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On Asteroid Mining
There's an article out in Feed Magazine that pans the Space Station, but then gets into some actually interesting matter, like the increasing ability to actually do asteroid mining. Asteroid mining has long been a staple of hard science fiction, but the benefits of being able to /really/ do it are immense - less pollution, really clean metals. There's just that nasty get-the-material to the factory issue. But that's why we need a space elevator, right?
Before you get too excited, better look at ecconomics. Sure that astorid you are talking about mining to death has a few trillion dollars worth of metal on it. Sure you can mine it cheaper in the long run becuse you build a mini-refinery on it, and then use local materials to build a big one, and solar power for everything. Then you flood earth with whatever raw material. Opps, turns out that prices on raw metal haven't been going anywhere for a long time. Since you are using robots and solar power your costs are lower (assuming a good delevery system), but you have to contend with supply and demand. Lowering the price of iron doesn't increase demand anymore. All the customers want lower prices and there is compititon to keep prices lower, but the demand is fixed, we can produce more iron then we need. So you come in with your load of iron and now have to sell it to a market that by your presence isn't paying as much.
Long term it is a good idea. Why mine prime land when you can put a wildlife refuge or something else that is beatiful there. We have unlimmited asteroids (okay, but close enough), and nobody cares are them as nothing is living on them.
Remember don't invest money unless you are sure you can make money. If your mining platanum that is no problem, you can drive prices down and compittion out of buisness, with $.50/lb platinum (currently more then $500.00/lb if I remember right) becuase the stuff is usefully chemically if we could get enough to use it everywhere we want to. I think anyway, but you do your own homework before investing money.
Human history is full of examples of unsustainable voyages of exploration. Vikings landed on the American continent before the Spanish, but they were unable to sustain a population there. The Spanish went in with a business plan.
I can assure you that increases in wealth of one parts of Earth's population are rapidly transferred to others, although international market barriers often keep this from happening. If you look at Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, you'll understand that it is actually economically most efficient for producers to produce what they can best make. Advanced countries should design computers, not make tennis shoes. Less advanced countries should produce tennis shoes. Over time, the sale of cheap tennis shoes will bring wealth into the country (above subsistance farming, for example). The population will become better educated, and wealth flows will allow entrepreneurism (a great uncle of mine started a plastic bag factory in his native El Salvador, for example). Of course, the US still imposes protectionist tarriffs on Salvadoran textiles, because we're greedy and don't want Salvadoran peasants to have jobs...but that's why we have spoiled rich college students protesting the WTO and such.
Another example, 50 years ago, Korea was at the level of subsistance farming, now (at least the southern part) has a modern economy. Every impoverished country on the planet has a combination of a lack of democracy or a lack of enforcement of rights to personal property or both.
If we are to truly be in space, it will have to be in an economically sustainable manner. I'm not totally again socialized space science, but I know it alone will not keep us in space.
First of all, when you say that the raw materials from an asteroid don't have enough value, you're forgetting the fact that THEY ARE ALREADY IN ORBIT. Since it costs $100K US a pound to lift raw materials into orbit using current technology, this adds tremendous value to the raw materials from an asteroid, which could be used to build things like the International Space Station or comm satellites much more cheaply than they could be on earth.
Secondly, about "spending the money on the rainforest instead": show me some results. The money spent on the space program has benefitted the US economy immensely due to the spinoff technologies and industries it has created. We're talking at least a tenfold return on investment. It has also greatly benefitted medical science, and even our understanding of the environment. It's been a tremendous bargain, frankly, and we haven't even spent that much on it in comparison with things like, say welfare.
What has your side accomplished lately?
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
EDUCATE PEOPLE ENOUGH TO STOP OVER-REPRODUCING.
"Education"? Educate them about what? People are going to reproduce if they want to. Any other solution requires the government to regulate whether you can reproduce or not, which is a thousand times worse than anything (look at China).
Actually, no, education really does help overpopulation. Again and again, the number one way people have found to lower population growth is to increase female literacy. It makes sense, most of these women in developing countries don't necessarily want ten kids apiece. By increasing female literacy, you help people economically and you help them decide their own birth control strategy.
