You have misinterpreted the sentiment behind the statement.
It is NOT an advocation of the status quo. It was an assertive declaritive about the current status quo. I agree: a slow transition away from the current policy is desperately called for.
Such a migration goes against the loca state level politics that gets senators and congressmen elected though.
The military spending is the bread and butter of many local and state governments; the so called "porkbarrel politics" required to attain office. Enacting the policies to transition away from the deleterious system we currently have is contrary to those local political imperitives, which says "more contracts! Gimme gimme gimme!"
Again. Not an advocation.
It is instead a deeply set sigh of cathartic lamentation about the status quo, and why it is unlikely to change gracefully.
Entitlement spending goes directly back into the economy in one fashion or another.
Take for instance, the infamous pension system.
The pension money goes into an interest accrueing account of one sort or another. This means that it is either providing high power capitol to the fractional reserve banking system, allowing people to get low priced loans, or is being invested in a brokerage fund, being used to build influence for a major market sector as an investment.
In the former case, it's a 900% increase in economic power by being witheld, but equates with debt on the part of the loan taker.
In the latter case, it adds directly to GDP.
Then you have medical entitlements. Assuming that the entitlement is actually used, that money enters the medical industry, and is used to provide services.
I agree however, the purpose of government is NOT to provide a one-stop shop for medical and retirement funding, nor other social programs.
The purpose of goverment is to provide infrastructure and security through a legal and criminal justice system, a military component, and standards and practices regulations. Anything more is not efficient, and undermines the intended function of our economic model.
Eg, instead of providing medicaid and medicare, the govt should instead impose restrictions on medical insurance policies for retirees to prevent those agencies being overcharged/simply overcharging for care, and to offset price to actively employed individuals within reason, with absurdly harsh penalties for violats. (Like license revocation.)
A government that tries to provide services diectly is essentially engaging in micromanagement. It doesn't work.
Which is hilarious, because exactly the opposite is true!
Regulations enacted during the LAST great depression to limit what lending institutions can legally do (glass-steigel act, etc.) Being REPEALED to fascilitate people who have bad debt problems getting loans they simply can't afford and a host of other abusive policies converning debt are what led to the banking system meltdown.
That's a start, but insufficient. Here's a more comprehensive suggestion:
Put a cap on existing budgets for expenditures, unalterable as a high-bound until after the transition has completed.
Transition foriegn base assets out of US control, as you suggest.
Transition domestic military contract expenditures from hardware and weapons development expenditures, into infrastructure and readiness expenditures. (Eg, rapid transit systems, better power grids, better water and waste delivery systems, better communication hardware, etc.) Then transition away from govt expenditures overall over a protracted period.
It would take more than 20 years to run the program.
This makes such a plan incompatible with the current crisis.
The current crisis has an immediate deadline, and requires an "instant" solution. No such solution exists without the phyrric consequence, or a massive loss of US govt military readiness.
Basically, "yes." "Too big to fail" means "if they tank, the whole economy will hit the shitter, so we have to take extraordinary measures to ensure that they don't!"
"Too big to fail" is exactly the pathology involved with oligopolies. Free market economics DOES NOT WORK WHEN OLIGOPOLIES EXIST.
That is exactly the reason why we have antitrust and pals. That regulation has been captured/is no longer effective enough. You need hundreds, even thousands of entities offering competing products and services to have a stable "invisible hand". That simply is not descriptive of the current market status.
The problem is that a good deal of labor talent is tied up in cocoa leaf cultivation, with little cross discipline application potential on the scales that would be required.
Slow weaning is absolutely essential. Keeping the government crackwhore lobbyists at bay for more than 4 years is the challenge. This kind of change would take decades of dedication. I don't see that happening.
That growth is presupposed to occur, but with what investment capitol? In the areas impacted, aerospace is *THE* dominant employer. A collapse of that industry would tank the economy, cause unemployment, and unpayed debts.
Nobody would have the money to purchase the vacant lots.
The problem is that said buggywhip makers would fold *without a replacement*.
This is very different from automobiles displacing carrage makers. This is carriage makers suddenly not being able to turn a profit selling carriages, without any new replacement technologies.
