, enough resources for that on barren rocks with no life... and there is some reason to call that "pristine" stuff we shouldn't touch? Idiots, let's take the load of supporting civilization off of Earth and put it where it is harmless.
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"In space there is enough constant solar energy to power a billion Earth civilizations,"
Except there is no actual, um, you know, place for these mythical civilizations to *be*. We need these little things like air, water, gravity? Heard of those?
O'Neill cylinders could be built with practical materials (steel), and turning asteroids and/or a planet into them would give you >1B earths of livable area:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
See 6:30-8:00 in particular.
And if you say engineering habitats of that size is totally impractical, that would also apply even more so to the TFA which assumes we're going to consume the solar system's entire resources.
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you make the objection of a moron who knows nothing of science and engineering, who doesn't know in the past two centuries we went from horses to spacecraft, from abacus to supercomputers, from scrolls and books to online indexed information, from smoke signals and couriers to cell phones.
no imagination, no understanding, no brains. that's you
Stupid, idiot, anomymous (Score:4, Interesting)
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Assumptions... (Score:2)
All this assumes there will be any ability to exploit other planets before we destroy the one we're on. Based on the direction in which we're moving, I'd say that's a pretty bold assumption.
..and this weeks' award for Most Ridiculous Study (Score:2)
Probably good thing for them they didn't give their names; they'd be laughed right out of their jobs for saying such stupid shit.
'Preserve pristine planets' for what reason, precisely?
The Moon, for instance: there is no life there, it's a rocky dustball. Mine the living hell out of it all you want.
Same goes for asteroids; they're just chunks of ruined planets. Have at them!
Gas giants? Scoop-mine them for gasses.
Venus? Mercury? Etc? If there's no
Use up? (Score:5, Insightful)
They found that an annual growth rate of 3.5% would use up an eighth of the solar systemâ(TM)s realistic resources in 400 years.
Short of some direct matter to energy conversion, all this stuff is still here. We just need a suitable power source to dig it out of a dump site, refine it and put it back into use.
Our solar systems inevitable future..... (Score:2)
Wolf's Astro-factory! Supplying your range of "must have" equipment! Hardened windows! Electronics- installation AND maintenance! Life support systems, all locally sourced and manufactured! Avoid those expensive and time consuming re-entry missions. Wolf's has got what you need, all duty free and outside the gravity well.
*Water accepted as payment
This is a legitimate concern (Score:2)
Second. 3.5% growth in raw material consumption doesn't seem unreasona
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“Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau. I do not feel there will be soon if ever a 50 or 60 point break from present levels, such as (bears) have predicted. I expect to see the stock market a good deal higher within a few months.”
– Irving Fisher, Ph.D. in economics, Oct. 17, 1929
http://pc.blogspot.com/2015/08... [blogspot.com]
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Not a legitimate concern at all.
There are more resources in the random rocks of the solar systems than a million Earths could ever use. There is no way humans can make them unavailable, you have no idea how big and how much material there is, do you? I'll give you a hint, it extends a light-year in every direction from the Sun.
I like to protect earth/moon environment but... (Score:2)
That's just too bad (Score:2)
Laws here on Earth don't apply in space, the ultimate "high seas"... the 250km economic zones won't even reach to where we're parking the asteroid... then there's the question of enforcement. You could always blow us out of the sky of course, but then be sure where all those fragments are going to come raining down.....
Sorry buddy. Arthur C Clarke was in many ways a visionary. "All these worlds are yours", etc.
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Laws on the Earth don't even really apply outside of national borders. I'm not seeing US leaders being prosecuted for invading and occupying a UN member nation.
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once a company has moved its official center of business off-world
Probably the first thing that would happen - for tax reasons. Space being the ultimate tax haven...
a quick way to have your capital city removed from the planet
War? Terrorism? No we're sorry, that was an "industrial accident"...
You have to be kidding... (Score:2)
It astounds me the stupidity people are willing to indulge in "the Name of Science", and not grasp that human induced Climate Change is capable of destroying human civilization as we know it within a century or two..
This is wrong think ... (Score:2)
... because it calls for a change across the human spectrum, you know -- kinda like the Paris agreement and stuff?
We've had this discussion before, in the form of climate change, and like the movie Titanic, the ship always sinks.
Capitalism is the final winning political party for mankind, and the sole religion that the species worships.
So it is written so let it be done.
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There is only one group that can ignore this. (Score:2)
the israeli occupation... they don't abide by rules. Point being when the time comes this is going to be ignored, just as there are those who do so today.
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