But beyond that, overpopulation is a way, way, way overblown problem. I heard a study once that the entire population of the world could fit in neighborhood-style homes, 4 per home, in an area the size of Texas. The world is very big.
BS. Sure, and do you know how many miles of farming you need to support each of those people at a USA level of consumption. How many acres of trees to build each of those homes. How many acres of mines, powerplants, railroads, businessparks, distribution centers, shopping centres, etc. this takes?
You are fooling yourself if you think your statistic is even vaguely insightful.
I agree with most of the rest of the post. Except for the bit about fusion. Granted, there is no place you can go and say "I'd like fusion technology, how much is that?" But larger amounts of funds for research will cause it to happen sooner than later.
First of all, it doesn't cost anywhere near as much to throw something down a gravity well. Second, why can't you do the manufacturing in orbit? I'll bet there's a lot of cool stuff industry could do with zero-g and vacuum and perpetual sunshine.
I was just doing a gross sanity check, not make a precise calculation. Obviously it's takes a lot less energy to drop something from space than to launch things into space. Certainly, the basic problem is lifting the matter out of the gravity well, but the cost, I believe, is not due to the fact that propellant is expensive, but that the systems you need to do this reliably and safely are complex, unique and require costly engineering and workmanship. The degree to which these factors apply is in part a function of mass (not to mention safety).
My gut feeling is that all these factors apply in spades to a realistic asteroid iron mining system. Consider that it would have rendezvous with a good sized aseteroid, extract millions of tons of iron, change the ore's velocity and position to put it in earth orbit, and then safely deposit it undamaged on the planet surface -- shooting artificial meteors into the ocean doesn't count. In fact if there were a slug of iron just the right size to fit in the space shuttle's cargo bay sitting in orbit, I doubt it would be economical to go up there and fetch it, even though you wouldn't have the delta-v problem.
It ain't going to happen anytime soon for iron, but maybe in our life time it could happen for iridium; or if they found platinum or rhodium in an asteroid. These metals have values per weight that are several orders of magnitude higher than the value of iron. Saying there's trillions of bucks worth of iron up there is like the sci fi writers who speculated that Jupiter might have diamonds at its core, or perhaps that at its core there might be a giant diamond. It's interesting, but doubtful if it would ever be economical to do anything about it.
The point I was trying to make is that it doesn't make sense to call ISS a boondoggle and say what we really should be doing is asteroid mining. The ISS is a logical next step towards learning how to do things in space, including development of industrial systems.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Don't expect me to navigate my spaceship through
:)
an asteroid mine when the automated mining bots
are infected with a computer virus created by a
rogue arms manufacturing / mining corporation to
overthrow the government!
I miss Descent...
Exactly. From what I understand, the major cost of establishing a permanent presence in space is getting it started. After a certant point, with the exception of a few things that need to be provided by earth, it becomes financially self-sustaining. Of course, then you run into the same problem as the British did with their colonies back a couple of hundred years or so.
-RickHunter
Here is what is needed to establish a self-reliant factory-system on an asteroid or another planet. We'll focus on a planet, as there are additional issues posed from how low gravity asteroids have (imagine a vehicle hauling a cart of ore that, when it hits a bump, flies into orbit).
;) The machine to assemble components would need to be brought in, and would probably be the most expensive device to transport. A larger machine could probably be assembled from a smaller machine, using some
:)
:)
We'll take Mars as our sample planet to establish a base on, as it is a far more similar environment to earth, and I know more about it than the moon, easier for humans to survive on (more gravity means less muscular atrophy, etc)). We'll start with the assumption that we're stuck with in the current day: that we can only transport tools and small pieces of equiptment into space, not entire factory structures or even moderate quantities of raw materials.
1) Power. This is critical - you need power to do anything. Constructing a decent sized power plant takes time, and, for an initial base, having human
labor as your only source of energy to establish a power plant is unfeasable. I recommend a small, self-contained nuclear generator. Not using... oh, whats that called, the phenominon where a difference in temperature at a junction creates electricity... but a self-contained steam turbine which collects all the steam and cools it. This would be assembled on earth or in space, and then landed. This would be used for all mining/construction vehicles until the next stage could be assembled. This stage takes a large field of mirrors which rotate in 2 axises to follow the sun and focus its light on a piece of metal in the center. The turbine-and-steam-collection part from the old nuclear reactor is detached, and attached to the new source of solar heat. This technique is used on earth in a few places, but would be far more efficient in most other places in our solar system, where more light makes it to the surface and there is a greater difference in temperature between the steam and the outside atmosphere.