Don't confuse the two, and don't take the cautionary tale as an advocation for the status quo. It isn't. I *despise* being subsidized by the subjugation of other nations!
50+ years is considerably longer than 2 to 5 years for military hardware. (Due to heavy wear and tear, mandated replacement schedules, outright asset losses, and becoming obscolete/vehicle retirement.)
Why do you think consumer goods are built so craptastically, when the technology exists to make very durable and reliable products that would last? Because crappy products fit with a shorter product lifecycle paradigm, that maximizes profits.
Urban and national infrastructure can't be made that way, because it has to be long term, and reliable.
Don't misinterpret my cautionary statements as being advocations of the current status quo.
I am merely pointing out what the status quo is, and why sudden, broad sweeping action will be horribly catastrophic. It will take dedicated longterm policy changes with strict enfocement over severa decades for the market to transition away from the current model, to a more stable and diversified one.
It would appear that such time is not currently available.
Rather than as an advocation, read the cautionary statement as a suggestion to "brace for impact."
You can't just change an employee pool's skillsets at the drop of a hat.
You go from a triving local economy with lots of high paid specialists, to an imploded economy with highly skilled but unemployable workers, scambling to fill vacancies in professions they aren't trained for.
Investing in infrastructure is a good idea. You can't just quit the current method cold turkey though. It just won't work.
This might work in the short term, but infrastructue is a durable good; once built, it lasts a very long time. Look at the national highway system. Still there, the better part of a century later. As such, the "constant replacement" schedule required to keep those industries bloated and propped up just isn't there.
Space travel would be a sufficiently wasteful activity that it could possibly replace warfare for the "constant replacement, and regular scheduled contracts" nature of the current status quo, but would be a more bitter pill for conservatives to swallow. (Military might gives conservatives a boner. Being able to fly nonstop flights to and from a lunar colony just looks wasteful, especially when you have a mountain of social programs you *could* theoretically be paying for instead.)
As such, it would be significantly harder to implement over existing purpetual military engagements, military buildup, and outright war profiteering that represents the status quo. It would be hounded constantly by both sides.
Then again, that too could be a good thing, as it would make being a megacorp more difficult, and promote fragmentation and subtle downsizing over time due to the instabilities/unreliabilities of the replacement revinue stream.
But I wouldn't bet on it getting past the lobbyists.
Bill collectors don't offer amnesty, and corporations, especially really big ones, that keep large active debts to shelter taxes with, suddenly having the table cloth pulled out from under their houses of cards, are going to fold faster than you could ever imagine possible if you just "disband the military, and let the market sort it out." The way the market would be forced to sort it out, would make our current recession look like a bull market.
For a very recent example, look at Hawker Beechcraft.
They failed in the recent rounds of government contract negotiations for building fighter planes.
Now they are basically bankrupt. Happened in under 2 years.
The same thing could easily happen to BOEING, CESSNA, and other military parts and vehicle suppliers. This is because large corporations treat all funding as fungible resurces, and allocate money from profit leaders to loss leaders. (See for instance, the Cessna/textron mess of about 3 years ago.) Big players absolutely depend upon the military contracts they get, because without them, they logistically just can't keep operating on the scales that they currently operate under. (Note the hawker implosion.)
The same is true for may other large scale industries.
A reduction in military spending would have to be commensurate with an equal or larger increase in civilian contracts, and let's face it, the world only needs so many 787 and 777 luxury airliners. Military ones get blown up, and need replacement. Civilian employed ones don't get replaced excepting for when they blow up on runways, or fall out of the sky.
Unless BOEING and pals start selling to international govts to offset local govt contract losses from military spending cuts, there will be a great shout of agony from the aerospace industry, and massive layoffs. Bet on it.
That's just one industry too. The automotive industry has similar lifesupport ties to military contracts for things like humvees, ATVs, jeeps, and other military grade vehicles, and will take a significant dive as well.
Foundries and chemical firms, faced with board-wide reductions in order volumes from the major customers, will likewise downsize.
It would result in a catastrophic and phyrric reduction in economic power. That's why military spending is such a sacred cow.
