Sure, things will be different in the future, but that doesn't mean that asteroid mining will become profitable. That's just magic thinking. Despite things being a whole lot different than 9,000 years ago, asteroid mining is still just as far away. You're making the invalid assumption that exponential curves can be extrapolated arbitrarily into the future. It's a very common mistake. The recent boom and bust in the housing market is caused by people making the same assumption.
And of course, the desire to have large families doesn't have to be entirely up to genetics. The only requirement is that some genes have some influence. Families with those genes will have a slightly larger exponent in their exponential growth. A slightly larger exponent is sufficient to take over the population, given enough time. Also, people tend to look for partners with similar interest in family size, so different genes contributing to large family sizes will be combined in their children, giving them even more desire to have bigger families.
You have no evidence whatsoever to back this up, even excusing the mistaken idea that the desire for big families is somehow genetic
Why is that idea mistaken ? The number of offspring is one of the key factors in evolutionary fitness. The other important factor is the ability to keep them alive. In a normal society, as has existed for more than a billion years, these two factors have to be balanced out, since it would be foolish to get 10 offspring, while you only have food for 2 or 3, and it would be equally foolish to only have 2-3 when there's food for 10. Now, in your cornucopia society, where there's plenty of resources, the limiting factor is taken off the table, so you'd expect for the other factor to take over.
If you are claiming that one of the core parameters to evolutionary fitness does not have any genes in our DNA, it seems you should be providing the evidence.
I agree, and where I live the urban infrastructure is already compact, and designed with bikes in mind. There are bike paths everywhere, supermarkets are small, and spread out through the town, so I can choose between 3 competing supermarkets all within a 3 mile radius.
In places where the infrastructure is spaciously designed around automobiles, it is much harder to retrofit bike paths. Distances between places are often too big to make biking a good option.
Unless you can show a comprehensive business case, mining asteroids is pure science fiction. Besides, while asteroids are a good source of metals, they don't contain much other needed stuff, such as energy. And if we had plenty of energy, we might as well go after low grade ores on Earth.
And yes, people are growing exponentially, and they'll continue to do so. The fact that in some societies, like Western Europe, the birthrates are declining is only a temporary anomaly. Couples that don't have any children are a genetic dead end. Their genes will be gone in 1 generation. On the other hand, couples that love big families will spread their genes exponentially. Just wait a few dozen generations, and they will have completely displaced the others.
Of course, AI robots by themselves do not solve the problem of resource scarcity. And people will continue to grow exponentially, so on a fixed earth, you'll always reach a point where not everybody gets a basic standard of living.
Actually, the dinosaurs were always worried about asteroid impacts. However, my own ancestors, who also lived during that time, never worried, and they survived.
Sure, 10000 km is 10000 km, everybody knows that. But to make a mental image, you need to put that in scale with the earth, moon and satellites. Knowing these sizes is just memorization of a bunch of trivia, often a sign of intelligence, but not always. I know a 6 year old kid who scored 135 on his IQ test, but failed the question about which day comes after Thursday.
It is possible to be highly intelligent, yet not have the ability to make a good mental picture for 10000 km, especially if you don't know the size of the earth or the distance of various satellites orbiting it.
We haven't explored Mars well enough to say if there was any past life, which would be quite interesting to find out. The rover missions are also quite affordable, at about $1 billion a pop. The return on investment is to satisfy our curiosity, which is a perfectly good reason.
It is long term habitation that is a joke. It's cold, near vacuum, hardly any water, and the entire planet is covered in dust and rocks. On top of that, you get bombarded with deadly radiation. Why would anybody want to be there ? We stopped going to the Moon for the same reason. Everybody lost interest, because there's only so much you can do on a dead rock in space.
It is very pragmatic not to sink trillions of dollars into a project without sufficient economic or scientific return. Exploration can be done by unmanned rovers for much less. I'll gladly support an unmanned Moon rover mission. I'd also like to see a sample return mission to Mars.
Sure, if you're making hundreds of trips to Mars, it may be cheaper to build a base on the Moon.