2) Resource collection. Also critical (ok, ok, everything discussed here is critical...). This would be best if it could be completely automated by a decent navigational AI. Basicly a small truck, rechargable (fuel cells, perhaps?), which has the capability to crumble the rock in the area the base is to be established, and either suction it or scoop it up into its bin. It runs back and forth between the ground and mineral processing.
3) Mineral processing. A few companies are working on devices like this in the present day. A system which is directly connected to a good power source, and melts all minerals put into it. Then, by various methods (separation of layers, electrolysis, etc), it gives you individual elements or critical compounds. Such output on mars, the most critical elements would be iron (quite abundant, generally in iron oxide), water (assembleable, possibly even minable directly in the form of ice), and oxygen (plenty to free from the rocks). Unwanted minerals could be thrown out, or saved for later processing by a future device. Also, atmospheric processing could
occur in a similar way (one would need to refrigerate, not heat, of course). Naturally, all devices would be, for the time, assembled on earth.
4) Component creation. This is a large scale extension of current 3-dimensional printers, and extending it to use of metals, assumably in most
cases, steel. One is fed in a 3d model, and it prints out the model. This may be fairly difficult to extend it to metals as such, as generally the method involves layering down a material that is soluable with some certain
compound in the spots where the desired material isn't to be placed, and the desired material where it is to be placed. Thus, we'd either need to
transport a very large quantity of both the material to be dissolved and the material to dissolve, or to create them both on mars. The later would be far preferable, but I leave it to the chemists to come up with a way to do
that, for now
of the original's components but building the large structural components with the smaller machine, to save weight.
5) Assembly. A series of cranes, welding torches, and other devices would be needed, in addition to people. If AI advances enough, expensive human
costs could be reduced with at least limited automatic assembly of components into structures.
6) Organic compounds. Hydroponics appears to be the best way to go for food and plant producs, seeds and nutrients brought in from earth. Animal
products should be avoided if at all possible, shipped in, or produced from easily replicable things like geneticly modified bacteria. Polymers should be generated from geneticly modified or naturally occuring bacteria in tanks constructed on the spot. The more automated every system is, such as plant growing, the lower the human cost, which will probably be the largest total
cost
7) Intricate components. Until a base is firmly established, all intricate components should be shipped in. Constructing a factory to produce, say, a pentium 3, would be truly immense task, involving many many compounds and many people. Even a simple electric motor would be difficult at first. So, ship them in
8) Profitability. For mars, not much in the immediate future. For the moon, helium 3 might prove profitable, but profitability is the last step, not the first. However, there is one good thing that happens here - all of the research into automating systems to cut the human cost would be immediatly applicable here on earth, too.
- Rei
Kneel Before Christ!
Yeah lets feed the 2 billion starving people and then have to feed the 4 billion starving 15 years later.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
and what happens when your particular product drops in price to the point where it becomes financially unfeasable to produce? same thing farmers do;
stockpile until the market dries up enough so that the price rockets up to the point where the producer can still profit.
the us government has LONG understood this, at least since midway through the great depression, and actually PAYS farmers the vaule of their would-be crop to not grow wheat, corn, and various other crops just so that farmers who do produce can be profitable. there's actually an entire sub economy in montana of people who own areas of land of 25,000 acres and live in huge mansions.
how do they make their money? by not growing wheat on that land. and the land is (nearly) tax-free, of course, because it's legitimate farm land. same deal with space mining. too much production? talk to the other miners and tell them to hold back production till prices rise. sound familiar?
ever heard of OPEC? bravo. BASIC ECONOMICS.
moox. for a new generation.
I'm sure all this sounds really good around the college dorm room, and I'm sure the chicks are very impressed. The problem is that your "solutions" either mean nothing or won't work. Let's take them one at a time...
EDUCATE PEOPLE ENOUGH TO STOP OVER-REPRODUCING.
