_Lucifer's Hammer_ Ending (Spoiler)
Matt Hickman
_Lucifer's Hammer_ is a cautionary tale, warning of the dangers of
Earth approaching celestial objects. The subtext of the novel is
that Humanity needs to have a presence in Space, if only to detect
and potentially deflect the occasional comet or asteroid that may
strike Earth and cause a significant amount of damage.
In _Lucifer's Hammer_'s epilogue, Niven and Pournelle write about an
asteroid -out in the Oort cloud- whose orbit is perturbed, sending
back into the inner parts of the Solar System. Apparently in a
few thousand years the asteroid or one of the comets whose orbit
it perturbed would strike the Earth.
This epilogue reminded me to much of a bad horror movie. One
where the monster has apparently been destroyed, yet the last
seconds of the movie show him lumbering away to terrorize another
set of teenagers somewhere else.
What I would have liked to see in _Lucifer's Hammer_'s epilogue is
for Niven and Pournelle to take the threat of an asteroid/comet
strike beyond simply that of the threat of destruction. We see
the destruction in the main body of the novel. Niven and
Pournelle should then turn the threat on its head and show the
potential of asteroids and comets have for exploitation of
resources, metals, ices, gases etc.
Instead of ending the novel with a threat, I suggest a better
epilogue. In this epilogue an asteroid descends into the inner
solar system where some heads-up entrepreneur sees its potential,
steers it into orbit around the Earth where it can be mined for it
ores. Only after this has happened does someone note that the
original orbit intersected the Earth.
Matt Hickman bh...@chevron.com TANSTAAFL!
OS/2 Systems Specialist, Chevron Information Technologies Co.
"No matter-he had solved that problem when he had first
grown old enough to wish to get in and out at night
without consulting his elders."
- Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988)
_Starman Jones_ (c. 1953)
Douglas Borsom
...
>What I would have liked to see in _Lucifer's Hammer_'s epilogue is
>for Niven and Pournelle to take the threat of an asteroid/comet
>strike beyond simply that of the threat of destruction. We see
>the destruction in the main body of the novel. Niven and
>Pournelle should then turn the threat on its head and show the
>potential of asteroids and comets have for exploitation of
>resources, metals, ices, gases etc.
...
Nice idea. I think it is an improvement on the book's. And
it's in keeping with the strong pro-technology, pro-space themes of
the book (Gosh, however would civilization have survived without those
nuclear power plants and the near godlike qualities of the astronauts?)
While I thought the book melodramatic and preachy, the panicky drive out
of LA (in a white Bronco??) reminds me of the drive from LA in
Heinlein's "Year of the Jackpot," an old favorite of mine.
-doug
LeeToon
"You can fly, but we control the lightning"
CRIES OUT for a sequel, perhaps dealing with the things mentioned in the
spoilers, so we could see what Niven and Pournelle meant by that.
Hey, they did a sequel to Mote. Lucifer is at least as deserving.
I dunno. How about a Clarke/Niven/Pournelle collaboration, where
survivalists speak Cultured British English regardless of circumstance.
They could call it "Lucifer's Hammer of God"
A fan of all three,
Don Lee
Please direct comments and/or flames to Lee...@aol.com
J. P. Gilliver
bh...@chevron.com "Matt Hickman" writes:
[]
> Instead of ending the novel with a threat, I suggest a better
> epilogue. In this epilogue an asteroid descends into the inner
> solar system where some heads-up entrepreneur sees its potential,
> steers it into orbit around the Earth where it can be mined for it
> ores. Only after this has happened does someone note that the
> original orbit intersected the Earth.
I don't think it is likely that such would ever be economical, unless the
substances in question were some rare and wonderful drug; certainly no ordinary
mineral - pure gold, uranium, plutonium, platinum - would (at current prices)
be worth orbital mining. There is the possibility of use of such an asteroid as
a construction base, but I doubt it (the materials still needing taking up).
