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Never underestimate the economics of scale.

For reference, here's the Delta-V chart that I'll be referencing.

Now getting on and off of Mars is the most expensive part. Yet at 4.1 km/s, it's far from unachievable. Because of the way that rocket engines work, the greater the Delta-V that is required, the more expensive the rocket must be. Since the delta-v for Low Mars Orbit is a bit more than half that of Earth. So it is quite feasible that existing rocketry could be used at a far lower cost.

Once in LMO, things become quite inexpensive. A Delta-V of 0.9km/s is all that's required to reach Phobos. With that tiny amount of Delta-V (which can be cheaply obtained via the use of ION engines), the spacecraft could pick up a ride on the Interplanetary Superhighway. This transfer orbit would allow the craft to get its cargo to Earth on little more than station keeping fuel.

Once at Earth, the cargo could then be decelerated and dropped into the ocean, riding atop a simple, mass produced, heat shield. The epoxy solutions used in the capsules should work extremely well and would be inexpensive to mass produce. The cargo craft could then boost itself back to the Superhighway (again with inexpensive ION engines) and repeat the process. Things become even more efficient when cargo is sent both ways.

A more in-depth analysis would be required to determine the precise craft and materials necessary to turn a profit, but it certainly *is* doable with modern technology. And with a colony on Mars, we could support Asteriod mining, a far more profitable venture.

Mind.Forth artificial intelligence has no intention of croaking within the next 35 years or even the next 35 millennia.

The Rejuvenate Mind-Module keeps Mind.Forth going potentially forever.

The heat death of the universe (Waermetod) or the crash of Microsoft Windows (BSOD) -- whichever comes sooner -- is the only risk of Mind.Forth dying by misadventure.

A Technological Singularity is coming within the next thirty-five years anyway, which Lawrence Lessig does not seem to have factored into his calculations.

When will the Singularity happen? -- you may ask. As Mind.Forth spreads first into classes for gifted students, then into high schools in general and university AI labs in particular -- The Singularity R Us.

Er, could anybuddy spare a few coins for Open Source Artificial Intelligence?

You don't even need to fund an unknown AI startup. Just hire some hotshot programmers and Steal.This.Idea!

It's all described in the scientific literature of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
Be the first on your block to launch the Hard Takeoff of a Technological Singularity.

The Earth's magnetic field doesn't shield us from cosmic rays.

I hate to respond to AC's but you need education:

From:

http://www.srl.caltech.edu/personnel/dick/cos_ency c.html

Discovery and Early Research: Cosmic rays were discovered in 1912 by Victor Hess, when he found that an electroscope discharged more rapidly as he ascended in a balloon. He attributed this to a source of radiation entering the atmosphere from above, and in 1936 was awarded the Nobel prize for his discovery. For some time it was believed that the radiation was electromagnetic in nature (hence the name cosmic "rays"), and some textbooks still incorrectly include cosmic rays as part of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, during the 1930's it was found that cosmic rays must be electrically charged because they are affected by the Earth's magnetic field.

Now these articles don't specifically come out and say that the magnetic field protects us, but explains how it works and one of the main concerns about colonization on mars because it doesn't have a strong magnetic field:

http://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/magnet.html

http://www.sievert-system.org/WebMasters/en/conten u_rayonnement.html

http://www-spof.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/wcosray.ht ml

If the earth's magnetic field doesn't protect us from cosmic rays then what does? The Atmosphere... Maybe, but it's apparent in those sites that the rays from the Sun and deep space are affected by Earth's magnetic field.

Also note it's mentioned in Wikipedia's Rare Earth Theory article.

The impact may also result in a large moon to stabilize the axis, and the cores of the original planet and the impacting body merging to form an over-massive core could produce a powerful magnetic field to protect against solar radiation.

In previous discussions about a mission to Mars, the suggestion often comes up about a one-way trip -- one or more explorers who make the trip with no intention of coming back. Pioneers, really, rather than explorers.

