The reduction of traditional family farms in NE that are now covered in 50+ year old trees along with the reduction in lumber used means there's a lot more tree cover today then 100, 200 or 500 years ago.
Remember, even before whitey came, man was messing with the environment in the Americas. Many Native American tribes had traditions of starting fires. Not out of reverence, but out of knowledge that if they burned down a forest, it would be come a meadow. That meadow would attract deer and other game easier. Despite our large farming, and the blight that is urban sprawl, much of the land in the US that is situated for trees has been regrown.
Of course if you really want biomass. Add a few cargo loads of iron powder to the ocean in equator regions to promote the growth of aquatic plant life. (Although that has plenty of other issues).
It's not end commercial fishing. It's end BAD commercial fishing.
The Pacific NW supplies a large amount of fish to the Pacific ocean. US fishing rules are pretty strict, but made around sustainable numbers.
Japanese though, still take flipper in their nets. They sit at the 9 mile limit. Remember the ship that went aground a few years ago in Oregon? Japanese fishing trawler. These few nations are having a huge impact on fish and don't care about reigning them in. And for once, the US isn't a nation that's fishing everything to death.
I'm a Barfly, eg, I hang out on the Baen Bar a good deal of time.
What that means is I read a large amount of ebooks. Baen books, http:/// www.baen.com , was started by the dearly departed Jim Baen who saw the internet as a way to hook readers. They created http://www.webscription.net/ which has most of their library for sale. Books which aren't even in hardback and are 2+ months from publication are $15. Books in hardback are around 6. Older books are even cheaper, some less than $4.
All of them DRM free.
Jim Baen has been a very passionate voice in the publishing industry against the concept of DRM because it assumes the customer is a Crook. He, and some writers (multiple NY times bestselling writers) decided that it was best to not DRM and to not charge an arm and a leg. Ebooks have low costs, and once the hardware is paid off the only costs are maintenance. They went a step further with a free library of Ebooks, mostly slightly older works and the starts of popular series.
Eric Flint has a nice editorial about the system. The idea is if the books are good, and people share them, Bully! Sharing books gets more people to read them. You might not buy the paperback, but 5 people you share your ebook with might. Or they might buy the hardcover of the sequel. The authors who are in the library have all had greatly enhanced sales.
One step further are their cds. Many hardcovers have a cd in the back with ebook collections related to that book. They even post them online for free, with the only stipulation is you don't profit off their ebooks. http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/
Tune in at a 11 to know what common household product will kill you!
Ever since real news became expensive to get, scary news was found to be cheaper and easier to get, with plenty of ratings. The media profits off scary news. Be it global warming, second hand smoke, car defects, tainted spinach, poisoned candy, or sexual predators that live in your neighborhood. Big Oil has a stake in it, but they are being cagey, as it really doesn't matter, as there isn't a ready made alternative that can take over tomorrow. (There are some close, but most of them either are impractical in some places/climates, or are as bad in CO2, worse if you include MPG/KPL).
Now with the expansion of blogs, the ability to read every paper on the planet, and straight wire news, skepticism is way up. Dan Rather got caught lying his butt off for ratings. The news industry is no better then the oil industry. Now granted, what is truth you and I will disagree with, but I'm willing not to call you names or insult your intelligence if you can believe I've read the same data and come to a different conclusion of facts. It's possible for two people to read the same facts and have different conclusions and not fight. The civil discourse is becoming a lost art.
Besides which, healthy skepticism is a good thing. As an optical physicist who works with a number of solar researchers, I'm doubtful of the impact of humans on GW. There's a tendency by some people to worst case everything. It's really too early to say anything for sure. Some of the folks in GW sound so doom and gloom I'm reminded of Y2K nuts. Or folks who thought Clinton and Reno were going to declare a dictatorship. There are some reasonable and proper suggestions to alive global warming that can me done with a minimal impact. Others create an economic straightjacket that is intolerable for many. Reduction of CO2 is actually best served by increased nuclear plants eliminating Coal plants. But that reduces particulate counts which might have a net effect of increasing global warming... It's complex and anyone who has an easy solution to the possible issues of global warming is trying to sell you something, or trying to get votes.