"Education"? Educate them about what? People are going to reproduce if they want to. Any other solution requires the government to regulate whether you can reproduce or not, which is a thousand times worse than anything (look at China).
But beyond that, overpopulation is a way, way, way overblown problem. I heard a study once that the entire population of the world could fit in neighborhood-style homes, 4 per home, in an area the size of Texas. The world is very big.
Distribute resources to feed the billions already on the planet.
The world goes hungry not because of an unequal distribution of resources, but because of an unequal distribution of capitalism. It's a political problem, not a resource problem. If you want to feed the world, change the governments.
Relocate highly pollutive industries to orbit or lagrange points.
Is the king supposed to just decree that this happens? It will happen eventually, when it makes economic sense. But you have to have an economic space infrastructure to support it.
Pour HUGE amounts of money into research for fusion or powersat development.
You seem to think that this has not already been done. Fusion is an immensely complex problem, and just throwing money at a problem does not produce magical solutions. The manhattan project succeeded not because of money, but because the world's smartest people gathered in one place out of patriotism. NOT out of money. Money is not the solution to every problem.
Fusion will happen, but we need some fundamental engineering breakthroughs first.
I'll just ignore all the other alarmist ranting, if you don't mind.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Metals are a commodity and their prices are affected by supply and demand. Rare metals that can be used in a number of high tech industries have a high price since there is a large demand, but only a limited supply.
NEO 3554 Amun is worth more than all of the platinum metal resources on Earth by several trillion dollars at today's prices only by virtue of being inaccessible. If it could be easily mined then those commodity price would fall quickly.
Alternatively, if the mining organisation maintained prices, thus maximising revenues, but the process by which they were doing it were relatively easily repeatable by others then comptitors would go looking for their own rocks - otherwise known as competition.
Also if the metals could be recovered and transported cheaply enough you could look to see even more mining companies going bust. (Though given the enironmental damage some of the mining companies have done that ain't necessarily a bad thing)
I think there's a good argument to get the ecologists going for this. Mining and smelting are really nasty polluters. If we do it in space, we get the benefits of having nice stuff without the mess in our back yard here on earth that comes from making the nice stuff. Plus, we don't have to destroy all kinds of natural wonders while prospecting for ore or energy supplies to power the processing plants.
science is a religion
New advances in ultrasonic drilling is reducing the complexity of asteroid sampling devices, and vaccuum smelting processes are being actively pursued. These, plus the scientific observations afforded by the Shoemaker-NEAR spacecraft will make it possible to avoid paying $10,000+ a lb to carry the materials needed to build tomorrows space colonies and industrial space presence.
The types of missions people pay the most attention to are the warm and fuzzy ones like J. Glenn's return to space and the Mars Pathfinder. The missions that will provide the best return on our investment in the future are the Cassini's, the SOHOs, and the Shoemaker-NEAR. They may not be as flashy as a remote control car driving a few feet on Mars, but they provide the type of rock-hard scientific data that's needed to get us into space for keeps.
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You are a fucking moron.
Do you know why the Bible calls people sheep? Because sheep are stupid. Test me on this - put a group of sheep out in the woods and see how many survive a week. They'll be falling off cliffs, be eaten by carnivours and just starve to death. Dumb. Stupid. If you've stepped back and observed some of mans blunders in the past few hundred years, the comparison is accurate. As smart as we think we are and as "superior" as we think we are, we're just plain stupid. We'd die in our own fesces rather than change our ways. "No, we don't want to stop clear-cutting - that would mean some of us would have to find new jobs" - tell me that's not stupid. "A million dollars a day in fines for ecological damage? Sure, no prob - we spend that in toilet paper..." Take the drought here in Texas - our lake got down to 5 feet deep before emergency measures and conservation measures were "suggested". Huh? And those measures allowed us to use twice the water we normally use.
Ha - sorry dude, but the human race is coming to an end and we're the losers. Or our children or their children. We don't think ahead. We don't take steps early. A few of us voice what we _all_ know, but the rest of us, well, wait for a shepherd to take care of it. Us sheep are too busy munching on this stale and poluted grass to do anything about it. The answers have been around for years, the technology has been around for years but the smartness is not there. Don't blame it on the "Twisted and Evil" oil empire - it's simple lazy stupidity that's the fault here. Wonder who'll replace us when we're gone...