This poor guy, who keeps getting tapped for "hey, ya think you can spend another year or so in zero-g, tovarisch?" is probably having it worse and worse when he comes back to Terra. How much of his "stamina" is due to some freak of biology, and how much comes straight from a Soviet-era "We invented it first, and better!" mindset?

If he's starting to feel those months in space when he's back on Earth, maybe Krikalev might want to take it easy in his retirement. Like, about 62% easier? Although medical facilities on Mars might be a bit lacking, even by Soviet standards.

very technical interesting article just found, Lo interview, a 2002 NASA press release, another cool description with nice illustrations, and the wikipedia.

very technical interesting article just found, Lo interview, a 2002 NASA press release, another cool description with nice illustrations, and the wikipedia.

There are lower energy paths than Hohman transfers called the "Interplanetary Superhighway" based on invariant manifolds. They are very efficient, but also very slow routes so mostly useful for moving cargo or certain asteroids which follow these types of chaotic orbits naturally. see http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~shane/superhighway/des cription.html

For my mission planning software we never considered more than two bodes at a time. For the real stuff, they probably consider more than two bodies at a time, but the other bodies are just correction factors.

The Mechanical Universe, is an excellent way to learn this stuff. It comes on in reruns from time to time.

Several of the people I work with in Caltech's Control and Dynamical Systems department work on celestial mechanics and calculating space flight trajectories -- and I can assure you, it's some pretty complicated stuff, involving invariant manifolds and (IIRC) patching together different three-body systems. There's a good popular article about this in Science News, and you can find more info (in as much detail as you'd like!) on Shane Ross' homepage.

Cheers,
IT

...at the very edge of the visible Universe...
quasars from Nasa Extragalactic Database, these are quite close as the visible universe goes.
3C 405, redshift 0.056
3C 273, redshift 0.158
Not to mention that the distinction between quasar and active galactic nucleus is essentially one of luminosity, and Centaurus A is only at redshift of 0.001825, ~4 megaparsecs.
How the most distant quasars (redshift 6.4 = 1 billion years after the big bang, unless I'm out of date) formed so quickly is not yet known, but I don't know any reason why it'd be impossible to make one in a billion years.

4: ...evaporate...
Yes, they don't evaporate that quickly. That's irrelevant. The energy we observe from quasars comes from infalling matter.

...the size of a typical Quasar would need to be absolutely gigantic...
A typical quasar mass is 10^8 or so Solar Masses, as has been measured quite accurately by reverberation mapping, gas kinematics and water maser studies. The event horizon of a quasar of this mass is comparable in size to the Solar System. Yes, it won't evaporate.

5: ...NO quasars closer than 5 billion light-years away...
See above.

...If Quasars were galaxy seeds...
How would you make a galaxy out of a Black Hole? You certainly wouldn't manage it in the lifetime of the Universe. The formation processes of quasars and galaxies is complicated and the two can interact in interesting ways. Quasars form in the centre of galaxies.

7:...If a Quasar were powered by a Black Hole, it would be typically 100,000 times more massive than the Black Hole at the Black Hole at the center of our own galaxy...
Sagitarrius A* mass: 2.6*10^6 Solar Masses
Typical quasar: 10^8 Solar Masses
So it's more like a factor of 100. A few quasars have masses up to 10^10, so at most a factor of 10,000.

I think I'll stop here, you're making up numbers that are easy to find in google.

In a word: No.

The discovers of both tell all.

As far as I know, the van allen belts are only a problem if you stay in them for a few weeks. Normally there's no problem when you just zip through them. http://spider.ipac.caltech.edu/staff/waw/mad/mad19 .html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_b elt

Thanks.

http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/planetlila/inde x.html

Why the hasty announcement? What about the hacking? What is going on here?