I question that we'll be making hundreds of trips to Mars. If humans ever make it to Mars, it will be a flag planting publicity stunt. There's just not much appeal to a cold and empty desert.
On the contrary. Being pragmatic and calculating is much better for our species than wasting our resources on pie in the sky projects that aren't going to pay themselves back.
You must be joking. In what sense is building a Moon base not insanely complicated ? If you go straight to Mars, you don't need to build the Moon base.
And your calculations about the gravity well make no sense. You should compare delta-v for Moon->Mars and Earth->Mars and then apply the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, to find out how much fuel you'd need.
Of course, if you put 10 tons of iridium on the market (2.5 times yearly global consumption), prices will plummet, and so will your profits. If you feed the market slowly, with 1 ton/year, and you manage to keep the prices the same, you only make $23 million/year.
Being able to run the same apps on your phone, tablet and PC is an awesome feature
Not really. Microsoft's biggest fault is that they don't recognize that the phone, tablet and PC have different purposes, and different modes of usage. In some cases, there's some applications, such as e-mailing or browsing that are done on all devices, but even then there's no need to have exactly the same app. The apps just need to be compatible, and be capable of sharing the files, but apart from that, they should be optimized for the platform and typical use.
In what way is the upgrade from robot travel to Mars to human travel relatively minor ? There's only existing and proven technology for relatively light weight landers with a mass of a few hundred kilograms. The latest Mars Science Lab is a bit heavier at 900 kilograms, but still needs to be proven. There's no technology for anything close to the mass of a human lander.
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Sure, things will be different in the future, but that doesn't mean that asteroid mining will become profitable. That's just magic thinking. Despite things being a whole lot different than 9,000 years ago, asteroid mining is still just as far away. You're making the invalid assumption that exponential curves can be extrapolated arbitrarily into the future. It's a very common mistake. The recent boom and bust in the housing market is caused by people making the same assumption.
And of course, the desire to have large families doesn't have to be entirely up to genetics. The only requirement is that some genes have some influence. Families with those genes will have a slightly larger exponent in their exponential growth. A slightly larger exponent is sufficient to take over the population, given enough time. Also, people tend to look for partners with similar interest in family size, so different genes contributing to large family sizes will be combined in their children, giving them even more desire to have bigger families.
You have no evidence whatsoever to back this up, even excusing the mistaken idea that the desire for big families is somehow genetic
Why is that idea mistaken ? The number of offspring is one of the key factors in evolutionary fitness. The other important factor is the ability to keep them alive. In a normal society, as has existed for more than a billion years, these two factors have to be balanced out, since it would be foolish to get 10 offspring, while you only have food for 2 or 3, and it would be equally foolish to only have 2-3 when there's food for 10. Now, in your cornucopia society, where there's plenty of resources, the limiting factor is taken off the table, so you'd expect for the other factor to take over.
If you are claiming that one of the core parameters to evolutionary fitness does not have any genes in our DNA, it seems you should be providing the evidence.
I agree, and where I live the urban infrastructure is already compact, and designed with bikes in mind. There are bike paths everywhere, supermarkets are small, and spread out through the town, so I can choose between 3 competing supermarkets all within a 3 mile radius.
In places where the infrastructure is spaciously designed around automobiles, it is much harder to retrofit bike paths. Distances between places are often too big to make biking a good option.
I just went to the supermarket, but I walked. If I need to bring more items, I'll take the bike, which is even more efficient.
Unless you can show a comprehensive business case, mining asteroids is pure science fiction. Besides, while asteroids are a good source of metals, they don't contain much other needed stuff, such as energy. And if we had plenty of energy, we might as well go after low grade ores on Earth.
And yes, people are growing exponentially, and they'll continue to do so. The fact that in some societies, like Western Europe, the birthrates are declining is only a temporary anomaly. Couples that don't have any children are a genetic dead end. Their genes will be gone in 1 generation. On the other hand, couples that love big families will spread their genes exponentially. Just wait a few dozen generations, and they will have completely displaced the others.