Ok, I'm a recent burnout of a Grad Student, I've been the good student and the bad student overtime, varying depending on my interests and on my level of Depression (Which can be and is a factor for students missing classes).
A simple example is with me and a former roommate whose had a closely related major. Both of us had to take a certain advance chem course. The Professor would commonly place notes online from his slides. He'd do it after the class and scan em into pdfs with all scribbles added. I only missed one or two classes all term, and used the notes only to study, as I took my own that included additional drawings and asides the prof got taken on. Many Profs will welcome interaction, questions, and can take a good portion of a lesson focusing on an aspect of a question asked. This is true in Physics as well as history.
I was on an upswing that term, while my room mate was on a downswing (in terms of entering and leaving depressive periods). While I went to class and used the notes as a tool, she slept in and only read the notes. As you can tell, over time if you're putting class off for the notes, you delay the notes. Until one night you have to read the entire term before the test the next morning.
Don't put protections up, people will come or won't. Putting nothing up as protection, lets folks audit a course and learn if they want it. If it's really general, that can help the College develop web classes. My old university has implemented them for a great deal of basic core credits as an option. Classes like Foods of the World, a class you would learn mostly out of a book anyway, is now almost entirely taught online. People will be motivated self starters with webclasses as much as they would be with Live classes.
Good students can use an audio podcast to review notes while on the move or exercising. It allows for them to better know the materials. Bad students might have a slightly better chance to pass with an actual good grade that they deserved off their work. The bad students might be horrible, but they will still earn their grades, and if it allows for better grades with out grade inflation, there is a clear benefit for everyone involved.
PS3 is suppose to make blue ray the it thing. If they sell 10's of millions of PS3s, as well as games, and get us to buy all our dvds again as blue ray, then they will make a hell of a profit.
If the PS3 tanks, that means the major force keeping their consumer electronics division going will tank (which has been taking a bath as cheaper and/or better products are killing their sales). The company expanded and expanded and bought and is now bloated enough that the management can't keep up. They have too many lagging divisions with their gaming division being the one source of major profit for the last few years. If it dies, they are going in deep.
It's similar to VU's woes, a massive conglomerate that owns everything from Warcraft to movies, to NBC and the french phone system. While World of Warcraft might pull in hundreds of millions in profits, that money off sets the losses of every Spyro game they make driving that franchise into the ground. Not to mention the games division propping up failing music stores.
68 Inches in Newport. And the big thing isn't forrestry (although to be honest not all the cutting is on the coast side of the watershed) instead I'm talking Ag and industry, which are traditionally seen as the big problems in river pollution.
The other thing is there have been multiple conflicting plans in Oregon with respect to stream management. The idea in the 80s was that fish need moving water or will get stuck. Now we know better, but it cost billions to implement the plan ODFW had to remove trees from every tiny stream in Oregon and surround the streams with trees that rot fast in water. And then it cost billions to reverse it. The trees along the small rivers and streams still haven't fully regrown to the pre 1980 state, meaning the massive cock up is still being felt (although Japanese overfishing is also to blame).
What rivers? It's off the Coast of Newport. That part of the Oregon Coast has rivers smaller than 20 miles headwatered in the Coast Range, anything from the Rockies or even the Cascades near there goes into the Columbia Basin, There are mountains between Newport and the Willamette Valley, with the Willamette dumping into the Columbia 150 miles north of Newport.
There isn't any Agriculture or Heavy industry that could be responsible. Here's google map of the area, look for a river longer than 20 miles near it. http://maps.google.com/maps?oi=map&q=Newport,+OR
It's not the Columbia. It's near Newport, which means it's off a mostly deserted section of Oregon coast with only small rivers. And by small, I mean Guinness book of records for smallest river.