As has been widely reported in the press, the announcement of the new planet was made in a rather hasty manner because of fears that our discovery was going to be made public by someone who had hacked a web site and gained access to information about where the object is. The details are a little more complicated than this, the terminology can be debated ("hacked?" "sleuthed?" "stole?" "stumbled across?") and not all are 100% clear to me, but here is a reconstruction of the events that lead to the announcement as best I can discern them. Some aspects remain mysterious.

In mid-July short abstracts of scientific talks to be given at a meeting in September became available on the web (for example, here). We intended to talk about the object now known as 2003 EL61, which we had discovered around Christmas of 2004, and the abstracts were designed to whet the appetite of the scientists who were attending the meeting. In these abstracts we call the object a name that our software automatically assigned is, K40506A (the first Kuiper belt object we discovered in data from 2004/05/06, May 6th). Using this name was a very very bad idea on our part! Unbeknownst to us, some of the telescopes that we had been using to study this object keep open logs of who has been observing, where they have been observing, and what they have been observing. A two-second Google search of "K40506A" immediately reveals these observing logs. Ouch. Bad news for us. From the moment the abstracts became public anyone on the planet with a web connection and a little curiosity about this "K40506A" object could have found out where it was. Anyone on the planet with even a modest-sized telescope could then go find the object and claim a discovery as their own.

Interestingly, this is not what we then happened. The Spanish group headed by J.-L. Ortiz legitimately discovered the object on their own in data from 2 and 3 years ago. The fact that this discovery happened days after the data were potentially available on the web is, I believe, a coincidence. At the time, however, some in the community privately expressed their concerns to me that this coincidence was too good to be true and wanted to know if there was any possible way that anyone could have found out the location of our object. I insisted it was impossible. I was wrong. I myself went to Google late on the night after the Spanish announcement, typed K40506A into Google, and let out a gasp. Even though I don't believe the Spanish group did this, I realized anyone could have found our object with very little effort. To be very clear, from the first day I have very publicly stated that the official discovery credit goes to Ortiz et al. and no one else.

By Friday morning it occurred to me that once someone knew about the web site where the information on where the telescopes we had been using had been pointing it would take only a little more effort to carefully peruse this web site to see if we had been looking at anything else moving in the sky. At this point I contacted Brian Marsden at the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC) by email, told him confidentially about the two objects that we had not yet announced (now known as 2003 UB313 and 2005 FY9), expressed my concerns that someone may be able to nefariously find our data and attempt to claim credit for discovering these objects, and sought his advice. His chilling response came less than an hour later: someone had already used a web service of the MPC to use past observations of an object to predict locations for tonight. The past observations were precisely the logs from the telescope we had used! The culprit and not even bothered to change the names that we used (K31021C for 2003 UB313 and K50331A for 2005 FY9). At this point we had no choice but to hastily pull together

Actually, Prof. Brown has changed his opinion on the "What is a planet" question. He now thinks that anything Pluto-sized or larger should be a planet, thus making 2003UB313 the 10th planet (not more than ten, because this is the first to actually be larger than Pluto).

Uh, if you look at this site the worst the guy alleges is that somebody looked like they were planning on peeking at his planet with a telescope.

He published his code-name for the planet. Somebody did a search for that name and found some publicly-available telescope logs that had that name in it. (One might think that the reason those logs are publicly available is since the public pays for them at least in part.)

Then somebody did some calculations on a website to figure out where the planet was now, presumably to take a look at it.

At no point did anybody claim discovery of the planet, hold the investigator at ransom, threaten to release data, etc.

Essentially the astronomer in question is probably highly paranoid and considers it unethical for anybody else to peek at "his" planet.

Mike Brown, a member of the team that discovered this object, has the following page on the definition of a planet: http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/sedna/#What%20i s%20the%20definition%20of%20a%20planet? According to his preferred definition neither the new object nor Pluto are planets.

I think Pluto is only considered a planet because it was grandfathered into the current (confusing and not entirely adhered to) rules on what is and isn't a planet.