The issue is that a frightening portion of the USA's domestic economy is beholden to government and military contracts. Without the spending, a huge part of the domestic economy will suffer implosions.
Say for instance, aerospace. What do you think will happen to cessna and boeing without new contracts for fighters and bombers? (At several million dollars a pop?) What about the foundries, mills, chemical companies, and other satellite organizations that supply BOEING, Cessna and pals? If BOEING slows, or liquidates in the face of less govt spending, the avalanche in that industry sector isn't going to be very nice.
This is what happens when the majority of an economy becomes dominated by a small handful of very large players; the system becomes far more vulnrable to a major upheval by a shift in conditions, much like the recently infamous banking disaster.
"Just quitting" on major war expenditures would be catastrophic. A huge portion of the USA's economy is built around war profiteering.
Migration of mass from atmosphere to surface will naturally speed up the period of rotation. By how much, I can't quite say, but it would definately have an effect.
They arrive on Mars safely, only to discover that the robotically built habitats they were to immediately move into, have been burried under several meters of martian regolith, and are inaccessible.
Mars already has a large extant of iron and oxygen on its surface. It is why it is red. (Iron III oxide.)
For venus, I could see it dropping to "still bitching hot, but cool enough to work with on the surface with robots" in about 2000 years.
Venus' surface temp is just a few degrees centigrade below the thermal decomposition temperature of aramid plastics. (Related to kevlar and pals.) Venus has a similar overall quantity of nitrogen in its atmosphere as earth does, just diluted by considerable excess of carbon dioxide.
The secret to venus is to sequester the carbon.
Engineering an extremophile atmospheric microbe to colonize the tops of the sulfuric acid cloud layer (were it's a nice, sunny 70F or so, at earth sealevel pressures.) That uses a stable sulfur cycle based derivitive of photosynthesis, that is engineered to produce aramid plastics, would do just that.
Lacking any natural predators, and having a huge petri dish to colonize, with an excess of "food", the little bitches would rapidly "snow" out thermally stable plastic molecules and deplete the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and thereby puncture the thermal equilibrium of the planet.
The issue is the hydrogen scarcity. The microbes would have to be able to produce their own water from their sulfur based respiration cycle from sulfuric acid, excrete sulfur dioxide, and sequester the water inside their cellular membranes. This means they would have to be extraordinarily robust in the face of anhydrous sulfuric acid. That alone is a pretty impressive feat to accomplish with engineered biology. I was thinking that the microbes could use a heavy metal complex with lead to reduce the chemical activity of their cellular membranes, and use of the aramid plastic as internal skeletal structures might work. (One of the interesting features on venus is lead sulfide snow. It volatizes on the surface, then crystalizes in the atmosphere. This makes it a potential raw material for the microbes to use. Lead is very resistant to acidic attack.)
Releasing such microbes on venus would cause a runaway reaction in the atmosphere, transforming venus from a cloudy hot furnace, into a hellish sea of acidic gel oceans, and do so very quickly.
The effect applied is equivalent to the gravitational constant, multiplied against the product of the two gravitating masses, divided by the square of the distance between them.
Eg, waaaaaaaaaay out at the moon's lagrange point, and weighing in at a paltry 500,000kilos... that rock isn't going to do much.
It wouldn't even displace a single millimeter of ocean water at that distance.
Watching paint and glue dry Vs This Old House, with Bob Vila.
The first is psychological torture. The latter is a well syndicated television show.
The difference? The former drags you through monotonously long periods with little stimulation. The latter demonstrates a technique, and conveniently fastfowards through the monotony to the finish.
"ISS Update" is watching paint dry.
A documentary on ISS's construction and previous mission experiments without all the anguish is entertainment.
Take this as an idea:
You create a television series about colonizing mars. No monsters. No aliens. Instead, you introduce drama from a natural source: the colonists.
You would be stuffing a minimum of 500 people into a tincan, in low gravity conditions, and close quarters for 6 months. If you can't find drama in that, you aren't trying very hard.
If it makes syndication, you can continue the series with their arrival at the colony site, and throw in geopolitics with earth.