Use of such a body as a source of fuel for spacecraft is just about possible,
especially if all that is required is reaction mass.
--
J. P. Gilliver (John); also G6JPG @ GB7NNA on the amateur radio packet network.
`Ergonomic' =/= `dext-handed'. (john.g...@gmrc.gecm.com at work.)
The summit of Everest is marine limestone.
I hope you dream a pig.
Erik Max Francis
rrs...@ibm.net (Matt Hickman) writes:
> This epilogue reminded me to much of a bad horror movie. One
> where the monster has apparently been destroyed, yet the last
> seconds of the movie show him lumbering away to terrorize another
> set of teenagers somewhere else.
I don't understand what was bad about it. It was pointing out that,
yes, this cometary impact nearly destroyed civilization, and, more
importantly, IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN. Since the book is a cautionary
tale, that seems like an important addendum to that tale.
> What I would have liked to see in _Lucifer's Hammer_'s epilogue is
> for Niven and Pournelle to take the threat of an asteroid/comet
> strike beyond simply that of the threat of destruction. We see
> the destruction in the main body of the novel. Niven and
> Pournelle should then turn the threat on its head and show the
> potential of asteroids and comets have for exploitation of
> resources, metals, ices, gases etc.
Huh? Naturally, there are great resources in the Belt, but I don't
see how this has _anything_ to do with _Lucifer's Hammer_. The book
was about a cometary impact, and its effects on human civilization.
What does the potential of cometary or asteroid mining operations have
to do with that?
> Instead of ending the novel with a threat, I suggest a better
> epilogue. In this epilogue an asteroid descends into the inner
> solar system where some heads-up entrepreneur sees its potential,
> steers it into orbit around the Earth where it can be mined for it
> ores. Only after this has happened does someone note that the
> original orbit intersected the Earth.
That's actually not bad, but it really has little to do with the guts
of the book.
Erik Max Francis, &tSftDotIotE ...!uuwest!alcyone!max m...@alcyone.darkside.com
San Jose, CA 37 20 07 N 121 53 38 W GIGO, Omega, Psi oo the fourth R _
H.3`S,3,P,3$S,#$Q,C`Q,3,P,3$S,#$Q,3`Q,3,P,C$Q,#(Q.#`-"C`- ftmfbs kmmfa / \
_Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt._ Founder SBWF http://www.spies.com/max/ \_/
Erik Max Francis
> I don't think it is likely that such would ever be economical, unless the
> substances in question were some rare and wonderful drug; certainly no ordina
> mineral - pure gold, uranium, plutonium, platinum - would (at current prices)
> be worth orbital mining. There is the possibility of use of such an asteroid
> a construction base, but I doubt it (the materials still needing taking up).
>
> Use of such a body as a source of fuel for spacecraft is just about possible,
> especially if all that is required is reaction mass.
Regardless of their bountiful availability in the Belt, there's always
another consideration: ores are getting harder to come by on the
Earth. Once extraction and processing costs above a certain amount,
it will be profitable to look toward the Belt. I can't say how long
that will take, but it's pretty clear that someday it will happen.
Nathan E Lipke
Niven and Pournel, were trying to get the government to spend money on an
asteriod "defense" system (Possibly where SDI came from). THe threat at the
end just furthered thier cause. While a exploration into the positive side of
asteriods, may have been interesting, it did not serve there cause.
PS A few years ago I saw a Ring-World game in a software store, does anyone
have it? Is it on the net? I might have actually baught it but it went so
quick :)
Nathan E. Lipke
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
< Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to stay in the >
< same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least >
< twice as fast as that! >
< -- Lewis Carrol [Charles Dodgson] >
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Mike Stern
: I don't think it is likely that such would ever be economical, unless the
: substances in question were some rare and wonderful drug; certainly no ordinary
: mineral - pure gold, uranium, plutonium, platinum - would (at current prices)
: be worth orbital mining. There is the possibility of use of such an asteroid as
: a construction base, but I doubt it (the materials still needing taking up).
