The ethics of manned commercial space flight are scary. One accident and the whole thing is going to be held back 50 years.
In the US this might be true but China will probably think otherwise. The US is far too risk adverse to actually do anything interesting and if it continues, China will kick the US's ass badly.
And you'd get more resources digging a hole in my backyard than you would from digging a hole on the Martian moons.
Phobos and Deimos are C/D type asteroids rich in Nickel and contain roughly 400x the concentration of Plainum group metals as your backyard. They have masses in the range of 10 trillion tons each. So no, you wouldn't get more resources by "digging a hole in your backyard."
Sure it can: if people stop wanting it, the price can drop quite low, as gluts of the stuff languish unsold and people are unable to unload it
I'm pretty sure people value Platinum and other rare metals as they are chemically, metallurgically and catalytically useful. There is no evidence that the demand for the metals will just suddenly disappear. Even if it did, the supply would simply drop to the level of demand. Econ101.
The price can never drop below the cost to maintain the rate of supply that is profitable. Never. It doesn't matter how much of x material there is. If it costs 500$/kg to extract, purify and transport it then the price must be at least 500$ over a period of time. If the price is set below that, the further ability to maintain the level of supply that results in that low price goes away which causes supply to drop and prices to rise to the point where it is again profitable to extract.
The supply of space metals shipped to Earth can not lower the price of precious metals on Earth lower than what it costs to ship them no matter how abundant they are in space. Hence why even though there are quadrillions of tons of salt on Earth, the price isn't near zero due to the cost of transport and extraction.
The volatiles, metals and ceramics are only worth mining for industry/economies already in space. Only the precious metals and various other materials would be sent back to Earth. The volatiles etc. would be used for space tourism and colonies as sending up those cheap materials to orbit is very expensive.
What company, with several billion dollars at it's disposal, has an incentive to go to the moon or Mars? What would the incentive be?
Google is funding the Lunar X-prize, of course this isn't anything more than a "probe" but the bigger stuff in terms of Lunar tourism come later. How much would someone absurdly rich pay to take a vacation near the moon or Mars? Or be the first human to step on either of them from a private space program? How about NEO mining? An ore that is 500x as rich in some precious metals like Platinum has to be worth mining at some point.
They're never going to get us into mars, because there's simply no profit in it.
Oh really? Because to me, Phobos and Deimos (Mars' moons) are little more than a few trillion tons of metal, ceramics, volatiles and a few million tons of precious metals sitting in a nice stable orbit over Mars. Just perfect to supply the Earth with some rare metals, the moon and LEO with volatiles and any space tourism around Mars. The view is fantastic and I'd bet there's people who would pay pretty big bucks to take a vacation to Martian orbit or even visit the surface. You woyuld have to have a profound lack of imagination to not see any "profit" in going to Mars and in space exploration in general. Resources, tourism, research etc. plenty of profit to be made, it's just a matter of building up the necessary technology and infrastructure.
That is because they aren't against big government, They're against government benefiting anyone other than themselves. Remember that the republican pundits had nothing bad to say about Bush despite the fact that under his administration, the big bad government expanded by over a third inflation adjusted compared to the liberal Clinton administration.
These banks used the money in large part to buy out their competitors. The ones that should otherwise have failed due to their own stupidity and greed continue to exist as a result of TARP. This shit will happen again and again and again because these banks know that the government will not allow them to fail anymore. The federal government has no right what so ever to use taxpayer money to bail out failed banks! It is the worst possible wealth transfer imaginable: one from the taxpayers to the wealthy.
Americans have a thing about censorship but really, all countries censor, it's only a matter of degree.
That doesn't make it right.
In any case fixating on speech, while somewhat important, is secondary to focusing on action. Actions speak louder than words.
Act on what? China censors speech to prevent the citizenry from contimplating action. Same goes for Iran. Action generally follows speech; to censor speech is also to censor action. For the record, only some Americans really give a fuck about speech. The rest are content with the FCC regulating TV, radio and newspapers; making a big deal out of wardrobe malfunctions, the occasional fuck and other pursuits of the puritan mindset.
How many homes don't have windows? Of those homes, how often is it that there is a need to connect with a computer inside a closed room? Any system that can connect to a computer inside a closed room can also be connected to from outside the house. Any system that can't be connected to from outside the house also can not connect to a system with the door shut. The number of times the signal can bounce off walls would significantly affect the range of the system. So while a direct path between floors of a house may be 10 meters, the path through the house from the top floor going around everything that is opaque to the system might be 50-60 meters and quite possibly out of range.
Some would argue that most governments scam their citizens to some degree. In the US's case, the scam was TARP ("to save the economy") as the banks themselves did not have the power to steal themselves a trillion without the government using its authority to remove that sum from the citizenry. Even the economy its self can be viewed as fraudulent as it has been constructed (inflationary FED practices, stimulus packages, corporate welfare etc.).