It could be done very nicely.
30 minutes of watching some slob stare out a window? More accurate, but far less entertaining.
For mars? Better take archemedes up on his really big lever and fulcrum offer:
Mars has an erratic axial tilt that needs correcting. That needs a big assed moon. A good candidate is Vesta.
Mars is also only about 2/3 the mass of earth. For stable tectonic activity, you need to rain 1/3 of an earth on it.
Then, after cooking, you need to wait for it to cool off. Dropping that much material on mars will heat the crust up to molten temps. (And likely also change the length of year, and length of day.) So, regardless, even starting right now, wouldn't be livable for several millenia, at least.
Bio-engineering venus poses a much less daunting timetable.
I think that would depend highly upon the composition of the asteroid they capture.
Being scientists, and only getting big bucks on the table for a one shot deal, I would bet on their choosing as heterogenous of an asteroid as possible, preferably one with clear signs of stratification.
This way portions of the asteroid will be rocky, while others will be more iron based, allowing for the greatest possible dataset to be collected from the expense.
Such an asteroid would almost certainly fragment on re-entry, should it fall from orbit. This means many smaller asteroids, instead of a monolithic 500,000kg bombshell. I would expect most of it to burn up, and for it to rain tiny particles over a large area, with a considerable chance it will hit ocean.
Slashdot Mirror
You have misinterpreted the sentiment behind the statement.
It is NOT an advocation of the status quo. It was an assertive declaritive about the current status quo. I agree: a slow transition away from the current policy is desperately called for.
Such a migration goes against the loca state level politics that gets senators and congressmen elected though.
The military spending is the bread and butter of many local and state governments; the so called "porkbarrel politics" required to attain office. Enacting the policies to transition away from the deleterious system we currently have is contrary to those local political imperitives, which says "more contracts! Gimme gimme gimme!"
Again. Not an advocation.
It is instead a deeply set sigh of cathartic lamentation about the status quo, and why it is unlikely to change gracefully.
Entitlement spending goes directly back into the economy in one fashion or another.
Take for instance, the infamous pension system.
The pension money goes into an interest accrueing account of one sort or another. This means that it is either providing high power capitol to the fractional reserve banking system, allowing people to get low priced loans, or is being invested in a brokerage fund, being used to build influence for a major market sector as an investment.
In the former case, it's a 900% increase in economic power by being witheld, but equates with debt on the part of the loan taker.
In the latter case, it adds directly to GDP.
Then you have medical entitlements. Assuming that the entitlement is actually used, that money enters the medical industry, and is used to provide services.
I agree however, the purpose of government is NOT to provide a one-stop shop for medical and retirement funding, nor other social programs.
The purpose of goverment is to provide infrastructure and security through a legal and criminal justice system, a military component, and standards and practices regulations. Anything more is not efficient, and undermines the intended function of our economic model.
Eg, instead of providing medicaid and medicare, the govt should instead impose restrictions on medical insurance policies for retirees to prevent those agencies being overcharged/simply overcharging for care, and to offset price to actively employed individuals within reason, with absurdly harsh penalties for violats. (Like license revocation.)
A government that tries to provide services diectly is essentially engaging in micromanagement. It doesn't work.
Which is hilarious, because exactly the opposite is true!
Regulations enacted during the LAST great depression to limit what lending institutions can legally do (glass-steigel act, etc.) Being REPEALED to fascilitate people who have bad debt problems getting loans they simply can't afford and a host of other abusive policies converning debt are what led to the banking system meltdown.
REMOVING regulations is to blame!
That's a start, but insufficient. Here's a more comprehensive suggestion:
Put a cap on existing budgets for expenditures, unalterable as a high-bound until after the transition has completed.
Transition foriegn base assets out of US control, as you suggest.
Transition domestic military contract expenditures from hardware and weapons development expenditures, into infrastructure and readiness expenditures. (Eg, rapid transit systems, better power grids, better water and waste delivery systems, better communication hardware, etc.) Then transition away from govt expenditures overall over a protracted period.
It would take more than 20 years to run the program.
