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HA! You won't convince anyone to go to space with petty reasons like population growth or fancy ideals. What you need is space gold! And you know what? It already exists.
http://www.matter-antimatter.com/asteroid_3554_amu n.htm
The first country to be successful in space will have untold wealth and resources waiting to be gained. Wealth which can be used to crush its enemies!

Probably the latter. Chairmen who have to answer to shareholders will choose short-term small profits over long-term huge profits everytime.

The problem isn't long term over short term profits, people everywhere make 30-year investments all the time. Its called buying property, and no one is saying thats a bad idea (unless you're in a bubble area). In fact with decent initial investments, everyone can make a good living while the space mining program gets off the ground (nyuck nyuck). The big problem is reliability of that investment. No one can say for sure if all that money isn't going to go spiralling down the drain, and the reason for that is cost to orbit. It doesn't matter how much value you are returning, when the cost to get up there reduces that value below current prices. Remove cost to orbit issues, and space is wide open.

But the wealth is up there, insane treasures beyond the dreams of Midas. Lets take for example the relatively close Amun Asteroid, about $20 trillion dollars worth of useable materials. I recall one geologist said it was something like three times the total amount of metals mined in the history of the human race. And that is just one SINGLE asteroid. How many million or billion more are there, in our system alone? The first to economically tap into that reservoir will revloutionise human existence, to the extent that our current economic issues would become moot. What price can you put on a car or a computer if they are manufactured in orbit for pennies by robots?

http://www.matter-antimatter.com/asteroid_3554_amu n.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3554_Amun

No need to main it in orbit. Just crash it into the Moon and collect the pieces.

Electric universe isn't the only interesting group out there. Some claim that comets are made of antimatter. If so the Tempel 1 collision should be a whopper. On the otherhand the lack of hard evidence (or hard radiation) coming from comets makes this theory a bit improbable. If comets were antimatter, I suspect we would have noticed the 0.51 and 938 MeV gamma rays produced when particles in the solar wind struck the comet.

If we even have a 100m ball of iron heading our way at 30km/s, that ball of Iron would have the kinetic energy of ~2e19J. And since on megaton of TNT is 4.18e15J, then the ball of iron has the energy of 4500 megatons of TNT!! How the hell are we suppose to defend against that (with today's technology)??? We can't even hit the damn thing, not to mention changing its orbit!!

If the same ball of iron travels at 40km/s, then it has the energy of 18000 megatons of TNT!!

Of course, most of the crap flying around might be (is) significantly larger than that. Anyway, until we can move asteroids around at will, there is really no point in finding objects that threaten us - WE CAN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT THEM!!!

Futhermore, more people will probably end up dead as a result of stress that these "discoveries" do to people.

I say we ignore these things until we can actually do something about them (a sign of actually be able to do something about asteroids might be when people finally have a mining operation on an asteroid. Or ability to use something better (stronger, faster, cheaper, safer :) than chemical rocket....

When at least it comes to asteroids, ignorance is bliss ... for now (or next few dacedes!) :)

Platinum? Here ya go.

It's a lot closer than 50 light-years, too.

Don't you all know comets are made of antimatter?

According to
matter-antimatter.com, this collision with the comet will kill us all!

I have a better idea. Send a manned mission to near-Earth asteroid 3554 Amun, bring back $20 trillion worth of metals, and solve NASA's budget problems forever.

Last time I heard about any "really new" developments in antimatter, they were just figuring out how to contain 10-100 protons (circa 1992) (I know, I'm dating myself, whatever. :-) This is really cool news.

Still, even a million atoms is really physically small. I wonder

• how much it weighs?
• whether it's visible to the naked eye? (well, duh, I guess being hydrogen gas it wouldn't be, or does it have interesting optical properties?
• how much energy it would give off if you mixed it with hydrogen?
• how long it will be till someone makes a weapon out of it. Would it even work?

Anyway, just my $0.01. :-)