The GP seems to think that these scammers did humanity a favor by removing large sums of money from the scammed (fools) who can't then use that money for other foolish purposes. Any crime could be justified along those lines by blaming the victim of the crimes for being unable to defend themselves against it. Social darwinism at its finest.
How many orders of magnitude more visible light do we emit than radio waves? In about 20 years we'll have the technology to directly image an extrasolar planet on a fairly consistent basis. Not long after that, we'll probably be able to detect artifical lights on the surface of an extrasolar planet on its night side. This is probably far easier than trying to fish out their extremely diluted, planet directed signals.
google spends millions of dollars employing lawyers to fight the us government's desire for user data
Why do you suppose that is? They do it for their own selfish reasons. In that case, it is in their selfish interest to protect privacy to a degree to avoid losing market-share from user paranoia. Selfishness isn't automatically evil; the result is what matters. What Google did in China wasn't evil simply because it was done for selfish reasons. It was evil because censorship is inherently immoral.
Considering how the meeting between two civilizations, one more avanced than the other has generally gone badly for the majority of human history, it may not be such a bad idea to keep ourselves quiet until their intentions are shown to be peaceful/cooperative.
Do you leave yourself open to being sued into oblivion by angry shareholders?
It looks like it is time to reform those liability laws.
And I know how we all think we are great idealists and we'd never do anything like this but what would you tell your family? Its not like there are companies having a shortage of labor...
Doing the right thing isn't always easy. If it were, there wouldn't be nearly so many oppressive regimes in the world. However, a line must be drawn in the sand at some point that tells those governments to frak themselves and their censorship.
Google has a legal duty to do not what is morally right, but what is in their shareholder's interest
I *know* that I'm going to be burning some karma here but to me, "the shareholders made them do it" isn't an excuse for violating human rights.
Google figured that now would be their best time to speak out against it and have the maximum impact.
They were just hacked and at the time, it was believed to be the work of Chinese hackers. This I suspect had a lot to do with why Google threatened to pull out of China and stop cooperating with the Chinese govt. In any case, I believe that my original point still stands; Google may have not broken any laws by participating in censorship in China but that does not mean they aren't evil. Willingly abiding by evil laws is evil in of its self.
It was just an example, the first one I could find. Google has been cooperating with the Chinese govt. in terms of censoring their results since 2006. Google only very recently showed their unwillingness to continue censoring their results after the infamous hack on Google's operations. There isn't any evidence that Google did this for anything other than selfish reasons.
A working ZPM that has the power of a few tons of Naquadah and the evilest thing you can think to do with it is sell power back to the power company? I for one would take over Earth with it.
No. The beta-amyloid plaques that damage and ultimately kill bain cells would still be present. The plaques themselves must be destroyed, not just throw billions of new neurons at the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
In the US this might be true but China will probably think otherwise. The US is far too risk adverse to actually do anything interesting and if it continues, China will kick the US's ass badly.
Phobos and Deimos are C/D type asteroids rich in Nickel and contain roughly 400x the concentration of Plainum group metals as your backyard. They have masses in the range of 10 trillion tons each. So no, you wouldn't get more resources by "digging a hole in your backyard."
I'm pretty sure people value Platinum and other rare metals as they are chemically, metallurgically and catalytically useful. There is no evidence that the demand for the metals will just suddenly disappear. Even if it did, the supply would simply drop to the level of demand. Econ101.
The price can never drop below the cost to maintain the rate of supply that is profitable. Never. It doesn't matter how much of x material there is. If it costs 500$/kg to extract, purify and transport it then the price must be at least 500$ over a period of time. If the price is set below that, the further ability to maintain the level of supply that results in that low price goes away which causes supply to drop and prices to rise to the point where it is again profitable to extract.
The supply of space metals shipped to Earth can not lower the price of precious metals on Earth lower than what it costs to ship them no matter how abundant they are in space. Hence why even though there are quadrillions of tons of salt on Earth, the price isn't near zero due to the cost of transport and extraction.
The volatiles, metals and ceramics are only worth mining for industry/economies already in space. Only the precious metals and various other materials would be sent back to Earth. The volatiles etc. would be used for space tourism and colonies as sending up those cheap materials to orbit is very expensive.
Google is funding the Lunar X-prize, of course this isn't anything more than a "probe" but the bigger stuff in terms of Lunar tourism come later. How much would someone absurdly rich pay to take a vacation near the moon or Mars? Or be the first human to step on either of them from a private space program? How about NEO mining? An ore that is 500x as rich in some precious metals like Platinum has to be worth mining at some point.