: Use of such a body as a source of fuel for spacecraft is just about possible,
: especially if all that is required is reaction mass.
Economical? If the cost of transportation comes down, almost anything
done in space becomes economical. If the cost of transporting a pound
of anything to earth orbit and back was lowered to $100, many things
would become economical. Certainly the use of raw materials from a
captured comet and used in EO to manufacture orbital goods is a possibility.
If the cost to EO and back was lowered further to $10/lb, many more things
would become economically viable. How about $1/lb? ...or less?
Rather than saying it will never become economical, we should be working
toward making asteroid mining economical. How? by supporting cheap,
reusable, spacecraft. As Jerry says, the Shuttle is not re-usable.
It's rebuilt before every flight. The Shuttle isn't cheap, since
it needs about 10,000 support people to get it into orbit and back.
The Delta-X has been flown succesfully with a total ground crew of
three (in a trailer). Don't you think it's logical that this spacecraft
was thunk up by Jerry, and designed on Larry's dining room table?
--
Mike Stern
ster...@netcom.com
"A waste is such a terrible thing to mind"
Anonymous Garbage Dump Supervisor
Matt Hickman
<idea concerning mining an asteroid in Eath orbit (EO) deleted>
>I don't think it is likely that such would ever be economical, unless the
>substances in question were some rare and wonderful drug; certainly no ordinary
>mineral - pure gold, uranium, plutonium, platinum - would (at current prices)
>be worth orbital mining. There is the possibility of use of such an asteroid as
>a construction base, but I doubt it (the materials still needing taking up).
>
be worth on today's market? Enough to make a lot of people very rich. Mining could be
done by automatic machinery. The cost would be that of developing the machinery, getting
it up in orbit and installed on the EO asteroid. Getting the minerals back to Earth could be
done using a rail gun or catapult ala _The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress_.
Further, it could be used as a source of raw materials for building and industrializing space. The
Space Studies Institute did a study a few years back where they were looking for any small
asteroids that might have settled in the Earth's L-4 or L-5 libration points. The point of the
study was to find easily accessible raw materials to spur space industrialization. And Earth orbit
is more accessible than Earth's L-4 or L-5 points,
Quite a bit of good SF has been written about Asteroid mining. Donald Kingsbury's "Bring in
the Steel" comes to mind.
Matt Hickman bh...@chevron.com TANSTAAFL!
OS/2 Systems Specialist, Chevron Information Technologies Co.
"I don't charge for world saving and don't do it to order;
It just happens." (Kip Russell)
Robert A. Heinlein (1907 - 1988)
_Have Space Suit Will Travel_ c. 1958
John Schilling
>J. P. Gilliver (G6...@soft255.demon.co.uk) wrote:
[economics of asteroid mining]
[low-cost space travel]
>The Delta-X has been flown succesfully with a total ground crew of
>three (in a trailer). Don't you think it's logical that this spacecraft
>was thunk up by Jerry, and designed on Larry's dining room table?
That would be "DC-X", a subscale test vehicle for a proposed spacecraft
called "Delta Clipper".
And it wasn't thunk up by Pournelle or Niven, but by a guy named Gary
Hudson, who ha substantially more experience and expertise in such matters
than N&P. He presented the idea to N&P circa 1980, and was ignored due to
all of the attention then being paid to the shuttle program. Presented it
again circa 1984, and was not ignored.
Niven and, especially, Pournelle, played a substantial role in mobilizing
the *political* support needed to get the project underway. They had little
to do with the technical aspects, and do not claim otherwise.
--
*John Schilling * "You can have Peace, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * or you can have Freedom. *
*University of Southern California * Don't ever count on having both *
*Aerospace Engineering Department * at the same time." *
*schi...@spock.usc.edu * - Robert A. Heinlein *
*(213)-740-5311 or 747-2527 * Finger for PGP public key *
Bruce Baugh
lee...@aol.com (LeeToon) wrote:
:The last spoken line in Lucifer's Hammer:
:"You can fly, but we control the lightning"
:CRIES OUT for a sequel, perhaps dealing with the things mentioned in the
:spoilers, so we could see what Niven and Pournelle meant by that.
