The first corporation that gets out there and starts commercial mining is going to be the big winner if this is so limited.
Why would this be?
In the real world those who "kill the snakes" usually die of snake-bite, while those who come in later with the advantage of experience and hindsight, and better planning, make the killing.
You aren't supposing that there is some law of nature that gives the guy who sends a mining probe to an asteroid automatic exclusive legal title to to it in perpetuity they everyone will simply have to respect even if it costs them huge potential sums of money?
...
I want to be a sci-fi writer; I can world-build fantasy and sci-fi, but I can't come up with plot. They've all been done; I'd feel like I'm copying someone else--anyone else--everyone else!
Welcome to literature. The "novelty story" phase of SF could not last forever - eventually writers will be judged solely by the quality of their writing in whatever genre the write. Just like the rest of literature - where all plots have also already been done. But that does not mean someone cannot write a better version with better characters and prose, and use the SF gimmicks in new and better combinations.
Consider Patrick O'Brien. Hadn't all the "sea tales" already been done by C. S. Forester and predecssors? Yet he managed to write the best sea tales so far in his 21 volume oeuvre (and was slowed down only be death). Many of the events in those novels weren't even "new", he borrowed them from actual historical events - yet to put them in an engaging story was a signal achievement.
...There's great speculation that Mars may be geologically dead... it's great news for mining---if it's completely dead, there's absolutely nothing that would prevent us from drilling right through it---right to the center core that (according to "dead planet" scenario) would just be a ball of iron and lots of other heavy metals)....
I am pretty sure that the hydrostatic pressure of 5 million PSI at the center, about 20 times the yield strength of the strongest known metal, is not "absolutely nothing".
The reasons for not using nuclear power in space are political, not technological.
... Sufficient shielding for even the crew and work areas for a reactor that can produce enough energy to smelt metals won't be light...
Umm. What crew and work areas?
Asteroid mining is going to be done by robots, or it won't be done at all. The enormous cost difference between putting a robot probe in space vs putting a man who is pretty much dead weight is well known. A robot can operate for a decade unattended (Opportunity, still operating on Mars, will hit this mark in three weeks time). Asteroid mining is tailor-made for robots who have no use for a stinking atmosphere or gravity.
I am happy to see the emergence of some sort of sketch of the technical concept. And it the picture is not pretty.
MarsOne proposes that is going to land on Mars with an super-sized version of the Dragon Earth-reentry vehicle. As a "proven technology" it is one proven to kill all the astronauts attempting to land on Mars as if it were a thick-atmosphere planet like Earth.
Landing on Mars in a human-sized vehicle (10,000 kg) is not possible with any known aero-breaking technology. Curiosity's (mass 900 kg) is close to the upper limit of current approaches, and even it required the use of a new powered descent stage to make the landing work. A scaling up to human size would require taking that concept to the max: essentially a powered descent vehicle for nearly the whole ride down. This "little detail" destroys their entire story - the cost of developing this new vehicle is not planned, and the mass for this goes way up, and so do all the launch issues.
To wipe off the scent of "scam" from this they need to present a credible concept and plan for developing a workable Mars lander, and work backward from there to the other aspects of the program. Also an estimated cost breakdown for each component of their mission. That is not so hard if they know what they are doing.
BTW, the little Curiosity probe, far simpler and far smaller than any manned mission, cost $2.5 billion by itself.
Please stop. I've now cited an official government source, and a reputable international source. Both of these analysis were done by a team of economists, nuclear engineers, and accounted for as many factors as reasonably can be taken into consideration. You have cited... absolutely nothing.
That the oceans contain enough uranium for 10,000 years of once-through energy production is well known and easily confirmed. The IEEE Spectrum article cites current research results that indicate the cost of seawater extraction can be performed at a cost of about $300/kg, a price point that the uranium spot market has already broken in the past, and the additional cost added to electricity by paying $300/kg vs current prices of around $100/kg is only about 0.6 cents per kwh still quite competitive with coal, gas and renewable energy sources.