Oh really? Because to me, Phobos and Deimos (Mars' moons) are little more than a few trillion tons of metal, ceramics, volatiles and a few million tons of precious metals sitting in a nice stable orbit over Mars. Just perfect to supply the Earth with some rare metals, the moon and LEO with volatiles and any space tourism around Mars. The view is fantastic and I'd bet there's people who would pay pretty big bucks to take a vacation to Martian orbit or even visit the surface. You woyuld have to have a profound lack of imagination to not see any "profit" in going to Mars and in space exploration in general. Resources, tourism, research etc. plenty of profit to be made, it's just a matter of building up the necessary technology and infrastructure.
That is because they aren't against big government, They're against government benefiting anyone other than themselves. Remember that the republican pundits had nothing bad to say about Bush despite the fact that under his administration, the big bad government expanded by over a third inflation adjusted compared to the liberal Clinton administration.
Eating too much? crime. Smoking? crime. We've tried that. A crime is harming other people (fraud, theft etc.) not harming one's self.
These banks used the money in large part to buy out their competitors. The ones that should otherwise have failed due to their own stupidity and greed continue to exist as a result of TARP. This shit will happen again and again and again because these banks know that the government will not allow them to fail anymore. The federal government has no right what so ever to use taxpayer money to bail out failed banks! It is the worst possible wealth transfer imaginable: one from the taxpayers to the wealthy.
That doesn't make it right.
Act on what? China censors speech to prevent the citizenry from contimplating action. Same goes for Iran. Action generally follows speech; to censor speech is also to censor action. For the record, only some Americans really give a fuck about speech. The rest are content with the FCC regulating TV, radio and newspapers; making a big deal out of wardrobe malfunctions, the occasional fuck and other pursuits of the puritan mindset.
How many homes don't have windows? Of those homes, how often is it that there is a need to connect with a computer inside a closed room? Any system that can connect to a computer inside a closed room can also be connected to from outside the house. Any system that can't be connected to from outside the house also can not connect to a system with the door shut. The number of times the signal can bounce off walls would significantly affect the range of the system. So while a direct path between floors of a house may be 10 meters, the path through the house from the top floor going around everything that is opaque to the system might be 50-60 meters and quite possibly out of range.
Some would argue that most governments scam their citizens to some degree. In the US's case, the scam was TARP ("to save the economy") as the banks themselves did not have the power to steal themselves a trillion without the government using its authority to remove that sum from the citizenry.
Even the economy its self can be viewed as fraudulent as it has been constructed (inflationary FED practices, stimulus packages, corporate welfare etc.).
The GP seems to think that these scammers did humanity a favor by removing large sums of money from the scammed (fools) who can't then use that money for other foolish purposes. Any crime could be justified along those lines by blaming the victim of the crimes for being unable to defend themselves against it. Social darwinism at its finest.
How many orders of magnitude more visible light do we emit than radio waves? In about 20 years we'll have the technology to directly image an extrasolar planet on a fairly consistent basis. Not long after that, we'll probably be able to detect artifical lights on the surface of an extrasolar planet on its night side. This is probably far easier than trying to fish out their extremely diluted, planet directed signals.
Why do you suppose that is? They do it for their own selfish reasons. In that case, it is in their selfish interest to protect privacy to a degree to avoid losing market-share from user paranoia. Selfishness isn't automatically evil; the result is what matters. What Google did in China wasn't evil simply because it was done for selfish reasons. It was evil because censorship is inherently immoral.
Considering how the meeting between two civilizations, one more avanced than the other has generally gone badly for the majority of human history, it may not be such a bad idea to keep ourselves quiet until their intentions are shown to be peaceful/cooperative.
It looks like it is time to reform those liability laws.
Doing the right thing isn't always easy. If it were, there wouldn't be nearly so many oppressive regimes in the world. However, a line must be drawn in the sand at some point that tells those governments to frak themselves and their censorship.
When your reputation is ruined, you can act without shame.
Freedom of speech. Governments should never be given an inherent right to censor speech of individuals nor the private sector in general.
I *know* that I'm going to be burning some karma here but to me, "the shareholders made them do it" isn't an excuse for violating human rights.
They were just hacked and at the time, it was believed to be the work of Chinese hackers. This I suspect had a lot to do with why Google threatened to pull out of China and stop cooperating with the Chinese govt. In any case, I believe that my original point still stands; Google may have not broken any laws by participating in censorship in China but that does not mean they aren't evil. Willingly abiding by evil laws is evil in of its self.
It was just an example, the first one I could find. Google has been cooperating with the Chinese govt. in terms of censoring their results since 2006. Google only very recently showed their unwillingness to continue censoring their results after the infamous hack on Google's operations. There isn't any evidence that Google did this for anything other than selfish reasons.
If?
A working ZPM that has the power of a few tons of Naquadah and the evilest thing you can think to do with it is sell power back to the power company? I for one would take over Earth with it.
No. The beta-amyloid plaques that damage and ultimately kill bain cells would still be present. The plaques themselves must be destroyed, not just throw billions of new neurons at the problem.