BTW - Have a Happy Thanksgiving.
While reading this article I'm sure some people were thinking of the investment possibilities of funding an asteroid mining operation. The thought of a multi-trillion dollar asteroid is appealing, but the article takes a pretty naive view of wealth.
We really live in a world of plenty. There is more than enough food and resources for everyone on earth, but a small portion of the population controls the majority of the resources for political reasons. Make no doubt about it, the same entities which control the majority of wealth now would claim ownership of space resources. I doubt if this would improve the lives of the disenfranchised or make many changes here on earth.
I can definitely see how this would make long term space station operation more affordable. In fact, I would tend to think that the most sensible route would be to use a large asteroid as a space station foundation. Build the station on the asteroid itself. I can't see the point of harvesting the materials and moving them to another location. This probably relates to the potential for altering the trajectory of an asteroid for our purposes, and I'll confess I'm not familiar with the challenges of doing this.
I'm rambling a bit, but my point is that pure science shouldn't have to promise us that it can turn lead to gold or turn a profit. It also shouldn't imply that riches in space will change the inequity of life on earth, because that is a political and social challenge that science is largely unable to affect.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
On Earth metals are found almost exclusively in the form of oxides, sulfides, etc. These compounds are lighter and therefore floated to the surface as the Earth formed. Metals in their heavier elemental forms are at least hundreds of miles below the surface.
Producing the elemental form of a metal from these compounds is a pretty simple chemical reaction. For example, iron oxides are reduced using carbon, producing iron and CO2. Unfortunately, this means that a vast amount of CO2 is released to the environment in the process. There are no shortcuts and no significantly cleaner ways to do it - it's basic chemistry. You get a few kilograms of CO2 for each kilogram of steel you produce. Add do that the energy required in the process which is usually also produced by burning fossil fuels and you end up with around 20 kilograms of CO2 for each kilogram of steel. Take a moment to think about the weight of your car. The emissions it will produce over its entire lifetime are about the same magnitude as the amount produced just in reducing the metal, not to mention the environmental cost of producing other parts.
Some asteroids were large enough (and hot enough) for the lighter compounds to float to the surface. After they cooled down they were struck by other asteroids and the chunks that came from their cores are almost pure elemental metals.
Getting them closer Earth is the tricky part. The delta-Vs required not too high for some of the asteroids, though. The cheapest and most practical method of slowing them down as they approach the Earth is aerobraking. I suspect that this solution will not be too popular, though...
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
The REAL impact of asteroidal mining/processing would be to eliminate most mining activities, especially bulk mining, hydraulic mining, and strip mining for metals. All have nasty environmental side effects, and are ugly and difficult to boot.
Plus you have the advantage of nearly unlimited energy from the Sun, either via solar cells for electricty, or via mirrors concentrating light to power smelting processes. And, once you have one good industrial plant Up There, you can bootstrap off of it to make another: several years of "bacterial" growth of orbital industrial plants, and you have a sizeable economic base in space. . . (g)
There, IMNSHO, is the REAL advantage of asteroidal.space mining. . .
In the early 80s Richard Gertz, professor at the Colorado School of Mines, was studying various techniques for mining extraterrestrial resources. He had obtained and analyzed samples of asteroids from meteorites for their "ore grade". His opinion was that Lewis was off in his estimate of the ore grades available on the asteroids -- that although the concentrations of precious metals was high, their thermodynamic availability was lower than would be considered economic to mine on the earth. He further pointed to a nickle-iron 'asteroid' that had actually fallen somewhere in Australia -- they know where it is and that it contains enough nickle and iron to supply a good chunk of the world's needs for these metals -- but they just don't have a way to cut it up economically. This is a guy who actually ran his own, one man, cyanide gold leaching process at an abandoned mine in the middle of the desert so he took his mining seriously and he was really interested in doing space resource work.
I haven't had a chance to look at Lewis's stuff myself primarily because based on Gertz's analysis and the reputation Gertz had with folks I dealt with at the California Space Institute who were analyzing lunar rocks for utilization (primarily insitu but also including LOX generation) I decided I would have to shove his stuff way down on my list of priorities to read.