Economists making government resource projections aren't permitted to consider emerging (aka unproven) technologies. Up until now there has been little incentive to try to develop seawater extraction (more expensive admittedly) as long as conventional mines were cranking out adequate supplies at low prices. This will change, and new technologies developed and exploited.
Just look at fracking. No production to speak of 10 years ago, now production is climbing steadily, soon to create a large gas surplus. Or renewable energy, with double digit increases in wind and solar power year after year. New technology and production processes with lower costs aren't limited to gas, solar and wind - uranium extraction benefits also. New processes often do not get perfected until there is economic demand for them.
Specially since this is U-235 (the primary nuclear fuel currently in use on civilian nuclear power stations).
Using U-235 for nuclear weapons is only common in first generation nuclear programs. You see, enriching uranium is a PITA (separating isotopes), while separating plutonium from anything else is soooo much easier (chemical separation).
Your notion is about 50 years out of date - this was a common idea in the 1950s. The perfection of the gas centrifuge, available since the early 1960s completely changed the equation.
Highly enriched uranium is much cheaper than plutonium gram for gram (the cost differential is more than 10:1). That "easy" chemical separation you speak of has to be done in a hot cell, and produces large amounts of highly radioactive waste, and requires first making uranium into fuel, then cooking it in an expensive reactor for months, and then more months of cooling. HEU these days simply takes slightly radioactive natural or low enriched uranium and sends it through a gas centrifuge cascade in a modest-sized warehouse giving you product easily converted to metal at the other end after several days later.
Highly enriched uranium (aka HEU, your "U-235") is widely used in modern thermonuclear weapons. The secondary casing is made out of it, the secondary spark plug is likely made out of it, and perhaps half of the total yield of warhead is when the highly enriched uranium is fissioned by the flood neutrons from the thermonuclear burn. There is roughly ten times more HEU in a modern weapon than plutonium, which is only used for the primary (where the fact that it has a lower critical mass is very important).
Obama jumped the pension obligation ahead of the secured lien holders. There was no legal reason for this and it was wrong.
The secured lien holders are the ones that refused a debt-for-equity swap, providing for partial repayment, preventing restructuring and and forcing GM into bankruptcy. Here is an account of this in that left-wing rag the Wall Street Journal.
The assertion that there was some sort of violation of law is flatly untrue. See for example: Stephen J. Lubben, "No Big Deal: The GM and Chrysler Cases in Context", 83 Am. Bankr. L. J. 531, 533-34 (2009). The disposition of assets was well within the authority of the bankruptcy judge.
Political factions that despise labor of course are upset that the workers didn't get screwed out of their jobs and pensions, as usual, but dressing this preference up in legal garb is fraudulent.
Even bankruptcy lawyers who would prefer to have seen workers thoroughly shafted admit that the bankruptcy was handled in a fully legal manner: Bankruptcy Law Review.
Wow. So, what happens the atmospheric CO2 in that case? Would it precipitate as "dry ice" snow?
Vapor pressure of carbon dioxide at -100 C: 100 mm. Actual partial pressure of CO2 on average in Earth's lower atmosphere: 0.3 mm. Partial pressure of CO2 in exhaled breath: 38 mm. So no, no dry ice snow - the vapor pressure is still too high. At around -110 C the possibility of "dry ice frost breath" becomes possible. It would have to be near -140 C before CO2 would start condensing out of the air.
"Suppose the next election is Hillary vs. Christie. Would you be happy with people listening in on Christie's phone calls and those of his circle and supporters? Or Hillary's?"
This is exactly what is happening in Turkey.
Consider the very well reported "Kuchmagate" incident in Ukraine in 2000 in which a government spy, spying on President Kuchma (aka "his boss"), revealed that Kuchma was involved in criminal activities including kidnap/murder. It resulted in a dramatic political change in Ukraine. The intial release of the recordings was completely anonymous.
We may like the change, considering it a baddie getting his just desserts, but this is a troubling precedent. Anybody could choose to do this for any political or personal reason.
