Past Perfect, Future Misleading

That's not the point. The gold rushes, or even the discovery of the
Americas were not effective neither, if what you expected from them
was to get gold. What's interesting in this venture is to open new
spaces (and new liberties) for mankind. The opportunity to establish
new society afresh. Of course, since we need the help of those who
stay behind to get there, we need to "motivate" them with some shiny
golden dream.

There is no place in the solar system to establish a new society
afresh. A far more interesting possibility would be using stimulated
lava releases to create new islands in the Atlantic and Pacific.

The rush to America was a land rush, not a gold rush, because land =
money.

In article ,
says...

snip

If an accessible, volatile rich asteroid is found, delta V might become
much cheaper. The asteroid's water and fuel could be exported to a depot
in earth orbit. Then it would be much cheaper to excape LEO. It would
also become much less expensive to export stuff to earth from various
locations.

I happen to believe "The Killer App" will be an extinct comet (Nereus or
1979 VA? Maybe even Deimos - it possibly has interior volatiles and is
easier to export from than Mars). Then when delta v is much cheaper,
metal rich asteroids will also become Killer Apps.

I *so* agree with this. While Mars beckons, I truly think that the next
important wave in manned space exploration is to the asteroids. We need
to learn how to mine asteroids safely, and there's going to be one
hellacious learning curve to it, I think.

--

Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for | Doug Van Dorn
thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup |

John Ordover wrote:

That's not the point. The gold rushes, or even the discovery of the
Americas were not effective neither, if what you expected from them
was to get gold. What's interesting in this venture is to open new
spaces (and new liberties) for mankind. The opportunity to establish
new society afresh. Of course, since we need the help of those who
stay behind to get there, we need to "motivate" them with some shiny
golden dream.


There is no place in the solar system to establish a new society
afresh. A far more interesting possibility would be using stimulated
lava releases to create new islands in the Atlantic and Pacific.

The rush to America was a land rush, not a gold rush, because land =
money.
terraform earth? That's a novel idea.
All we have to do is get rid of the greenies and algae huggers
and then we can actually make this place a nice world.
I'm not a republican or a democrat. but, As the space cats have
discovered, this place needs major management. We have everything
we need here. We can't all leave this planet. Do we trash what's
left and the elite bail off. I suspect that the remaining pop
would send A WMD your way on principle. I would.
Time to farm the planet earth. Then, let's go to the sky
when everybody is happy here. There is a hugh amount of space
based activitiy that will have to happen for us to make this
a right planet.
Jim Davis.
I don't know why i'm having these thoughts, but bad things are
going to happen, and soon if we don't take action.

snip
There is no place in the solar system to establish a new society
afresh. A far more interesting possibility would be using stimulated
lava releases to create new islands in the Atlantic and Pacific.

The rush to America was a land rush, not a gold rush, because land =
money.
snip a ****load of utopia ****
What the hell am I thinking?
It will never happen, you space guys revel in your gov contracts.
We will continue to fart away public assets on bean sprout space
experiments and eventually all end up living under an overpass.
See you there!
Jim Davis.

Allen Thomson wrote:
Kevin Willoughby wrote

WAG indeed. It ignores the fact that dumping that much gold into the
market would depress the price significantly. There was a time
aluminium was more expensive than gold. Decent refining techniques make
it cheap enough to be disposable when used for cans and food wrap.

But is it not true that far more profit is made off of cheap Al
now than very expensive Al then? Volume matters.

On a previous iteration of this discussion, someone proposed that,
if the fabled El Dorado Asteroid could somehow be returned to Earth
(carefully, gently), the price of Au (or Pt or Ir, etc.) per kg would
indeed plummet. But many high-volume applications now infeasible
because of scarcity and cost would appear -- home plumbing,
cookware, chemical industry uses, electronics, etc., etc.

But unlike Al, Au is not useful in notthat many places. What would
you use a dense soft metal for?


I have no idea as to what would actually happen, but it might be
interesting to put the question to a graduate engineering seminar:
what could you do if [now-precious metal] cost, say, $10/kg? Or $1/kg
or $100/kg?

Not much.

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++

In article , Kevin Willoughby wrote:
Andrew Gray said:
The oceans contain some $1.5 *quadrillion* worth of gold (or so my
slighlty hyperbolic-looking source says; this number seems inherently
WAG);

WAG indeed. It ignores the fact that dumping that much gold into the
market would depress the price significantly. There was a time
aluminium was more expensive than gold. Decent refining techniques make
it cheap enough to be disposable when used for cans and food wrap.

I think I mentioned in the previous paragraph that a couple of thousand
tonnes would depress the world market, so... g

ISTR that, if supply was equal, copper would be mroe valuable than gold.
Always worth bearing in mind.

--
-Andrew Gray

"Andrew Gray" wrote in message
. ..
In article , Kevin Willoughby
wrote:
Andrew Gray said:
The oceans contain some $1.5 *quadrillion* worth of gold (or so my
slighlty hyperbolic-looking source says; this number seems inherently
WAG);

WAG indeed. It ignores the fact that dumping that much gold into the
market would depress the price significantly. There was a time
aluminium was more expensive than gold. Decent refining techniques make
it cheap enough to be disposable when used for cans and food wrap.

I think I mentioned in the previous paragraph that a couple of thousand
tonnes would depress the world market, so... g

ISTR that, if supply was equal, copper would be mroe valuable than gold.
Always worth bearing in mind.

--
-Andrew Gray

There are several "Mountains" of copper scattered about the world? IRC a
mine/processing facility has recently came on line at 1 such "Mountain" in
Indonesia. There are others in Peru & Chili.

There have been rumors that the Indonesian's will be able to control the
price of copper because production costs are below most other
mine/processing operations world wide, with possibly the exception of
certain mines/processing operations in Peru & Chili.

With any natural resource there is a point where any given deposit is not
economically feasible to exploit. Oil is an example. There is oil in many
places, but it is not economically feasible to produce because OPEC has
sufficient production capability to control the price of oil. Historically
OPEC has maintained the price of Oil at a level to make many known deposits
uneconomical to exploit. The same circumstances could become reality where
copper is concerned.
Ralph Nesbitt

ISTR somebody mentioning a paper, about three or so years back, that
took these effects into account, and concluded that such an enterprise
would still be profitable under reasonable assumption (even about the
cost of getting to the asteroid etc.) Henry?

Here are some cites which were posted to usenet a few years ago.
These are also at http://www.panix.com/~kingdon/space/mining.html
along with a few online links.

* M. McKay, D. McKay, M. Duke, eds., Space Resources:Materials,
NASA SP-509, v. 3, US GPO, 1992 (P. 111-120 cover asteroid
mining).
* J. Lewis, T. Jones, W. Farrand, "Carbonyl Extraction of Lunar
and Asteroidal Metals", Engineering, Construction, and
Operations in Space (eds. Johnson & Wetzel),
p. 111-118. American Society of Civil Engineers, New York, 1988
* J. Lewis, M. Mathhews, M. Guerrieri, eds., Resources of
Near-Earth Space, U. of Arizona Press, Tuscon, 1993. (Too many
good articles in this one to list).
* J. Kargel, "Metalliferous Asteroids as potential sources of
precious metals", Journal of Geophysical Research, v. 99, no
E10, p. 21129-21141, October 25, 1994. (The first attempt I've
seen at developing price elasticity curves for raw materials)
* C. Meinel has a nice article from the 1985 IEEE EASCON on mass
payback for various asteroidal return scenarios.
* Lewis and Lewis, Space Resources: Breaking the Bonds of
Earth. (Don't have a complete citation for this).