Even if all they find is iron, it will be Moon Iron (mFe) which is worth more to eccentric wealthy folk. Nothing is as bling as Moon Iron. Maybe DeBeers will buy the moon and start an entirely new marketing campaign that will have our great great grandchildren proposing to their future wives with golden rings touting a half karat of Moon Iron. Only the poor buy diamonds.
That is, until one day, where some lab finds out how to grow Moon Iron at a fraction of the cost of real Moon Iron. Maybe they will even master this so well that the lab-grown Moon Iron will be indistinguishable from real Moon Iron.
I think there will be a market for elements mined from the moon, but I don't think that market will compete directly with the market for the same elements from Earth. At least, not at first.
I know I'm late, but I found this comment funny. Mostly because my girlfriend is chinese and I always get a kick out of going to her parents house and seeing every remote in its own special plastic remote sleeve. Apparently they are readily available at the chinese market.
They have a full home theater component setup with all the goodies. Probably have 10 remotes in little sleeves.
If you don't want a loud, hot old PC around, simply run m0n0wall on an embedded platform. I feel that's really what it was designed for.
Grab a WRAP board with a power supply and case for under $200US. Write the version of m0n0wall specifically developed for the WRAP board onto an old 16MB compactflash card, plug it in, and you've got a commercial-grade router that will support two subnets that does things a $100 "gaming router" can't touch. Completely silent, smaller than any Linksys. If you must use generic PC parts, buy an $8 compactflash-to-ide adapter to boot the system off of and skip the CD-ROM and floppy ordeal. The whole configuration saves as a single XML file so if hardware ever breaks you can boot m0n0wall off another pile of generic parts, upload the XML file, and you're back up.
Yeah, its more expensive, but a true geek will appreciate all the extra features. m0n0wall can do some really cool stuff for it's size and friendlyness. I've dumped Cisco for all my small-to-medium sized network setups in favor of m0n0wall and haven't looked back.
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Even if all they find is iron, it will be Moon Iron (mFe) which is worth more to eccentric wealthy folk. Nothing is as bling as Moon Iron. Maybe DeBeers will buy the moon and start an entirely new marketing campaign that will have our great great grandchildren proposing to their future wives with golden rings touting a half karat of Moon Iron. Only the poor buy diamonds. That is, until one day, where some lab finds out how to grow Moon Iron at a fraction of the cost of real Moon Iron. Maybe they will even master this so well that the lab-grown Moon Iron will be indistinguishable from real Moon Iron. I think there will be a market for elements mined from the moon, but I don't think that market will compete directly with the market for the same elements from Earth. At least, not at first.
I know I'm late, but I found this comment funny. Mostly because my girlfriend is chinese and I always get a kick out of going to her parents house and seeing every remote in its own special plastic remote sleeve. Apparently they are readily available at the chinese market. They have a full home theater component setup with all the goodies. Probably have 10 remotes in little sleeves.
If you don't want a loud, hot old PC around, simply run m0n0wall on an embedded platform. I feel that's really what it was designed for. Grab a WRAP board with a power supply and case for under $200US. Write the version of m0n0wall specifically developed for the WRAP board onto an old 16MB compactflash card, plug it in, and you've got a commercial-grade router that will support two subnets that does things a $100 "gaming router" can't touch. Completely silent, smaller than any Linksys. If you must use generic PC parts, buy an $8 compactflash-to-ide adapter to boot the system off of and skip the CD-ROM and floppy ordeal. The whole configuration saves as a single XML file so if hardware ever breaks you can boot m0n0wall off another pile of generic parts, upload the XML file, and you're back up. Yeah, its more expensive, but a true geek will appreciate all the extra features. m0n0wall can do some really cool stuff for it's size and friendlyness. I've dumped Cisco for all my small-to-medium sized network setups in favor of m0n0wall and haven't looked back.
You don't think Super Mario Bros. the movie was intentionally comedic?