I have often thought that it'd be fun to do a sequel to LUCIFER'S HAMMER that
would start by acknowledging it's alternate history - the Hammer pretty much
has to hit within about two years (plus or minus) of 1981. Pick a definite
time, trim some background details, and then run with it from there.
bru...@teleport.com _____________ http://www.teleport.com/~bruceab/
List Manager, Christlib, for Christian and libertarian concerns
Preview S.M. Stirling's forthcoming novel DRAKON at my home page
"Encrypt! Encrypt! OK! All-One-Key-Steganography-Privacy!
God's law prevents decryption above 1042 bytes - Exceptions? None!"
Robert Billing
G6...@soft255.demon.co.uk "J. P. Gilliver" writes:
> In article <402vef$2s...@news-s02.ny.us.ibm.net>
> bh...@chevron.com "Matt Hickman" writes:
> []
> > steers it into orbit around the Earth where it can be mined for it
> > ores. Only after this has happened does someone note that the
> []
> I don't think it is likely that such would ever be economical, unless the
> substances in question were some rare and wonderful drug; certainly no ordinary
> mineral - pure gold, uranium, plutonium, platinum - would (at current prices)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Surely that's the point. If air travel remained at the cost-per-mile
of the Wright brothers machine then we'd all still be using ships to
cross the Atlantic. If there was a good reason for needing a cheap
ground to orbit tug, one could be produced. Two useful tricks would be
to use ground based power, such as a whacking great microwave beam,
during the initial climbout, and to pick up reaction mass as you go by
using a jet engine while still in atmosphere, then switching to rockets
when the jet gives out. The HOTOL engine worked on this principle, it
was a jet in atmosphere, then in vacuum it closed off its intakes and
used the same combustion chambers and exhaust nozzles to work as a pure
rocket in vacuum.
--
I am Robert Billing, Christian, inventor, traveller, cook and animal
lover, I live in southern England, close to 0:46W 51:22N. "...Trurl,
who vowed by everything that was ever held sacred never, never again to
make a Cybernetic model of the Muse." Stanislaw Lem in the Cyberiad.
Sam
]In <807745...@soft255.demon.co.uk>, "J. P. Gilliver" <G6...@soft255.demon.co.uk> writes:
]<idea concerning mining an asteroid in Eath orbit (EO) deleted>
]>substances in question were some rare and wonderful drug; certainly no ordinary
]>mineral - pure gold, uranium, plutonium, platinum - would (at current prices)
]>a construction base, but I doubt it (the materials still needing taking up).
]>
]Do you know what a couple hundred million tons of nickel-iron (asteroid material)
]would be worth on today's market?
Yes, but if you dump a couple of hundred million tons of nikel-iron a today's
market, bang, no more market - the prices will drop through the floor. Anybody
interested in asteroid mining will first have to create or wait for a massive
demand in nikel-iron. Unless you can get DeBeers interested in stockpiling
the stuff, that is...
---
Sam Pierson <Sam.P...@Sun.COM> I don't speak for Sun, OK.
"Then there the beneficial spin-offs from defense research to be
considered, all the wonderful products that we use every day that were
originally developed for military applications - guns, for instance."
- P.J. O'Rourke
Ken Moore
schi...@spock.usc.edu "John Schilling" writes:
>That would be "DC-X", a subscale test vehicle for a proposed spacecraft
>called "Delta Clipper".
>
>And it wasn't thunk up by Pournelle or Niven, but by a guy named Gary
>Hudson, who ha substantially more experience and expertise in such matters
>than N&P. He presented the idea to N&P circa 1980, and was ignored due to
>all of the attention then being paid to the shuttle program. Presented it
>again circa 1984, and was not ignored.