Of course, AI robots by themselves do not solve the problem of resource scarcity. And people will continue to grow exponentially, so on a fixed earth, you'll always reach a point where not everybody gets a basic standard of living.
But does the volume go to eleven ?
So he should refuse to buy USPTO products ?
Why stop at the software ? For a complete review, the hardware design should be open too.
It's clear that you have no idea what censorship is. Blocking the content itself would be censorship.
Most content that people get through TPB isn't blocked either.
Actually, the dinosaurs were always worried about asteroid impacts. However, my own ancestors, who also lived during that time, never worried, and they survived.
Actually, when I first saw a scale drawing of the Earth-Moon system, I was shocked to see how close the Moon actually is.
A fun thing to do is ask people to stretch out their arm, and have them indicate how big the moon is between their thumb and index finger.
Sure, 10000 km is 10000 km, everybody knows that. But to make a mental image, you need to put that in scale with the earth, moon and satellites. Knowing these sizes is just memorization of a bunch of trivia, often a sign of intelligence, but not always. I know a 6 year old kid who scored 135 on his IQ test, but failed the question about which day comes after Thursday.
It is possible to be highly intelligent, yet not have the ability to make a good mental picture for 10000 km, especially if you don't know the size of the earth or the distance of various satellites orbiting it.
Historically speaking, the chance of being killed by an asteroid is low enough that I'm not going to worry about it.
We haven't explored Mars well enough to say if there was any past life, which would be quite interesting to find out. The rover missions are also quite affordable, at about $1 billion a pop. The return on investment is to satisfy our curiosity, which is a perfectly good reason.
It is long term habitation that is a joke. It's cold, near vacuum, hardly any water, and the entire planet is covered in dust and rocks. On top of that, you get bombarded with deadly radiation. Why would anybody want to be there ? We stopped going to the Moon for the same reason. Everybody lost interest, because there's only so much you can do on a dead rock in space.
It is very pragmatic not to sink trillions of dollars into a project without sufficient economic or scientific return. Exploration can be done by unmanned rovers for much less. I'll gladly support an unmanned Moon rover mission. I'd also like to see a sample return mission to Mars.
Sure, if you're making hundreds of trips to Mars, it may be cheaper to build a base on the Moon.
I question that we'll be making hundreds of trips to Mars. If humans ever make it to Mars, it will be a flag planting publicity stunt. There's just not much appeal to a cold and empty desert.
On the contrary. Being pragmatic and calculating is much better for our species than wasting our resources on pie in the sky projects that aren't going to pay themselves back.
You must be joking. In what sense is building a Moon base not insanely complicated ? If you go straight to Mars, you don't need to build the Moon base.
And your calculations about the gravity well make no sense. You should compare delta-v for Moon->Mars and Earth->Mars and then apply the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, to find out how much fuel you'd need.
Why not spend it on useful projects here on Earth, like a working fusion plant, where we can also inspire man to higher goals ?
I think that after you add the cost for a moon base, it will be cheaper and quicker to launch from Earth instead.
Of course, if you put 10 tons of iridium on the market (2.5 times yearly global consumption), prices will plummet, and so will your profits. If you feed the market slowly, with 1 ton/year, and you manage to keep the prices the same, you only make $23 million/year.
Being able to run the same apps on your phone, tablet and PC is an awesome feature
Not really. Microsoft's biggest fault is that they don't recognize that the phone, tablet and PC have different purposes, and different modes of usage. In some cases, there's some applications, such as e-mailing or browsing that are done on all devices, but even then there's no need to have exactly the same app. The apps just need to be compatible, and be capable of sharing the files, but apart from that, they should be optimized for the platform and typical use.
In what way is the upgrade from robot travel to Mars to human travel relatively minor ? There's only existing and proven technology for relatively light weight landers with a mass of a few hundred kilograms. The latest Mars Science Lab is a bit heavier at 900 kilograms, but still needs to be proven. There's no technology for anything close to the mass of a human lander.