I think this is a nice way of putting it. Pluto is pretty much "grandfathered" in. If you were to take the 8 inner planets in one group and the KBO's in another group and ask to which group Pluto belongs, I think that a lot of planetary scientists would say that it's a KBO (I argue this mostly because of its inclination relative to the plane of the Solar System).

However, as the discovering scientists quite rightly point out on their page, the word "planet" has entered the common usage of the English language to include Pluto. Maybe the scientists can't have the term back . . .

If scientists notified the public every time there is a possibility of there being Planet X somewhere there would be 100 announcements each day and then 100 retractments a couple hours later 99% of the time. The computers that look for objects spit out these 100 objects each day and a person looks at most of them and says that they are just minor camera issues or some small asteroid or comet most of the time. Most of this would not interest the public at all.

Furthermore, I attend Caltech, have taken Planetary Science class from Mike Brown, and my girlfriend is doing Astrophysics research into searching for more planets and she told me that someone looked up telescope records to figure out where Mike Brown has been looking when so that they can reconstruct the orbit and find the object. It doesn't sound that improbable, and I can't imagine someone here at Caltech in the Planetary Science or Astrophysics Departments making it up.

Now that I've written this, I checked his site at the bottom and it confirms what I said is possible, though maybe no one bothered to actually try it.

mod grand-parent down, his reactionary statement say's very little when you read this. Mod parent up most definately.

Both Sedna and 2003 EL61 are smaller than Pluto and not considered planets.

The new KBO, 2003 UB313, is larger than Pluto, which is why the discoverers are considering it a planet.
They also discovered Sedna, so they would probably know.

As has been widely reported in the press, the announcement of the new planet was made in a rather hasty manner because of fears that our discovery was going to be made public by someone who had hacked a web site and gained access to information about where the object is. The details are a little more complicated than this, the terminology can be debated ("hacked?" "sleuthed?" "stole?" "stumbled across?") and not all are 100% clear to me, but here is a reconstruction of the events that lead to the announcement as best I can discern them. Some aspects remain mysterious.

In mid-July short abstracts of scientific talks to be given at a meeting in September became available on the web (for example, here). We intended to talk about the object now known as 2003 EL61, which we had discovered around Christmas of 2004, and the abstracts were designed to whet the appetite of the scientists who were attending the meeting. In these abstracts we call the object a name that our software automatically assigned is, K40506A (the first Kuiper belt object we discovered in data from 2004/05/06, May 6th). Using this name was a very very bad idea on our part! Unbeknownst to us, some of the telescopes that we had been using to study this object keep open logs of who has been observing, where they have been observing, and what they have been observing. A two-second Google search of "K40506A" immediately reveals these observing logs. Ouch. Bad news for us. From the moment the abstracts became public anyone on the planet with a web connection and a little curiosity about this "K40506A" object could have found out where it was. Anyone on the planet with even a modest-sized telescope could then go find the object and claim a discovery as their own.

Interestingly, this is not what we then happened. The Spanish group headed by J.-L. Ortiz legitimately discovered the object on their own in data from 2 and 3 years ago. The fact that this discovery happened days after the data were potentially available on the web is, I believe, a coincidence. At the time, however, some in the community privately expressed their concerns to me that this coincidence was too good to be true and wanted to know if there was any possible way that anyone could have found out the location of our object. I insisted it was impossible. I was wrong. I myself went to Google late on the night after the Spanish announcement, typed K40506A into Google, and let out a gasp. Even though I don't believe the Spanish group did this, I realized anyone could have found our object with very little effort. To be very clear, from the first day I have very publicly stated that the official discovery credit goes to Ortiz et al. and no one else.

