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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."
The discussion has been cancelled after a meteor crashed into the 6 panelists hotel...
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
Regardless of whether we exist because of asteroid collisions, I'd rather not give space the chance to reinvent the planet again :)
I can just see the adverts now
"Did you read an article that encouraged you to mine asteroids in your own home? Did you drag an asteroid out of orbit, or drive to a place in order to catch one, did this vapourise you, your loved ones and most of the state ? Here a Sue, Grabbit and Runne Associates we specialise in extra orbital and terrestrial accidents. Last year we helped Bob who strapped himself to 10,000 fireworks to get into space, Bob sadly died but were helped his widow sue Nasa for 100,000,000 dollars. Phone us now and we'll help you get over your stupidity"
(quick voice over)
"ActualAmountMayNotBeAsAdvertisedHereLevel
Your just building yourself a litigation hell Slashdot.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Stands to reason - we destroy practically everything else, it must be the Universe's way of protecting itself against us.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
For a minute, I thought this would be pr0n.
Asteroids, without a doubt, helped our species survive. What else would have filled the immense void in the arcade hall in the years between Pong and Pac-Man?
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Hello, Slashdot user. My name is Dr. Sbaitso. I am here to help you.
Regardless if asteroid impacts helped or hindered life on Earth (no so good for the dinosaurs, good for our proto-mice ancestors) I don't think that an asteroid impact would be a good thing today, thank you. Any future life forms that would be helped by an impact can kiss my grits.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
As a matter of fact, if you won't back in time 1 billion years and swished your hands around, and then came back, nothing would be the same. You guys know the Simpson's episode ;-)
And from the article: We should bear in mind that 99.9% of all species that ever dwelled on Earth were wiped out, most likely, as a result of large impacts.
If those species wouldn't have died, we also wouldn't be here today.
--naked
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
A few interesting points from this article. One is that a number of impacts helped in creating some of the earths key resources. As evidenced by Canada's nickel deposits around the Sudbury impact crater, and Mexico's oil deposits around the Chicxlub impact.
In addition, the major impacts may not have contributed that much to mass extinctions. While there may have been a momentary spike in extinctions, the vast majority of extinctions were not related to a major event.
It is difficult for us to fully understand the effect of asteroid and comet impact on the earth, as we are so dynamic that much evidence gets lost..
strategies for exterminating asteroids
Just send up Bruce Willis, Steve Bushemi, and, Ben Afleck. Billy-Bob will coordinate the whole she-bang from the ground.
Good luck and God speed gentlemen
I was all excited, I was going to work on a new project Seti@home, meet Asteroid@home...
It would have been the remnants of the entire world, representing far more mass than dinosaurs, that would have turned into the "fossil fuels", and not merely dinosaurs. Come to think of it, the vegitation alone would dwarf the collective mass of the dinosaurs, not to mention insects, which can breed and grow on high geometric curves.
I've been mining asteroids at home for the past twenty years! How is this "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"?
Wait... hemmaroids are the ones in space, right?
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
At the conference, the Bush Administration is expected to seek support for a pre-emptive strike against the Universe. Administration sources were quoted as saying, "The Universe has a long history of unpredictable agression and deterrance of its threats is simply not an option." Donald Rumsfeld went on to state that the US military strategy would bring about a swift and clean victory over the Universe.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
cockroaches may never have evolved to the vast interstellar empire we have today.
All you have to do is send an asteroid to the planet at the top of the list. Then remove that planet from the list, move the rest up one space and add your planet to the bottom of the list. Pass this list around by radio transmissions to other solar systems. Eventually your planet will reach the top of the list, and you'll have more asteroids than you know what to do with!
This really works. It is NOT a SCAM!
Could this be a distributed computing project that combines dig dug, searching for alien intelligence, AND lets me pilot a vector-based shooting triangle through an asteroid field?!?!
Where do I sign up?
Since some of us figure we owe our petroleum resources to dead dinosaurs, it stands to reason that the next form of life on this one-day-to-be-post-apocolyptic planet will filling their gas tanks with dead humans.
If you don't believe me, ask that guy over there.