It's not normal pollution either because the large populated sections of Oregon are all in the Columbia river basin, which is 150 miles+ north of the region. Newport is small coast town that is known because it used to hold Free Willy. The run off of the Snake and Columbia valleys, that is all the agriculture of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, along with quite a bit of industry is all Columbia based. This is no where near there.
However, Newport is near some massive subsurface methane hydrate supplies. Those could be displacing the Oxygen as increased ocean temperatures allow them to release methane.
Population density is an excuse for while my folks house couldn't get broadband till last year. They are 70 miles from a minor city, and about 5 from a small town.
For New York, it's an issue of infrastructure. The US structure is older, and was much of the first. This was all Cold War related, but as such our major systems are more built for surviving a nuclear war then downloading videos. With a 'good enough' infrastructure in place, it's slow to upgrade, while the Europeans didn't have our basic system and had to create their own, ten and twenty years later.
It's much the same reason for Japanese and European cell phones, as a result of cold war interests and population density we spent a hella lot on a really good (for 1980) system. Now it's looking and feeling older, but it's been good enough for long enough upgrades have been slow. And unlike some nations which are skipping the landlines to go straight to cells, we have the existing base and a large required number of towers if you want good service outside major cities and beltways that make it a non trivia cost for phone companies, resulting in a much slower growth than say, South Korea.
I have to argue the reverse, I'm only able to write on the anti-depressants, as depression is complex and arrests my motivation for writing, as well as clearing the wooly cobwebs in my brain that make the process so hard.
Closest thing to what you want is a Transflective display, partly reflective, partly transmitted. Nintendo DS has the most widely spread version of one.
The big issue is that LCDs rob peter to pay paul. Small issues in room lighting become huge issues in the outside, and vice versa. If you want increased brightness in the sun, you're going to lose a number of things, cone of viewing, contrast, color saturation. If you want one of those others you lose another. Small increases, such as dbefs really do make billions. The dbef was made in order to steal some light from one orientation and give it to another. About a 25% total increase in brightness with only a small loss of contrast, and is the main reason laptops are practical. And 3m who now owns the patent makes over a billion a year on it.
The issues with displays is that there are really only 6 or 7 companies that actually make them. Mostly all in Taiwan, and the fabs cost billions to make in Taiwan. (Which means 10s of billions in the US or Japan, or any country with actual environmental laws). They are running full tilt, automated, and make 2 meter on a side flat pieces of glass.
Now experimenting with tfts is all well and good, but the amount of money spent on R&D per unit can be staggering and is responsible for a good deal of spin offs, acquisitions, and mergers in US based companies. With the US and European countries just buying everything from asia, they don't have the ability to screw around with manufacturing very much.
One other thing, I've seen better. Postage size stamp LCD displays that are made on silicon wafer substrates exist. They are much much better. They also cost $400 per unit with the price tied to wafer fabrication processes and not going down anytime soon. Because of their high price (essentially they take up space the fabs could be building processors or ram and are even larger making them more expensive) no company is interested in them beyond toying with them.
You might say, "Oh that's so Cool! I'd want one." Slashdot is full of early adopters. And full of people who end up buying a failed commercial product because it's cool. Market research has been done and the better tiny displays can only make a profit if they are cheap enough to be used in Cameras. HUDs are not big enough market for a company to make money on the displays.
Orion ships would be huge, as the funny thing is, bigger ones are more efficient. In theory they can reach up to the 10% C range. 50 years or so to the nearest system, but in a big enough ship quite possible. I mean if we are talking an permeant colony it can work. By the time we'll be looking seriously at an attempt to go, we might have something faster, but not for cargo.
You could even use it as the push for cargo and industrial base. Known the sort of things we'll need, push it with a small crew, perhaps AI, perhaps cryo, perhaps monks, perhaps just a good automation. The crew and colonist come later, on a faster ship, that may have a much higher fuel/cargo ratio.
The main issue of Orion is its a low tech relatively quick method. We could of gone out in the 60s, made a moon colony, seen most of the system, and what not. However, the main allure is it's our best method to divert an impact. Enough mass and nukes and you'll be able to deflect anything short of a comet.