By Friday morning it occurred to me that once someone knew about the web site where the information on where the telescopes we had been using had been pointing it would take only a little more effort to carefully peruse this web site to see if we had been looking at anything else moving in the sky. At this point I contacted Brian Marsden at the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC) by email, told him confidentially about the two objects that we had not yet announced (now known as 2003 UB313 and 2005 FY9), expressed my concerns that someone may be able to nefariously find our data and attempt to claim credit for discovering these objects, and sought his advice. His chilling response came less than an hour later: someone had already used a web service of the MPC to use past observations of an object to predict locations for tonight. The past observations were precisely the logs from the telescope we had used! The culprit and not even bothered to change the names that we used (K31021C for 2003 UB313 and K50331A for 2005 FY9). At this point we had no choice but to hastily pull together a press

If you look at the bottom of this page, you get a very interesting account from the view of the scientists who have done a lot of work on it. The so-called "hacking" sounds much less nefarius than in the article.

Scroll to the bottom of this page to read what Michael Brown (the professor who co-discovered 2003UB313) has to say about the alleged "hacking."

No there aren't. From here:

This new planet (see "What makes a planet?" below) is the largest object found in orbit around the sun since the discovery of Neptune and its moon Triton in 1846. It is larger than Pluto, discovered in 1930. Like Pluto, the new planet is a member of the Kuiper belt, a swarm of icy bodies beyond Neptune in orbit around the sun. Until this discovery Pluto was frequently described as "the largest Kuiper belt object" in addition to being called a planet. Pluto is now the second largest Kuiper belt object, while this is the largest currently known.

Explained here. There's no conspiracy - they didn't discover it until January:

Because the new planet is so far away it is moving slower than most of the objects that we find. It is movng so slowly, in fact, that our computers didn't notice it the first time around! We began a special reanalysis a year later to specifically look for very distant objects. This reanalysis found the new planet on January 8th 2005, almost 1 1/2 years after the initial data were obtained.

It's on this page. But, yeah, it wasn't really hacking, it was just using Google well.

Like, maybe they didn't want to risk the media flaming them for prematurely announcing a tenth planet if they had to recant part of their data?

Also, the computers they use for analysis didn't see it because it moves so slowly. They found it on reanalysis a year and a half after they imaged it. They weren't actually sitting on the discovery for two years - just since January.

I suggest you check out this page at the bottom about "Why is it called Sedna?"

Seems to be larger than Pluto, see

http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/planetlila/inde x.html

Thomas

This web page gives away their name:
http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/planetlila/inde x.html

Lila is the name of Dr. Brown's newborn daughter by the way...

See http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/planetlila/inde x.html . There's already another one, possibly an 11th "planet" (or nth TNO).

However, there's an even more interesting thing that Mike Brown has on his page, called 2003 UB313 (a.k.a. "Lila").

However, there's an even more interesting thing that Mike Brown has on his page, called 2003 UB313 (a.k.a. "Lila").

However, there's an even more interesting thing that Mike Brown has on his page, called 2003 UB313 (a.k.a. "Lila").

I should have noticed that there's a very very informative article about this new object at Mike Brown's website. It includes details about how they calculated it's mass, and details about the moon.

Check out this picture from Mike Brown's website. He's the one who discovered Sedna and has a bit of useful information on that site.

I feel that Pluto should officially be considered a planetoid at least officially. But I don't especially care what they teach in Elementary School. By the time we start looking for smaller planets around other stars we'll come up with some definition of a planet and a planetoid and maybe Pluto will be grandfathered in, but it would probably just be easier to start saying now that it's a planet and not a planetoid.

Check out this picture from Mike Brown's website. He's the one who discovered Sedna and has a bit of useful information on that site.

I feel that Pluto should officially be considered a planetoid at least officially. But I don't especially care what they teach in Elementary School. By the time we start looking for smaller planets around other stars we'll come up with some definition of a planet and a planetoid and maybe Pluto will be grandfathered in, but it would probably just be easier to start saying now that it's a planet and not a planetoid.

Yes, that Space.com article is very very informative.

What was interesting to me is that the discoverer of Sedna, Mike Brown of Caltech, has been monitoring this object for some time, and was just about to make an announcement about it before this announcement by the Ortiz group was made. Apparently the Brown group was only waiting for some data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, which arrived last week. Based on the Space.com article, it appears the Brown group knows a lot more about this object than anyone else--including the fact that it has a moon. There's a very nice image of the planet and its moon with the Space.com article.

