Losers from Obama's proposed 2011 budget

On Feb 4, 11:11 am, "Graystar" wrote:
South Africa is not stable and is the 1st likely to be a problem in a global
conflict.

Please cite a source for this. My understanding was that violence in
South Africa has decreased, not increased, since the abolition of
apartheid.

China is likely to be the cause of the next global conflict. They are
gearing up now.

Or they could be looking for global-but-economic supremacy, or
political-but-regional supremacy, or a second Cold War through proxy
nations. Or -- unlikely as it may seem to you -- they might just be
trying to join the First World after languishing in a Maoist economy
for decades. At any rate, they are currently both willing and able to
supply the world with titanium at market prices, which is more than
can be said for the Moon.

The cap on the ambition of their rulers is not going to hold unless their
stranglehold on the markets is circumvented.
That can only be done by removing them as the primary resource pool.

The Chinese economy is not going to be seriously affected by Lunar
mining operations: they have so many other customers, and so many
other markets to sell in, that they would be unfazed by the loss of
American titanium sales. As for averting World War III, diplomacy,
widened economic sanctions, or really anything at all would be a
better solution than rushing off to colonize the Moon.

Australia is stable and is likely to be stable for a while unless... the
China cap pops off.

Or unless the Earth is struck by a comet, or unless the Rapture
occurs, or unless aliens invade, or unless the LHC destroys the
world... There are an infinite number of unlikely apocalypses, and in
every one of them, the availability of titanium becomes rather a moot
point.

You have to think longer term than your view IMO. It would ease tensions if
we had a source no one else can touch,
but would allow us to sell some on the world market.

I'm not sure that it would. Sadly, most of the world's problems are
totally unrelated to metal reserves. Would more aluminum have
abolished apartheid any faster? Would China commit fewer human rights
violations, or concern itself less with Taiwan, if it had greater
stockpiles of manganese?

You can bet there are
activist in all those countries, Earth Firsters etc...
and that is arising as a problem and will only grow causing needless
conflict and may lead to worse problems.

If I may be frank with you, I think you seriously misunderstand the
both the objectives, and the capabilities, of conservationist groups.

Antarctica mining: that is Earth based. It affects the Earth and is
accessible by Activists and other geopolitical entities.
The moon is not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Treaty

These two treaties offer more than enough ammunition for anybody who
wants to protest commercial or industrial use of the Moon.

You don't have to strip mine the moon to get what we want.

Yes, we do. That's what "processing the Lunar regolith" means:
scooping up tons of surface material (thousands or millions of tons,
in most discussions of the subject), melting it down to retrieve the
desired elements, and discarding the slag in huge heaps.

It's not a single element program, nor is it a single purpose program.
That's what the first lab habitat is for and there are multiple phases to
any project.

Add as many phases as you like. You still have to sell 1 unit of
titanium as if it were half-a-million units. Billy Mays himself
couldn't pull that off.

No one is talking about using old transport technology to make the cargo
runs.

But it provides a baseline for speculation. We know we have to make
Lunar shipping half-a-million times more profitable, somehow, if we
want to break even...never mind turn a profit. Are there any
technologies, new or old, that could realistically do this? (Note
that if your plan relies on "handwavium" -- antigravity, cold fusion,
unicorn blood -- it cannot be considered "realistic".)

Then give us the lecture. Really, I want to see an old-fashioned Moon
base as much as the next guy. But I haven't yet seen the case made,
that doing so would be *economically* expedient.

***
Love to. Not possible at this time thanks to our imperious leader.

Who is this, and how is he or she stopping you from typing words on a
keyboard?

Financial seaworthiness is more of a concern to me right now than educating
those who
1) want all the answers for free 2) think that

In case you haven't noticed, "financial seaworthiness" is a concern
for me too. I'm the one quoting titanium prices, etc. You're the one
claiming this scheme will pay for itself without crunching the
numbers. BTW, if you can't be bothered to explain why people should
do something, don't expect it to get done.

Actually Ti is the nineth most abundant.

I stand corrected. My apologies. Of course, it's still an extremely
common element.

You should know that the form of the ore matters. Our Earth Ti is found in
rutile, ilmenite, magnetite and iron in combination, not by itself.

Nor is it found by itself on the Moon: we would still have to refine
the ores somehow. In addition, magnetite contains no titanium; it's
Fe3O4. And iron, of course, contains no titanium at all. Perhaps
there was a typo in that last sentence?

As to the "Chunk of change" I have already pointed out that Ti alone is not
the only metal we would gain.

No, but it is the most profitable, as I have already pointed out.

CO2 produced from the process could be used for the bio lab, and for feeding
the atmospheric portion of the habitat.

In other words, it will not be shipped off the Moon to pay for the
colony. (Though there's no significant demand for CO2 in the first
place, so that's just as well.)

Since there will be an effort to harvest volatiles, like He3, then there
will also be harvesting of other gasses.

You assume there will be an effort to harvest helium-3. Again,
without helium-3 reactors back home to use it, there's not much hope
for that. And the other gases on the Moon aren't worth much: trace
amounts of helium-4 and hydrogen, some sodium and potassium, lots of
oxygen. Not exactly rare, precious materials.

That claim was not made by me.

You said: "It is processed in a place that allows for complete
processing of the ore, unlike Earth". How am I supposed to read that
sentence, except as "the Earth does not allow for complete processing
of titanium ore"? Which is obvious nonsense, because we do in fact
have titanium, and we're not getting it somewhere other than Earth,
so...

That is a very narrow view. No one is going to the moon for 1 thing.

Except you started this conversation by claiming that "Mineral ore
Resources laying on the surface = money". If it turns out we can't
actually make any money from those resources, we have to cross that
off our list of reasons to go to the Moon.

What we both understand is that if current prices will always be the same,
most Earth mining will eventually lead to increased scarcity of these
resources to the average citizen.

Once again, all the metals available on the Moon are are abundant
right here on Earth, and will continue to be far into the future.
We're not talking about gallium and tantalum; we're not even talking
about copper and zinc, for pity's sake. Nobody, but *nobody*,
predicts a "titanium peak"...not in the next century, not in the next
thousand years. (After all, it's the ninth most abundant element on
Earth, right?)

....You will have noticed that I did not address your concerns about
whether CO2 is a pollutant, the failure of American education, etc.
I'm sure these would be rewarding topics for another conversation, but
I've had to skip over them in favor of discussing the main topic of
this one: would a Moon colony be profitable? If not, your faith in
the private sector is sadly misplaced. McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed
Martin, Virgin Galactic, Space Adventures...these are corporations
with stockholders, not charities run for the good of humanity.