This makes such a plan incompatible with the current crisis.
The current crisis has an immediate deadline, and requires an "instant" solution. No such solution exists without the phyrric consequence, or a massive loss of US govt military readiness.
"Too big to fail"
Basically, "yes." "Too big to fail" means "if they tank, the whole economy will hit the shitter, so we have to take extraordinary measures to ensure that they don't!"
"Too big to fail" is exactly the pathology involved with oligopolies. Free market economics DOES NOT WORK WHEN OLIGOPOLIES EXIST.
That is exactly the reason why we have antitrust and pals. That regulation has been captured/is no longer effective enough. You need hundreds, even thousands of entities offering competing products and services to have a stable "invisible hand". That simply is not descriptive of the current market status.
Oh, I agree! It *is* crack cocaine!
The problem is that a good deal of labor talent is tied up in cocoa leaf cultivation, with little cross discipline application potential on the scales that would be required.
Slow weaning is absolutely essential. Keeping the government crackwhore lobbyists at bay for more than 4 years is the challenge. This kind of change would take decades of dedication. I don't see that happening.
That growth is presupposed to occur, but with what investment capitol? In the areas impacted, aerospace is *THE* dominant employer. A collapse of that industry would tank the economy, cause unemployment, and unpayed debts.
Nobody would have the money to purchase the vacant lots.
See for example, crumbling old detroit.
The problem is that said buggywhip makers would fold *without a replacement*.
This is very different from automobiles displacing carrage makers. This is carriage makers suddenly not being able to turn a profit selling carriages, without any new replacement technologies.
Don't confuse the two, and don't take the cautionary tale as an advocation for the status quo. It isn't. I *despise* being subsidized by the subjugation of other nations!
After 50+ years of operation.
50+ years is considerably longer than 2 to 5 years for military hardware. (Due to heavy wear and tear, mandated replacement schedules, outright asset losses, and becoming obscolete/vehicle retirement.)
Why do you think consumer goods are built so craptastically, when the technology exists to make very durable and reliable products that would last? Because crappy products fit with a shorter product lifecycle paradigm, that maximizes profits.
Urban and national infrastructure can't be made that way, because it has to be long term, and reliable.
Don't misinterpret my cautionary statements as being advocations of the current status quo.
I am merely pointing out what the status quo is, and why sudden, broad sweeping action will be horribly catastrophic. It will take dedicated longterm policy changes with strict enfocement over severa decades for the market to transition away from the current model, to a more stable and diversified one.
It would appear that such time is not currently available.
Rather than as an advocation, read the cautionary statement as a suggestion to "brace for impact."
You can't just change an employee pool's skillsets at the drop of a hat.
You go from a triving local economy with lots of high paid specialists, to an imploded economy with highly skilled but unemployable workers, scambling to fill vacancies in professions they aren't trained for.
Investing in infrastructure is a good idea. You can't just quit the current method cold turkey though. It just won't work.
This might work in the short term, but infrastructue is a durable good; once built, it lasts a very long time. Look at the national highway system. Still there, the better part of a century later. As such, the "constant replacement" schedule required to keep those industries bloated and propped up just isn't there.
Space travel would be a sufficiently wasteful activity that it could possibly replace warfare for the "constant replacement, and regular scheduled contracts" nature of the current status quo, but would be a more bitter pill for conservatives to swallow. (Military might gives conservatives a boner. Being able to fly nonstop flights to and from a lunar colony just looks wasteful, especially when you have a mountain of social programs you *could* theoretically be paying for instead.)
As such, it would be significantly harder to implement over existing purpetual military engagements, military buildup, and outright war profiteering that represents the status quo. It would be hounded constantly by both sides.
Then again, that too could be a good thing, as it would make being a megacorp more difficult, and promote fragmentation and subtle downsizing over time due to the instabilities/unreliabilities of the replacement revinue stream.
But I wouldn't bet on it getting past the lobbyists.
Oh yes it can.
Bill collectors don't offer amnesty, and corporations, especially really big ones, that keep large active debts to shelter taxes with, suddenly having the table cloth pulled out from under their houses of cards, are going to fold faster than you could ever imagine possible if you just "disband the military, and let the market sort it out." The way the market would be forced to sort it out, would make our current recession look like a bull market.