For a nuclear warhead, traditional GPS' 5m-accuracy should be quite sufficient. It's not like they'd be trying to avoid "collateral damage"
In wartime the US can, will and does turn off the GPS in the warzone. Galilieo isn't under the same controls, and for that reason is popular with some governments for their guided weapons programs. Further, the civilian GPS receivers still have certain height and velocity restrictions artificially put in by the US to prevent guided missile uses. Only recently was an agreement made that would allow the US and EU to block signals in warzones without disabling the opposing system.
The landmines mentioned here can self detonate, and can be computer controlled. They are designed to be used, and then taken care of.
This new tech makes the weapons much more humane, as they don't last till the box rots or the metals corrode. They can be remote detonated, and if the detonation fails, you can tell as the mine still transmits.
Which would you rather have? Mines designed to be controlled and can be remote detonated? Or mines that are made out of wood and designed to remove legs? These mines are a hell of a lot better than existing mines, and if responsibly used they can end the types of problems we know too well.
I'm lucky, my grandmother's father's line is one that kept a family bible and family tree current from just before the first landing in 1633. While most of my family dissolves into the European groups that say, we're Americans, we're not talking about the old country, this tree lets me go back pretty far.
See, there are certain names that are common and well researched. My great grandpa was a Roger, and can trace it back to John Rogers the martyr, whom many Rogers are descended from. He in turn has a well researched tree and something like his greatX6 grandmother was a british noble. And once you get to a british noble, you can trace a good number of trees back another 1500 years or so.
Most Europeans that can track back far enough will find a noble, be it via the 6th daughter of a lowest rank, but those are then related to higher nobles, and eventually some king or chief.
1. It's easier than building a true space station. It has gravity, and resources we can build upon while doing many functions of a space station, (observing, solar wind, etc)
2. Helium-3, fusion catalyst that's only found on earth as a by product of nuclear reactions and is about 50,000 a pound. That alone makes it worth it moneywise.
3. Possible water ice in craters, let alone if caves of some sort exist with regolith protecting ice in other locations.
4. Abundant Solar that doesn't have the atmosphere blocking it.
5. Titanium mining, high power use aids the refining.
6. Catapult, ala Heinlein. Makes it possible not only just to throw it to orbit and allow assembly of more space infrastructure, as well as sending it back to Earth for pennies on the pound. Or sending probes to space via em only.
Go read the moon is a harsh mistress. You just make a catapult to put it in orbit. No friction, and abundant solar power makes an em catapult work. Of course it could also be a weapon of mass destruction. Heck the materials could make quite a nice network of solar cells on the moon.
Of course heavier metals are not going to be found. It's not part of the moon's crust. The big thing would be if we could find nice ice supplies, as we need it for bio and it's an easy fuel and easy to mine. You get a few hundred tons and you got what you need to exploit NEOs.
But why can't we have a difference of opinion on a complex matter? Terri Shivao is not like the rest. She was a woman in a questionable state. Not a theory that met a wide burden of proof.
Slashdot Mirror
And what state/country is the internet? Just wondering if she's legal.
Remember, even before whitey came, man was messing with the environment in the Americas. Many Native American tribes had traditions of starting fires. Not out of reverence, but out of knowledge that if they burned down a forest, it would be come a meadow. That meadow would attract deer and other game easier. Despite our large farming, and the blight that is urban sprawl, much of the land in the US that is situated for trees has been regrown.
Of course if you really want biomass. Add a few cargo loads of iron powder to the ocean in equator regions to promote the growth of aquatic plant life. (Although that has plenty of other issues).
The Pacific NW supplies a large amount of fish to the Pacific ocean. US fishing rules are pretty strict, but made around sustainable numbers.
Japanese though, still take flipper in their nets. They sit at the 9 mile limit. Remember the ship that went aground a few years ago in Oregon? Japanese fishing trawler. These few nations are having a huge impact on fish and don't care about reigning them in. And for once, the US isn't a nation that's fishing everything to death.
But you can not take my porn!
What is this thing called Radio? Is it like podcasting?
