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Mining Asteroids@Home
An anonymous reader writes "Like the lively discussion on mediation strategies for exterminating asteroids, a six-person expert panel is debating today whether humans exist because of big collisions or in spite of them. Interestingly Mexico's oil (and most of the rest of the world's resources) seem to have arisen from later mining of these byproducts: the luck of geography or the price at the pump for dead dinosaurs."
Humans exist, today, because of billions and billions of tiny factors, and probably about a dozen large factors. If you took any of them away, you wouldn't be alive today.
:-) God I miss him.
Im a big believer of the concept that "the reason it looks this way is because if it was any other way, we wouldnt be here to look at it." as well.
It seems a slight waste of time to debate if they made a difference or not, when there are so many other questions that are more relevent, such as 'are we alone?'.
Oh yea, and I had to fight REALLY REALLY hard to not comment on "billions and billions" Carl Sagan style comment.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
There is a growing realization that the source of petroleum is not 'dead dinosaurs' or even dead plants and/or bacteria as had been believed for so long. It seems that what we consider 'organic' chemistry (in chemistry btw, 'organic' just means carbon containing compounds)) might be quite common in the natural world even without what we would recognize as life to create it. Some Google searches on terms like 'non-organic', 'inorganic' and 'petroleum' will turn up lots of articles about the new theories. This one, for example. Or This one in a respected journal of geology. It's looking more and more like the term 'fossil fuels' is a misnomer. That's not to say that the supply isn't limited, however...
I don't understand this obsession with panels. We really need action. We need someone to invent the mass driver in their back yard. Think of flight.
Before the Wright Brothers, flight (when attempted) was perilous and uncontrolled. You could control your Yaw motion well enough, you place a rudder on the tail of the aircraft like the rudder on a boat. Pitch was easy, you take a rudder, turn in sideways, and you can control up and down movement. The tricky part was Roll. The Wright brothers developed a technique called "Wing Warping", where they altered the geometry of the wing to control roll motion.
Think of radio. Deforest clodged together a bunch of parts and created the precursor to the modern Diode. He never really understood how it worked, but the invention (and the name escapes me) is the one missing piece that allows radio transmissions.
The nautical clock, a stepping stone that allowed ships to calculate their longitudinal position, was invented be a sole crazed inventor.
Einstein did not have a panel to work out relativity. Hell how many theorums do Newton, Fermat, Fourier, Laplace, and Liebnitz have to their names. And don't forget loonies like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
Face it, geeks rule. They always have. All of human history was more or less worked out by one crackpot at a time. We need crackpots working on this problem.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Or, it was going to almost exactly this way no matter what. See above comment about metastable systems.
If you killed Newton and Leibniz before they invented calculus, someone else would do it for them. Maybe a few years later, but you don't even know that, and either way the small bubble it creates could be smoothed out inside a generation. If you look at the history of science, things happened about when they were ready to. Individuals were merely the agents of their predecessors.
You could interrupt the evolution of any trait or species, but would it greatly change the state of the biosphere 100,000 years later? It really might not.
At least, that's what my father told me on my wedding day - "go hog wild, son - nature'll sort it out!".