For a very recent example, look at Hawker Beechcraft.
They failed in the recent rounds of government contract negotiations for building fighter planes.
Now they are basically bankrupt. Happened in under 2 years.
The same thing could easily happen to BOEING, CESSNA, and other military parts and vehicle suppliers. This is because large corporations treat all funding as fungible resurces, and allocate money from profit leaders to loss leaders. (See for instance, the Cessna/textron mess of about 3 years ago.) Big players absolutely depend upon the military contracts they get, because without them, they logistically just can't keep operating on the scales that they currently operate under. (Note the hawker implosion.)
The same is true for may other large scale industries.
A reduction in military spending would have to be commensurate with an equal or larger increase in civilian contracts, and let's face it, the world only needs so many 787 and 777 luxury airliners. Military ones get blown up, and need replacement. Civilian employed ones don't get replaced excepting for when they blow up on runways, or fall out of the sky.
Unless BOEING and pals start selling to international govts to offset local govt contract losses from military spending cuts, there will be a great shout of agony from the aerospace industry, and massive layoffs. Bet on it.
That's just one industry too. The automotive industry has similar lifesupport ties to military contracts for things like humvees, ATVs, jeeps, and other military grade vehicles, and will take a significant dive as well.
Foundries and chemical firms, faced with board-wide reductions in order volumes from the major customers, will likewise downsize.
It would result in a catastrophic and phyrric reduction in economic power. That's why military spending is such a sacred cow.
The issue is that a frightening portion of the USA's domestic economy is beholden to government and military contracts. Without the spending, a huge part of the domestic economy will suffer implosions.
Say for instance, aerospace. What do you think will happen to cessna and boeing without new contracts for fighters and bombers? (At several million dollars a pop?) What about the foundries, mills, chemical companies, and other satellite organizations that supply BOEING, Cessna and pals? If BOEING slows, or liquidates in the face of less govt spending, the avalanche in that industry sector isn't going to be very nice.
This is what happens when the majority of an economy becomes dominated by a small handful of very large players; the system becomes far more vulnrable to a major upheval by a shift in conditions, much like the recently infamous banking disaster.
"Just quitting" on major war expenditures would be catastrophic. A huge portion of the USA's economy is built around war profiteering.
Migration of mass from atmosphere to surface will naturally speed up the period of rotation. By how much, I can't quite say, but it would definately have an effect.
Nope. :D. Far more diskish.
They arrive on Mars safely, only to discover that the robotically built habitats they were to immediately move into, have been burried under several meters of martian regolith, and are inaccessible.
Do it as a season ending cliffhanger.
Mars already has a large extant of iron and oxygen on its surface. It is why it is red. (Iron III oxide.)
For venus, I could see it dropping to "still bitching hot, but cool enough to work with on the surface with robots" in about 2000 years.
Venus' surface temp is just a few degrees centigrade below the thermal decomposition temperature of aramid plastics. (Related to kevlar and pals.) Venus has a similar overall quantity of nitrogen in its atmosphere as earth does, just diluted by considerable excess of carbon dioxide.
The secret to venus is to sequester the carbon.
Engineering an extremophile atmospheric microbe to colonize the tops of the sulfuric acid cloud layer (were it's a nice, sunny 70F or so, at earth sealevel pressures.) That uses a stable sulfur cycle based derivitive of photosynthesis, that is engineered to produce aramid plastics, would do just that.
Lacking any natural predators, and having a huge petri dish to colonize, with an excess of "food", the little bitches would rapidly "snow" out thermally stable plastic molecules and deplete the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and thereby puncture the thermal equilibrium of the planet.