Note that this is not Sedna, and this is not Nibiru.

• Wallscreens (cf. Tad Williams' Otherland novels) Wall-sized ultra-flatscreen net connected hardware-complete televisions/consoles/workstations - my pitch to kill Fox cable like the evil slug it is
• Look-to-click. I've gotten carpal tunnel from the stupid mouse because I have to chase what I'm looking at all the time. cut out the middle man!
• speak/think/twitch -to-type. The typewriter keyboard has been around since what, 18-hundred-and-something? I do love the new LCD board, but a better mousetrap is still a mousetrap. Hows about a virtual keyboard linked up to wireless fingertip-pads - tip-twitching _must_ be quicker than whole-hand-typing
• Visual overlay. Why have a desktop background at all? Why can't I have glasses/implants constantly streaming data/commands as requested while I go about my day? Left-eye Slashdot summary while walking between greens? sure. Instant bring up of gas prices down the road while pulling up at the gas station? great. And why do I have to crick my neck reading goddamn tree-killing novels again? Get me away from these noisy boxes and crotch-burning fliptops and oopsy-dropsy input-contortion-inducing PDAs. Stop making my monkey eyes look at psychosis-inducing backlights and radiation blasters. Bring the screen to my retinas where the rest of my incoming video is.
• Self-storage. Where do I need my data? Wherever I am. Do I want to have to remember a sodding device everytime I go anywhere, or chain myself to a fixed conduit device? no. Insert a terabyte of wireless flash in my appendix or something and have every device I walk up to sync to it. This is the 'Electronic Workspace'/'Digital Presence' requirement. why the hell do I have to spend so much time shifting bits about the place? they're _my_ bits for chrissakes - give 'em back you stinking non-interoperable discrete-storage non-propagating storage media of death. Unify all my boxen via _me_.
• Universal wireless net coverage. WiMax, 3G whatever. And do it global. Net access is as much a right for every child as is clean air and water.
• Brain overclocking. If I'm only seeing what's on the net, and interacting with it virtually, my defunct body is just a supporting fluid sac right? Why can't my brain start viewing content as fast as it possibly can? Why can't I leave monkey-pace viewing behind and go to dream speed? Don't we REM for only minutes, but have hours of experience in the dreamscape? Why can't I asccelerate my daily read of BBC/Slashdot/TheRegister/Kottke/Waxy/Digg/Del.icio .us by upping my brainwave refresh rate?

There's an even easier and simpler alternative that doesn't even use lasers... nothing but a lamp and a ruler! http://www.vision.caltech.edu/bouguetj/ICCV98/

The results are remarkably good for such a simple setup.

Oh, and don't forget, you can use distilled water to make 2" long ice spikes on your cubes!

Here's a chart. The surface of the moon to LEO is 5.5 km/s (and visa versa). Transfer between LEO and Moon orbit is 3.9 km/s. Transfer from LEO to Mars Orbit is 4.7 km/s. Transfer from LEO to Mars Surface is 10.2 km/s (and, again, visa versa).

Sooo... the lunar surface is about 1/2 of the cost of going to Mars. However, to go to the surface of Mars' moon Deimos, you only need 5.6 km/s! How weird is that?

No, looks like you're right. (Or closer to right, anyway.) I was using this chart, but somehow ended up with 3.9 km/s. According to the chart, the correct Delta-V is 2.5+0.7+0.6+0.9 = 4.7 km/s, That being said, there are "cheaper" ways of getting to Mars, but not such that the trip would be suitable for humans.

Not that it matters too much for this discussion. With a 25% gas tank, the maximum Delta-V attainable at 11,000 Isp is 24 km/s. (24,000 m/s) For a 500 tonne craft, one gas tank would look approximately something like this (at 4700 m/s per trip):

Trip 1: 500tn -> 478tn
Trip 2: 478tn -> 457tn
Trip 3: 457tn -> 437tn
Trip 4: 437tn -> 418tn
Trip 5: 418tn -> 400tn
EMPTY

That's 5 full trips, or two and a half round trips on one fuel tank! And that's considering that I gave each trip about 100 m/s more delta-V than necessary due to rounding! Engines like these would forever change the face of space travel if they went into common usage. :-)

Although it wasn't nearly large enough to cause any damage, the shaking was signifigant enough to disturb the Hanford LIGO site. Took about 3-4 hours for ground motion to calm down enough that the mirrors could be used again. Most of the people working on the Interferometers decided it was a good time to head out and grab dinner.

And for those that don't know what LIGO is, look at http://www.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/ And check out the Einstein@home project while you're there.

Seems to just be a more realistic version of something like PolyWorld. Still quite interesting.

If you want a "AI" that borders on a consciousness, you don't want to start at this level - that's way too much work. You want to algorithmicly be simulating entire cells or even groups of cells at once, instead of components of cells. The higher up you can shift the behavior, the more computation you can get done.

Hmm... this may tempt me to play with Framsticks and Avida some more. :)

I liked Foundations of Cellular Neurophysiology whose material overlaps with Biophysics of Computation a little. The former is more focused on channels while Biophysics of Computation seems to focus on neuron operations. I have read only a little bit of it, but I understand that it is good, too.

This is cool, but the mantle is hardly the center of the earth. I'm much more interested in this - a proposal to create a molten-iron probe capable of actually reaching the core of the earth. A hundred thousand tons or more of the stuff would be poured into an artificial crevice in the earth, where it would sink down through the mantle.

The trick seems to be finding a probe that can ride the iron blob the whole way down, and keep it hot (probably through radioactivity). This was also considered as a way to dispose of nuclear waste.

At only $10 billion, this seems like a very hot possibility for exploring the mysteries of the earth. Just like sending a man to the moon, sending a manmade object to the center of the earth would be a seven-sigma experience.

Incomplete, and thus inaccurate. Nanotechnology is likely to make petrochemical synthesis from alternative raw materials possible, and alternate materials may partially replace plastics. (Pla However, the key difficulty in replacing oil is that it is a pre-existing compact form chemical energy storage. Nanotechnology might concievably produce a replacement energy storage technology-- although the high energy profit ratio and reasonable energy density of gasoline make this somewhat questionable. However, if you are using nanotechnology to synthesize a form of energy storage, you still need the energy as an input in one form or another. Nanotechnology is primarily materials science; it does not provide new energy sources.

A space elevator is highly unlikely to be developed before it is rendered unnecessary by other nanotech-based technology.

Um? A space elevator allows for access to space via a Conservative system. Unless losses to entropy are far higher than projections for fullerene conductors indicate, there is NO more long-term economical way for bulk materials space transport; the costs are prinicpally capital set-up costs, of which the bulk are projected for the initial semi-orbital space deployment... of just the sort that a beanstalk can ameliorate.

Furthermore, large scale space solar is the ONLY kind of energy source capable of sustaining humanity to a Singularity scenario, barring a suprise in a GUT breakthough well beyond what is expected at this point from string theory models. Nanotech is primarily an improvement in materials science, not physics. It has the potential to improve energy storage and transportation, but very limited possibilites for improving energy production.

Besides which, I said Transhumans will go off-planet - not every monkey-ass primate who can wipe his nose. If the latter die by the billions, it's NOT a disaster.

Unfortunately, until said Transhumans are living in a self-contained biosphere, they are probably reliant for production of their food supply on said monkey-ass primates. Even then, the transhumans will need a self-sustaining technological infrastructure. Haven't you read Marooned in Realtime? Merely because something is stupid does not mean it is safe to remove from your local economy nor ecology. Additionally, diminished biodiversity within a species-- even (trans)humans-- is generally a bad thing; too much risk of single point of failure from epidemics and the like.