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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.
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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!
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.
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
Many years ago -- I exterminated thousands of asteroids at home using the Asteroid Targetting And Removal Instrument 2600.
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