The issue is the hydrogen scarcity. The microbes would have to be able to produce their own water from their sulfur based respiration cycle from sulfuric acid, excrete sulfur dioxide, and sequester the water inside their cellular membranes. This means they would have to be extraordinarily robust in the face of anhydrous sulfuric acid. That alone is a pretty impressive feat to accomplish with engineered biology. I was thinking that the microbes could use a heavy metal complex with lead to reduce the chemical activity of their cellular membranes, and use of the aramid plastic as internal skeletal structures might work. (One of the interesting features on venus is lead sulfide snow. It volatizes on the surface, then crystalizes in the atmosphere. This makes it a potential raw material for the microbes to use. Lead is very resistant to acidic attack.)
Releasing such microbes on venus would cause a runaway reaction in the atmosphere, transforming venus from a cloudy hot furnace, into a hellish sea of acidic gel oceans, and do so very quickly.
Consider newton's law of universal gravitation.
The effect applied is equivalent to the gravitational constant, multiplied against the product of the two gravitating masses, divided by the square of the distance between them.
Eg, waaaaaaaaaay out at the moon's lagrange point, and weighing in at a paltry 500,000kilos... that rock isn't going to do much.
It wouldn't even displace a single millimeter of ocean water at that distance.
D'oh!
(Was thinking radius! Stupid human that I am! Mars has a little over 1/2 earth's bulk radius, but only a little over 1/10th its overall mass!)
Well, looks like you would need to rain 9/10ths of an earth on Mars... and wait several hundred thousand years for it to cool.
My bad. Regardless, "it will take a very very long time" is the lesson here.
4.7 (caveat) promise China the debt owed them will be paid in gold. Paint "Interest Payment" on the asteroid, drop on the mongolian highlands.
A large percentage will burn off in transit, due to gold's low melting point, and it breaking apart from turbulence.
As the price of gold drops like a boulder, ever larger asteroids will need to be "delivered".
Continue until china offers debt amnesty.
Compare:
Watching paint and glue dry
Vs
This Old House, with Bob Vila.
The first is psychological torture.
The latter is a well syndicated television show.
The difference? The former drags you through monotonously long periods with little stimulation. The latter demonstrates a technique, and conveniently fastfowards through the monotony to the finish.
"ISS Update" is watching paint dry.
A documentary on ISS's construction and previous mission experiments without all the anguish is entertainment.
Take this as an idea:
You create a television series about colonizing mars. No monsters. No aliens. Instead, you introduce drama from a natural source: the colonists.
You would be stuffing a minimum of 500 people into a tincan, in low gravity conditions, and close quarters for 6 months. If you can't find drama in that, you aren't trying very hard.
If it makes syndication, you can continue the series with their arrival at the colony site, and throw in geopolitics with earth.
It could be done very nicely.
30 minutes of watching some slob stare out a window? More accurate, but far less entertaining.
For mars? Better take archemedes up on his really big lever and fulcrum offer:
Mars has an erratic axial tilt that needs correcting. That needs a big assed moon. A good candidate is Vesta.
Mars is also only about 2/3 the mass of earth. For stable tectonic activity, you need to rain 1/3 of an earth on it.
Then, after cooking, you need to wait for it to cool off. Dropping that much material on mars will heat the crust up to molten temps. (And likely also change the length of year, and length of day.) So, regardless, even starting right now, wouldn't be livable for several millenia, at least.
Bio-engineering venus poses a much less daunting timetable.
I think that would depend highly upon the composition of the asteroid they capture.
Being scientists, and only getting big bucks on the table for a one shot deal, I would bet on their choosing as heterogenous of an asteroid as possible, preferably one with clear signs of stratification.
This way portions of the asteroid will be rocky, while others will be more iron based, allowing for the greatest possible dataset to be collected from the expense.
Such an asteroid would almost certainly fragment on re-entry, should it fall from orbit. This means many smaller asteroids, instead of a monolithic 500,000kg bombshell. I would expect most of it to burn up, and for it to rain tiny particles over a large area, with a considerable chance it will hit ocean.
7m as in, 7 meters? At that size, they might as well tow it into synchronous earth orbit. It's far smaller than the ISS at that size.
If it fell on the earth, it wouldn't be much different than a normal meteor.
Or did you mean 7m as an improper unit designator for Miles? (Proper is 'mi', as in 7mi.) A 7 mile asteroid hitting the earth would be catastrophic.
Inquiring minds want to know!