Most Definitely.. Collisions of men and women produce people all the time.
George Zebrowski wrote a book about mining asteroids. The book was called Brute Orbits. Strange and alarming part is what that did with the asteroids after they had been mined. They shot prisoners into a timed orbit....God only knows what the Bush administration will do.
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
You know, outlawing explosive bullets in war actually worked pretty well.
This sig wasn't worth reading, was it.
Many years ago -- I exterminated thousands of asteroids at home using the Asteroid Targetting And Removal Instrument 2600.
The
Sinistar, the best asteroid mining 'simulation' evah! =P
Banaaaana!
Depends which half....just off the top of my head I can think of a few people we could do without...
Good page (Quit Slashdot). Everyone here should read it. ;)
Funny thing from the Al Gore critique critiqued page it links to - Gore is accused of "mispronouncing" the word [packet] router as "rooter". But I'm an experienced system and network admin, and that's how I pronounce it. A "rowter" is a woodworking tool; on the other hand, I pronounce it "root 66" (as I think Bob Dylan did).
I do realise that a lot of people say "router" with an ow, but a significant number I've talked to also don't. Is this because I'm Canadian? What do other non-Americans asy?
But for me, the sleeping Yellowstone caldera ranks much higher on the heebee-jeebees scale, when it comes to ELEs.
... "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the w
Dude, he's talking about Asteroids the candy, not the game, DUH!
Rowter it is here, mate. In Australia a "rooter" has a different meaning altogether, vis a viz "pig rooter" does not mean someone digging for truffles.
Thou hast damnable iteration, and art indeed able to corrupt a saint - Henry IV, Act I scene II
Consider this:
Titan is said to have an ocean of hydrocarbons.
Carbonaceous asteroids and meteorites contain asphalt-like material (I guess the lighter hydrocarbons just boiled away into space).
And we're supposed to believe that the source of terrestrial petroleum must be organic? We know better now. It's time to revise the old theories.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Aye to that, but we could spare the Canadians, they are OK.
So where did the asteroids come from? Where did all the stuff in space come from? I mean, if you really think about it, shouldn't there be nothing? Well, less than nothing, actually. Not nothing that no one sees, but nothing nothing. Not emptiness...but nothing. Not empty space...but nothing.
My head hurts.
I LIVE.
Clear, Dark Skies
They did create a NEO monitoring program. The problem is that it's run by the UN, and the asteroids have gotten quite adept at avoiding the inspectors.
Clear, Dark Skies
Here I saw the title and thought that someone else had come up with my idea: to reduce the danger from planet-killer sized debris, locate all the troublesome objects and mine them out of existence. We save the planet and get valuable materials besides.
Sorry, but the idea that the deccan traps were caused by a metorite impact are daft to say the least.
Firstly, there is the geochemical evidence:
Then there are the dates - this started 3.5 million years before the Mexico impact.
And then you have the minor fact that metorite impacts and flood basalt events do not correlate. This is another case of astronomers forgetting that this science called 'geology' exists...
Everyone I have encountered in the UK pronounces it root-er.
Didn't the Apollo moon rocks show that the moon was created 4 billion years ago when something the size of Mars hit the earth? The moon ended up with most of the rock (with perhaps a small metal core) and the earth ended up with most of the metal with just a wafer thin coating of rock. The effoect of this is the earth is able to slowly and safely relieve internal stress through vulcanism, earthquakes, and plate techtonics while planets like Venus, with a crust much thicker than Earth, has outbursts every couple of hundred million years that cover half the planet in lava. If the moon hadn't been blasted off the earth, it would have been impossible for complex life to even begin to evolve.
Yes oil is dead ocean plankton not dinosaurs.
Debate all you want about whether asteroids have caused good in the past... when one comes towards Earth there won't be much good about to say about the impact.
At least there will be a lot fewer lawyers collecting fees from the resulting class action suit about the lack of celestial disclosure of the full risks of living in our universe.
at least all the worries of today would seem meaningless...
Um, I worry about asteroids today, or more to the point I worry about our overall lack of action in detection of asteroids and creating effective means of stopping asteriod earth matings.