And then there is the "Squidgygate" where private (but embarrassing) conversations involving Diana, Princess of Wales, then the wife of the heir to the throne, were apparently recorded by a phone tap on New Years Eve 1989, then rebroadcast several days later by the tapper so that it could be clearly picked up by anyone who monitored non-commercial radio frequencies. The apparent conclusion would be that that agents of the British Government spied on Diana to aid Prince Charles in dealing with his troubled marriage, headed for divorce.
The rise of the national security state has placed all democratic institutions in peril.
2. Grinding poverty and inequality: Monarchial rule begets serfdom and a midevil class structure. furthermore that class is infected upon your name for generations. Kings decide what you can and cannot eat with hunting laws, and who you can and cannot marry by proxy of the church. in the past, even certain hats and colors were banned by monarchies.
While there are problems with monarchies, this is not one of them, not relative to modern society. Gaps in inequality were much less in feudalism (though everyone had less overall, too),
Instead of everyone who breaths being able to vote only let people who opt-in vote. To opt-in would require some form of service to the government be it civil services, administrative, military, etc. Freedom would still exist for all but political decisions would be limited. That might curb masses of people voting for candidates who simply promise the world and deliver little. Just because the idea is from Starship Troopers doesn't negate its efficacy.
You do realize that this system is required to offer everyone a government job, right? So that everyone can "opt in" who wants to? Or do we instead only let certain select people to "opt in"?
From TFA: "Neoreactionary ideas overlap heavily with pickup artistry...". Yes, not getting laid is one of their chief complaints. They aren't getting any and learning to con females is their plan to rectify the situtation.
Neoreactionary ideas overlap heavily with pickup artistry, seasteading and scientific racism
Lets see - they are fascinated with picking up hot girls (without having to invest in a relationship), escape to a fantasy realm where they will automatically be in charge (the number of sea-cities and real sea-city projects being zero), and they want to regard other ethnic groups as truly inherently inferior, without having to admit to being a racist ("scientific racism" is currently as scientific as "intelligent design").
Arrested male geek adolescence which, having come into some money, is trying to buy itself into intellectual legitimacy.
The rich of today pale in comparison to the wealthy of the last century. Rockefellers, Carnegies had 10 times as much wealth as Bill Gates, the 'wealth gap' was much wider, yet the standard of living for the poor was rising, not falling the way it is today.
Wow! 10 times more!? Got a source for this interesting claim? You wouldn't just be makin' stuff up would you?
From what I can find the incomes of the top 1%, and the top 0.01%, etc., is at or above the GDP share of the beginning of the 20th century.
Taking short exposures and processing them on a computer is the "poor man's adaptive optics". A very powerful technique (if the object is bright enough) is too take a large number (thousands) of short exposures, then sort through them for a "lucky" image - one in which the atmosphere is momentarily stable. Multiple lucky images can be stacked together to get longer exposures. This really is a very powerful technique, not requiring extremely expensive high precision tracking hardware.
Lord Rosse's telescope used a cast speculum metal mirror, basically pewter, which had a reflectivity of 66%. Glass silvering technology had not been developed to a level adequate for astronomical mirrors. As a result the light gathering power of the 72" Leviathan of Parsontown was equivalent to a 58" mirror of 100% reflectivity. Clement's mirror is coated with silver, and with even a mediocre silvering job a reflectivity at least 90% should be obtained. This makes his mirror equivalent to a 66" mirror of 100% reflectivity, so it is a more "powerful" mirror.
Slashdot Mirror
Dean Kamen is a cool rich guy, and like most rich guys, can afford to advocate things that don't impact him.
The term "limousine liberal" comes to mind.
Because there is no catchy pejorative coined for right-wing billionaires pushing their own policy preferences?
The early bird gets the worm.
The first corporation that gets out there and starts commercial mining is going to be the big winner if this is so limited.
Why would this be?
In the real world those who "kill the snakes" usually die of snake-bite, while those who come in later with the advantage of experience and hindsight, and better planning, make the killing.
You aren't supposing that there is some law of nature that gives the guy who sends a mining probe to an asteroid automatic exclusive legal title to to it in perpetuity they everyone will simply have to respect even if it costs them huge potential sums of money?
... I want to be a sci-fi writer; I can world-build fantasy and sci-fi, but I can't come up with plot. They've all been done; I'd feel like I'm copying someone else--anyone else--everyone else!
Welcome to literature. The "novelty story" phase of SF could not last forever - eventually writers will be judged solely by the quality of their writing in whatever genre the write. Just like the rest of literature - where all plots have also already been done. But that does not mean someone cannot write a better version with better characters and prose, and use the SF gimmicks in new and better combinations.
Consider Patrick O'Brien. Hadn't all the "sea tales" already been done by C. S. Forester and predecssors? Yet he managed to write the best sea tales so far in his 21 volume oeuvre (and was slowed down only be death). Many of the events in those novels weren't even "new", he borrowed them from actual historical events - yet to put them in an engaging story was a signal achievement.
...There's great speculation that Mars may be geologically dead... it's great news for mining---if it's completely dead, there's absolutely nothing that would prevent us from drilling right through it---right to the center core that (according to "dead planet" scenario) would just be a ball of iron and lots of other heavy metals)....
I am pretty sure that the hydrostatic pressure of 5 million PSI at the center, about 20 times the yield strength of the strongest known metal, is not "absolutely nothing".
The reasons for not using nuclear power in space are political, not technological.
... Sufficient shielding for even the crew and work areas for a reactor that can produce enough energy to smelt metals won't be light...
Umm. What crew and work areas?
Asteroid mining is going to be done by robots, or it won't be done at all. The enormous cost difference between putting a robot probe in space vs putting a man who is pretty much dead weight is well known. A robot can operate for a decade unattended (Opportunity, still operating on Mars, will hit this mark in three weeks time). Asteroid mining is tailor-made for robots who have no use for a stinking atmosphere or gravity.
It would also be going through the heads of anyone who watched the pilot of The Lone Gunmen TV series.
List of the technology they want to use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_One#Technology
I am happy to see the emergence of some sort of sketch of the technical concept. And it the picture is not pretty.
MarsOne proposes that is going to land on Mars with an super-sized version of the Dragon Earth-reentry vehicle. As a "proven technology" it is one proven to kill all the astronauts attempting to land on Mars as if it were a thick-atmosphere planet like Earth.
Landing on Mars in a human-sized vehicle (10,000 kg) is not possible with any known aero-breaking technology. Curiosity's (mass 900 kg) is close to the upper limit of current approaches, and even it required the use of a new powered descent stage to make the landing work. A scaling up to human size would require taking that concept to the max: essentially a powered descent vehicle for nearly the whole ride down. This "little detail" destroys their entire story - the cost of developing this new vehicle is not planned, and the mass for this goes way up, and so do all the launch issues.
To wipe off the scent of "scam" from this they need to present a credible concept and plan for developing a workable Mars lander, and work backward from there to the other aspects of the program. Also an estimated cost breakdown for each component of their mission. That is not so hard if they know what they are doing.
BTW, the little Curiosity probe, far simpler and far smaller than any manned mission, cost $2.5 billion by itself.
Any argument that...
Please stop. I've now cited an official government source, and a reputable international source. Both of these analysis were done by a team of economists, nuclear engineers, and accounted for as many factors as reasonably can be taken into consideration. You have cited... absolutely nothing.
That the oceans contain enough uranium for 10,000 years of once-through energy production is well known and easily confirmed. The IEEE Spectrum article cites current research results that indicate the cost of seawater extraction can be performed at a cost of about $300/kg, a price point that the uranium spot market has already broken in the past, and the additional cost added to electricity by paying $300/kg vs current prices of around $100/kg is only about 0.6 cents per kwh still quite competitive with coal, gas and renewable energy sources.
Economists making government resource projections aren't permitted to consider emerging (aka unproven) technologies. Up until now there has been little incentive to try to develop seawater extraction (more expensive admittedly) as long as conventional mines were cranking out adequate supplies at low prices. This will change, and new technologies developed and exploited.
Just look at fracking. No production to speak of 10 years ago, now production is climbing steadily, soon to create a large gas surplus. Or renewable energy, with double digit increases in wind and solar power year after year. New technology and production processes with lower costs aren't limited to gas, solar and wind - uranium extraction benefits also. New processes often do not get perfected until there is economic demand for them.
Specially since this is U-235 (the primary nuclear fuel currently in use on civilian nuclear power stations). Using U-235 for nuclear weapons is only common in first generation nuclear programs. You see, enriching uranium is a PITA (separating isotopes), while separating plutonium from anything else is soooo much easier (chemical separation).
Your notion is about 50 years out of date - this was a common idea in the 1950s. The perfection of the gas centrifuge, available since the early 1960s completely changed the equation.
Highly enriched uranium is much cheaper than plutonium gram for gram (the cost differential is more than 10:1). That "easy" chemical separation you speak of has to be done in a hot cell, and produces large amounts of highly radioactive waste, and requires first making uranium into fuel, then cooking it in an expensive reactor for months, and then more months of cooling. HEU these days simply takes slightly radioactive natural or low enriched uranium and sends it through a gas centrifuge cascade in a modest-sized warehouse giving you product easily converted to metal at the other end after several days later.
Highly enriched uranium (aka HEU, your "U-235") is widely used in modern thermonuclear weapons. The secondary casing is made out of it, the secondary spark plug is likely made out of it, and perhaps half of the total yield of warhead is when the highly enriched uranium is fissioned by the flood neutrons from the thermonuclear burn. There is roughly ten times more HEU in a modern weapon than plutonium, which is only used for the primary (where the fact that it has a lower critical mass is very important).
Obama jumped the pension obligation ahead of the secured lien holders. There was no legal reason for this and it was wrong.
The secured lien holders are the ones that refused a debt-for-equity swap, providing for partial repayment, preventing restructuring and and forcing GM into bankruptcy. Here is an account of this in that left-wing rag the Wall Street Journal.
The assertion that there was some sort of violation of law is flatly untrue. See for example: Stephen J. Lubben, "No Big Deal: The GM and Chrysler Cases in Context", 83 Am. Bankr. L. J. 531, 533-34 (2009). The disposition of assets was well within the authority of the bankruptcy judge.
Political factions that despise labor of course are upset that the workers didn't get screwed out of their jobs and pensions, as usual, but dressing this preference up in legal garb is fraudulent.
Even bankruptcy lawyers who would prefer to have seen workers thoroughly shafted admit that the bankruptcy was handled in a fully legal manner: Bankruptcy Law Review.
I take exception to this. As of 24 March 2012 we can state for a fact that Dick Cheney now has a normal human heart: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/dick-cheney-receives-heart-transplant/
And we have suspicions as to why...
Wow. So, what happens the atmospheric CO2 in that case? Would it precipitate as "dry ice" snow?
Vapor pressure of carbon dioxide at -100 C: 100 mm. Actual partial pressure of CO2 on average in Earth's lower atmosphere: 0.3 mm. Partial pressure of CO2 in exhaled breath: 38 mm. So no, no dry ice snow - the vapor pressure is still too high. At around -110 C the possibility of "dry ice frost breath" becomes possible. It would have to be near -140 C before CO2 would start condensing out of the air.
"Suppose the next election is Hillary vs. Christie. Would you be happy with people listening in on Christie's phone calls and those of his circle and supporters? Or Hillary's?"
This is exactly what is happening in Turkey.
Consider the very well reported "Kuchmagate" incident in Ukraine in 2000 in which a government spy, spying on President Kuchma (aka "his boss"), revealed that Kuchma was involved in criminal activities including kidnap/murder. It resulted in a dramatic political change in Ukraine. The intial release of the recordings was completely anonymous.
We may like the change, considering it a baddie getting his just desserts, but this is a troubling precedent. Anybody could choose to do this for any political or personal reason.
And then there is the "Squidgygate" where private (but embarrassing) conversations involving Diana, Princess of Wales, then the wife of the heir to the throne, were apparently recorded by a phone tap on New Years Eve 1989, then rebroadcast several days later by the tapper so that it could be clearly picked up by anyone who monitored non-commercial radio frequencies. The apparent conclusion would be that that agents of the British Government spied on Diana to aid Prince Charles in dealing with his troubled marriage, headed for divorce.
The rise of the national security state has placed all democratic institutions in peril.
Well said. Please mod this AC up.
Right wing coward advocates police state to control what is intrinsically a victimless crime (intoxication). Good to know.
2. Grinding poverty and inequality: Monarchial rule begets serfdom and a midevil class structure. furthermore that class is infected upon your name for generations. Kings decide what you can and cannot eat with hunting laws, and who you can and cannot marry by proxy of the church. in the past, even certain hats and colors were banned by monarchies.
While there are problems with monarchies, this is not one of them, not relative to modern society. Gaps in inequality were much less in feudalism (though everyone had less overall, too),
Oh my. Citiation needed.
Let's see, around 1100 AD in England 75% of the wealth (land) was owned by just 200 people (0.01% of the population): http://faculty.history.wisc.edu/sommerville/123/123%2013%20Society.htm
As bad as wealth inequality is in the US (it is by far the most extreme among the economically advanced nations), here it takes a full 10% of the population to reach this level of wealth ownership: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States
that bad, no worse than your average modern wage-slave (and serfs actually tended to work fewer hours each day than we do).
Support for your claim?
Instead of everyone who breaths being able to vote only let people who opt-in vote. To opt-in would require some form of service to the government be it civil services, administrative, military, etc. Freedom would still exist for all but political decisions would be limited. That might curb masses of people voting for candidates who simply promise the world and deliver little. Just because the idea is from Starship Troopers doesn't negate its efficacy.
You do realize that this system is required to offer everyone a government job, right? So that everyone can "opt in" who wants to? Or do we instead only let certain select people to "opt in"?
Some geeks REALLY need to get out and get laid...
From TFA: "Neoreactionary ideas overlap heavily with pickup artistry...". Yes, not getting laid is one of their chief complaints. They aren't getting any and learning to con females is their plan to rectify the situtation.
A telling excerpt form the article:
Lets see - they are fascinated with picking up hot girls (without having to invest in a relationship), escape to a fantasy realm where they will automatically be in charge (the number of sea-cities and real sea-city projects being zero), and they want to regard other ethnic groups as truly inherently inferior, without having to admit to being a racist ("scientific racism" is currently as scientific as "intelligent design").
Arrested male geek adolescence which, having come into some money, is trying to buy itself into intellectual legitimacy.
The Baby Boom ended in 1964. 1957 was the peak year of the Boom. The youngest Baby Boomers are 50.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Birth_Rates.svg
The rich of today pale in comparison to the wealthy of the last century. Rockefellers, Carnegies had 10 times as much wealth as Bill Gates, the 'wealth gap' was much wider, yet the standard of living for the poor was rising, not falling the way it is today.
Wow! 10 times more!? Got a source for this interesting claim? You wouldn't just be makin' stuff up would you?
From what I can find the incomes of the top 1%, and the top 0.01%, etc., is at or above the GDP share of the beginning of the 20th century.
Seems like everything is a delicacy somewhere in China...
Taking short exposures and processing them on a computer is the "poor man's adaptive optics". A very powerful technique (if the object is bright enough) is too take a large number (thousands) of short exposures, then sort through them for a "lucky" image - one in which the atmosphere is momentarily stable. Multiple lucky images can be stacked together to get longer exposures. This really is a very powerful technique, not requiring extremely expensive high precision tracking hardware.
Lord Rosse's telescope used a cast speculum metal mirror, basically pewter, which had a reflectivity of 66%. Glass silvering technology had not been developed to a level adequate for astronomical mirrors. As a result the light gathering power of the 72" Leviathan of Parsontown was equivalent to a 58" mirror of 100% reflectivity. Clement's mirror is coated with silver, and with even a mediocre silvering job a reflectivity at least 90% should be obtained. This makes his mirror equivalent to a 66" mirror of 100% reflectivity, so it is a more "powerful" mirror.