What that means is I read a large amount of ebooks. Baen books, http:/// www.baen.com , was started by the dearly departed Jim Baen who saw the internet as a way to hook readers. They created http://www.webscription.net/ which has most of their library for sale. Books which aren't even in hardback and are 2+ months from publication are $15. Books in hardback are around 6. Older books are even cheaper, some less than $4.
All of them DRM free.
Jim Baen has been a very passionate voice in the publishing industry against the concept of DRM because it assumes the customer is a Crook. He, and some writers (multiple NY times bestselling writers) decided that it was best to not DRM and to not charge an arm and a leg. Ebooks have low costs, and once the hardware is paid off the only costs are maintenance. They went a step further with a free library of Ebooks, mostly slightly older works and the starts of popular series.
http://www.baen.com/library/
Eric Flint has a nice editorial about the system. The idea is if the books are good, and people share them, Bully! Sharing books gets more people to read them. You might not buy the paperback, but 5 people you share your ebook with might. Or they might buy the hardcover of the sequel. The authors who are in the library have all had greatly enhanced sales.
One step further are their cds. Many hardcovers have a cd in the back with ebook collections related to that book. They even post them online for free, with the only stipulation is you don't profit off their ebooks. http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/
Tune in at a 11 to know what common household product will kill you!
Ever since real news became expensive to get, scary news was found to be cheaper and easier to get, with plenty of ratings. The media profits off scary news. Be it global warming, second hand smoke, car defects, tainted spinach, poisoned candy, or sexual predators that live in your neighborhood. Big Oil has a stake in it, but they are being cagey, as it really doesn't matter, as there isn't a ready made alternative that can take over tomorrow. (There are some close, but most of them either are impractical in some places/climates, or are as bad in CO2, worse if you include MPG/KPL).
Now with the expansion of blogs, the ability to read every paper on the planet, and straight wire news, skepticism is way up. Dan Rather got caught lying his butt off for ratings. The news industry is no better then the oil industry. Now granted, what is truth you and I will disagree with, but I'm willing not to call you names or insult your intelligence if you can believe I've read the same data and come to a different conclusion of facts. It's possible for two people to read the same facts and have different conclusions and not fight. The civil discourse is becoming a lost art.
Besides which, healthy skepticism is a good thing. As an optical physicist who works with a number of solar researchers, I'm doubtful of the impact of humans on GW. There's a tendency by some people to worst case everything. It's really too early to say anything for sure. Some of the folks in GW sound so doom and gloom I'm reminded of Y2K nuts. Or folks who thought Clinton and Reno were going to declare a dictatorship. There are some reasonable and proper suggestions to alive global warming that can me done with a minimal impact. Others create an economic straightjacket that is intolerable for many. Reduction of CO2 is actually best served by increased nuclear plants eliminating Coal plants. But that reduces particulate counts which might have a net effect of increasing global warming... It's complex and anyone who has an easy solution to the possible issues of global warming is trying to sell you something, or trying to get votes.
Ok, I'm a recent burnout of a Grad Student, I've been the good student and the bad student overtime, varying depending on my interests and on my level of Depression (Which can be and is a factor for students missing classes).
A simple example is with me and a former roommate whose had a closely related major. Both of us had to take a certain advance chem course. The Professor would commonly place notes online from his slides. He'd do it after the class and scan em into pdfs with all scribbles added. I only missed one or two classes all term, and used the notes only to study, as I took my own that included additional drawings and asides the prof got taken on. Many Profs will welcome interaction, questions, and can take a good portion of a lesson focusing on an aspect of a question asked. This is true in Physics as well as history.
I was on an upswing that term, while my room mate was on a downswing (in terms of entering and leaving depressive periods). While I went to class and used the notes as a tool, she slept in and only read the notes. As you can tell, over time if you're putting class off for the notes, you delay the notes. Until one night you have to read the entire term before the test the next morning.
Don't put protections up, people will come or won't. Putting nothing up as protection, lets folks audit a course and learn if they want it. If it's really general, that can help the College develop web classes. My old university has implemented them for a great deal of basic core credits as an option. Classes like Foods of the World, a class you would learn mostly out of a book anyway, is now almost entirely taught online. People will be motivated self starters with webclasses as much as they would be with Live classes.
Good students can use an audio podcast to review notes while on the move or exercising. It allows for them to better know the materials. Bad students might have a slightly better chance to pass with an actual good grade that they deserved off their work. The bad students might be horrible, but they will still earn their grades, and if it allows for better grades with out grade inflation, there is a clear benefit for everyone involved.
If the PS3 tanks, that means the major force keeping their consumer electronics division going will tank (which has been taking a bath as cheaper and/or better products are killing their sales). The company expanded and expanded and bought and is now bloated enough that the management can't keep up. They have too many lagging divisions with their gaming division being the one source of major profit for the last few years. If it dies, they are going in deep.
It's similar to VU's woes, a massive conglomerate that owns everything from Warcraft to movies, to NBC and the french phone system. While World of Warcraft might pull in hundreds of millions in profits, that money off sets the losses of every Spyro game they make driving that franchise into the ground. Not to mention the games division propping up failing music stores.
The other thing is there have been multiple conflicting plans in Oregon with respect to stream management. The idea in the 80s was that fish need moving water or will get stuck. Now we know better, but it cost billions to implement the plan ODFW had to remove trees from every tiny stream in Oregon and surround the streams with trees that rot fast in water. And then it cost billions to reverse it. The trees along the small rivers and streams still haven't fully regrown to the pre 1980 state, meaning the massive cock up is still being felt (although Japanese overfishing is also to blame).
There isn't any Agriculture or Heavy industry that could be responsible. Here's google map of the area, look for a river longer than 20 miles near it. http://maps.google.com/maps?oi=map&q=Newport,+OR
It's not normal pollution either because the large populated sections of Oregon are all in the Columbia river basin, which is 150 miles+ north of the region. Newport is small coast town that is known because it used to hold Free Willy. The run off of the Snake and Columbia valleys, that is all the agriculture of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, along with quite a bit of industry is all Columbia based. This is no where near there.
However, Newport is near some massive subsurface methane hydrate supplies. Those could be displacing the Oxygen as increased ocean temperatures allow them to release methane.
Says linux in summary.
For New York, it's an issue of infrastructure. The US structure is older, and was much of the first. This was all Cold War related, but as such our major systems are more built for surviving a nuclear war then downloading videos. With a 'good enough' infrastructure in place, it's slow to upgrade, while the Europeans didn't have our basic system and had to create their own, ten and twenty years later.
It's much the same reason for Japanese and European cell phones, as a result of cold war interests and population density we spent a hella lot on a really good (for 1980) system. Now it's looking and feeling older, but it's been good enough for long enough upgrades have been slow. And unlike some nations which are skipping the landlines to go straight to cells, we have the existing base and a large required number of towers if you want good service outside major cities and beltways that make it a non trivia cost for phone companies, resulting in a much slower growth than say, South Korea.
I have to argue the reverse, I'm only able to write on the anti-depressants, as depression is complex and arrests my motivation for writing, as well as clearing the wooly cobwebs in my brain that make the process so hard.
The big issue is that LCDs rob peter to pay paul. Small issues in room lighting become huge issues in the outside, and vice versa. If you want increased brightness in the sun, you're going to lose a number of things, cone of viewing, contrast, color saturation. If you want one of those others you lose another. Small increases, such as dbefs really do make billions. The dbef was made in order to steal some light from one orientation and give it to another. About a 25% total increase in brightness with only a small loss of contrast, and is the main reason laptops are practical. And 3m who now owns the patent makes over a billion a year on it.
Now experimenting with tfts is all well and good, but the amount of money spent on R&D per unit can be staggering and is responsible for a good deal of spin offs, acquisitions, and mergers in US based companies. With the US and European countries just buying everything from asia, they don't have the ability to screw around with manufacturing very much.
One other thing, I've seen better. Postage size stamp LCD displays that are made on silicon wafer substrates exist. They are much much better. They also cost $400 per unit with the price tied to wafer fabrication processes and not going down anytime soon. Because of their high price (essentially they take up space the fabs could be building processors or ram and are even larger making them more expensive) no company is interested in them beyond toying with them.
You might say, "Oh that's so Cool! I'd want one." Slashdot is full of early adopters. And full of people who end up buying a failed commercial product because it's cool. Market research has been done and the better tiny displays can only make a profit if they are cheap enough to be used in Cameras. HUDs are not big enough market for a company to make money on the displays.
You could even use it as the push for cargo and industrial base. Known the sort of things we'll need, push it with a small crew, perhaps AI, perhaps cryo, perhaps monks, perhaps just a good automation. The crew and colonist come later, on a faster ship, that may have a much higher fuel/cargo ratio.
The main issue of Orion is its a low tech relatively quick method. We could of gone out in the 60s, made a moon colony, seen most of the system, and what not. However, the main allure is it's our best method to divert an impact. Enough mass and nukes and you'll be able to deflect anything short of a comet.
In wartime the US can, will and does turn off the GPS in the warzone. Galilieo isn't under the same controls, and for that reason is popular with some governments for their guided weapons programs. Further, the civilian GPS receivers still have certain height and velocity restrictions artificially put in by the US to prevent guided missile uses. Only recently was an agreement made that would allow the US and EU to block signals in warzones without disabling the opposing system.
This new tech makes the weapons much more humane, as they don't last till the box rots or the metals corrode. They can be remote detonated, and if the detonation fails, you can tell as the mine still transmits.
Which would you rather have? Mines designed to be controlled and can be remote detonated? Or mines that are made out of wood and designed to remove legs? These mines are a hell of a lot better than existing mines, and if responsibly used they can end the types of problems we know too well.
I'm lucky, my grandmother's father's line is one that kept a family bible and family tree current from just before the first landing in 1633. While most of my family dissolves into the European groups that say, we're Americans, we're not talking about the old country, this tree lets me go back pretty far.
See, there are certain names that are common and well researched. My great grandpa was a Roger, and can trace it back to John Rogers the martyr, whom many Rogers are descended from. He in turn has a well researched tree and something like his greatX6 grandmother was a british noble. And once you get to a british noble, you can trace a good number of trees back another 1500 years or so.
Most Europeans that can track back far enough will find a noble, be it via the 6th daughter of a lowest rank, but those are then related to higher nobles, and eventually some king or chief.
1. It's easier than building a true space station. It has gravity, and resources we can build upon while doing many functions of a space station, (observing, solar wind, etc)
2. Helium-3, fusion catalyst that's only found on earth as a by product of nuclear reactions and is about 50,000 a pound. That alone makes it worth it moneywise.
3. Possible water ice in craters, let alone if caves of some sort exist with regolith protecting ice in other locations.
4. Abundant Solar that doesn't have the atmosphere blocking it.
5. Titanium mining, high power use aids the refining.
6. Catapult, ala Heinlein. Makes it possible not only just to throw it to orbit and allow assembly of more space infrastructure, as well as sending it back to Earth for pennies on the pound. Or sending probes to space via em only.
Go read the moon is a harsh mistress. You just make a catapult to put it in orbit. No friction, and abundant solar power makes an em catapult work. Of course it could also be a weapon of mass destruction. Heck the materials could make quite a nice network of solar cells on the moon.
Of course heavier metals are not going to be found. It's not part of the moon's crust. The big thing would be if we could find nice ice supplies, as we need it for bio and it's an easy fuel and easy to mine. You get a few hundred tons and you got what you need to exploit NEOs.
You're Quoting the Daily Kos about Ann Coulter being a troll?
Kettle, meet Pot.
But why can't we have a difference of opinion on a complex matter? Terri Shivao is not like the rest. She was a woman in a questionable state. Not a theory that met a wide burden of proof.
Oh well, ignore me. I'm drunk.