Earlier this year, the Colorado School of Mines hosted the first-ever roundtable on "Space Resource Utilization." That's funny -- I went back to the article and found this reference to Gertz's institution. So far as I know, Gertz was the only guy at CSM doing space resource utilization back in the early 80s.
Seastead this.
You're forgetting the value of having the stuff in orbit, which effectively inflates its value by about $100K a pound. Use it to build satellites and space stations, in nice clean vacuum, and without having to withstand the stresses of launch.
And, moving stuff around in space is not very expensive compared to the cost of lifting stuff out of Earth's gravity well. If you're willing to move stuff over the course of a few months, ion propulsion and favorable orbital mechanics make it doable.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
For instance, you apparently missed READING THE ARTICLE. In it, it states that (for example) a recently discovered Near Earth Orbit (NEO) asteroid that is only about 2 kilometers in size but "At today's prices, the iron and nickel alone would be worth about eight trillion dollars, cobalt another six trillion dollars, and the platinum-group metals about the same."
Sure, but the article also says that launching about quart of water into orbit costs over a quarter million bucks according to the same article. Consider the cost of going farther, extracting the material, and applying the delta V to get it back down to earth. If the article's figure are correct, assuming two pounds of water costs about $300,000 to launch we get something over $9000 per ounce to launch. Assuming the cost to extract the material and get it back to earth is roughly on the same order of magnitude as the launch costs (a very generous assumption), then we aren't going to be mining asteroids for iron and nickel any time soon. Even iridium which is much more valuable goes for something like $400 per troy ounce -- you'd lose 8K$ on every ounce you brought back.
It'd be more economical to mine landfills for iron and nickel we've already thrown away.
I'm not saying asteroid won't happen eventually, but the technology has to develop a lot farter to make it economical. The ISS is a step towards developing more economical space technology.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Okay...so....6 billion people...expanding geometrically...regressive regimes that refuse to curb birth rates or educate people...massive pollution...hmm...I'm sure everything will be fine for a few thousand more years...
Wrongo.
We either move the factories off this rock or we drown in our own wastes. We either crack the controlled fusion problem (maybe we should spend more money on that than...say...cosmetics? Nah...)
or we are going to bleed the planet dry of petrochemicals----and drown in more waste. Fusion too tough for 5 or 6 decades? Get powersats in orbit (constructed with asteroidal raw materials) or its going to be brownouts for the next hundred years. Not to mention the air is going to be brown anyway...
Look folks, all you general luddites, "its too expensive, we should worry about Social Security"-ers, "Mother Gaia will protect herself"-ers, and "well, uh, things won't be too bad for another hundred years or so"-ers need to shut the hell up. Either control birthrates and educate the starving billions or we are going to collapse under the mass of our waste and energy and resource consumption.
1. EDUCATE PEOPLE ENOUGH TO STOP OVER-REPRODUCING.
2. Distribute resources to feed the billions already on the planet.
3. Relocate highly pollutive industries to orbit or lagrange points. This obviously necessitates the acquisition of asteroid raw materials.
4. Pour HUGE amounts of money into research for fusion or powersat development. I'm not talking about 20 guys in Berkely zapping a molecule of tritium every 18 months. We need Manhattan Projecy importance attached to this.
Of course....NONE of this will get done. Only after the planet is a teeming desert where we all suck smog and eat krill steaks will anyone stop to think...gee...maybe we should have put some effort into orbital industries and Belt mining.
Oh well. Everybody get back to watching Survivor II. Bye now.
Plus, do you know for certain there isn't a kind of life there? Think back to real Star Trek and the horta, perhaps horta's live there and we;re about to destroy their habitat.
Repeat after me:
Star Trek is NOT a documentary.
Thank you
Can't be too complicated . . . shoot 'em once and they split in half, shoot 'em again and they split in half again. Repeat until they're pocket-sized.
Why not get the factory to the materials? Considering the size of most asteroids, it wouldn't take much to anchor a refinery to it, and just launch the refined metal back to the earth. Of course, we could also leave it in orbit and use it to build the structural components of (long-haul ships|space stations|satellites) outside of the gravity well, thus saving millions of dollars.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams