On Thursday, December 1, 2016 at 12:28:26 AM UTC+13, Fred J. McCall wrote:
William Mook wrote:

You are correct self replicating mining machines revolutionise mining.

Where are they today in mining?

I would suggest you study the work of Diane Newman at Caltech. She bred bacteria that breathe rock and **** valuable metals like gold and copper. They're working in copper mine tailings today and are revolutionising mining industry.


I'd suggest you learn to spell her name. I assume you're referring to
Dianne Newman. What you describe isn't what she did. Microbes aren't
'machines'.


Others are looking at extending this capability to control weather.

http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studi...Manobianco.pdf


When are you going to learn that paper studies are NOT operating
systems?


--
"Ordinarily he is insane. But he has lucid moments when he is
only stupid."
-- Heinrich Heine


Its funny that you are so certain about things you obviously know nothing about. You are clueless of the fact that 20% of the worlds copper production ALREADY comes from bioleaching.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17406375

Bio-Systems recover 90% and more of the metals, and techniques to recover the metals extracted by the microbes are well developed. Research is underway to use microbes in space to extract metals from asteroids and return the concentrates to Earth.

http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2015/...oleaching.html

A sample return capsule coming back from 101955 Bennu - which masses 7.76x10^10 kg - which contains 20,389 kg of gold worth $767,298,982 today! Along with similar values of other rare materials.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...5427462344.jpg

A 2 meter diameter sample return capsule with a 0.3 meter height, plated on the back side with 156 mm (6.14 inch) thick layer of gold, carries 20.4 metric tons of gold, worth $767 million. Well worth the $150 million cost of deploying the system on the asteorid in the first place!

Forward thinking investors are looking into this technology TODAY! Not waiting around for the government to hand them the contract.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...old_production

A system that takes five years to mine a small asteroid of gold and other rare materials (and process the remaining un-returned materials into stuff easily recovered by future space operators) - could match the present world production of these materials with a launch per day! After five years, a capsule per day would be returning to Earth - increasing value 5.11x in five years providing a 38% ROI.