>
>Niven and, especially, Pournelle, played a substantial role in mobilizing
>the *political* support needed to get the project underway. They had little
>to do with the technical aspects, and do not claim otherwise.
Niven, Pournelle and Flynn acknowledge the special help of Gary Hudson
at the end of "Fallen Angels".
"The Observer" (British Sunday newspaper) for 6 August has an article
about a new aircraft being developed as a launcher at Kirtland Air Force
Base. This is aimed at a launch cost of $225 per kilogram (I make that
$100/lb, near enough). Its name is "Black Horse". It is rocket powered,
using kerosene and hydrogen peroxide (which do not need refrigeration).
It is launched partially fuelled (to save undercarriage weight),
refuelled at 30000 feet and takes a satellite to 400000 feet. There is
nothing in the article about injecting the satellite into orbit, but I
presume the use of small once-only rockets for this delta-v would be
cheaper than putting the whole aircraft into orbit. The USAF hopes to
have a prototype by mid-1997. Anyone with more information?
--
Ken Moore (K...@hpsl.demon.co.uk)
Brian Hostetler
>I dunno. How about a Clarke/Niven/Pournelle collaboration, where
>survivalists speak Cultured British English regardless of circumstance.
>They could call it "Lucifer's Hammer of God"
I know you meant this in jest as you probably know that Pournelle and
Clarke DO NOT get along. Frankly, I wish NO ONE got along with
Pournelle, but that's another, uh, story.
--
Brian
The Internet: Your old grade school home room.
http://silver.ucs.indiana.edu/~brianh/home.html
Steven Leffler
: What possibly could become economical at $100 per pound? Railways
: in the US can move things for about 2.5 cents per ton-mile. Pipe-
: lines are often even cheaper. Against that what does LEO have that
: you don't have on Earth? Power would be more expensive. Wages much
: more so. Building costs likewise. You would have to move most of
: your raw materials no matter how you slice it (at $100 per pound
: that is one expensive car) The only thing it has is vacuum and
: that is of doubtful utility as it is more sensible to use lower
: grade but infinitely cheaper systems on Earth.
.
.
.
: Why bother if, as it is fairly easy to demonstrate, it will
: never be economical to mine asteroids? There is nothing they
: have that can't be mined more cheaply on Earth.
Your argument assumes that resources will continue to be available
cheaply on Earth. This is a bad assumption. The supply of
easily-mineable minerals on Earth is finite and will eventually be
exhausted. When the minerals which are in shortest supply begin to run
out, it may well become economically feasible to mine asteroids for those
substances.
A second thing you've ignored is that it only has to be expensive to
get mass *up* to space. In principle, you can send things *down* from
orbit much more cheaply. Once you have a fleet of ships out of Earth's
gravity well, they can stay up there and send things down by means of a
relatively low-mass ground-to-orbit ship, or some sort of one-shot reentry
vehicle manufactured in orbit. Furthermore, if you want to use the mined
resources in space, you don't have to worry about Earth's gravity well at
all. Moving resources from the asteroid belt to Earth orbit for use in
space construction there could be quite cheap compared to bringing
construction materials up from Earth.
I recognize that this is all far-off stuff. We won't be mining the
asteroids anytime soon. Saying that asteroid mining will "never" be
economical is far too short-sighted, however. You can't predict what our
technology will be like in 200 years anymore than people in the 1700s
could have predicted today's technology.
--
Steven Leffler
lef...@physics.ubc.ca
Mr TH Lawler
>: substances in question were some rare and wonderful drug; certainly no ordinary
>: mineral - pure gold, uranium, plutonium, platinum - would (at current prices)
>: be worth orbital mining. There is the possibility of use of such an asteroid as
Stuff deleted.
>Economical? If the cost of transportation comes down, almost anything
>done in space becomes economical. If the cost of transporting a pound
>of anything to earth orbit and back was lowered to $100, many things
>would become economical. Certainly the use of raw materials from a
>captured comet and used in EO to manufacture orbital goods is a possibility.
>If the cost to EO and back was lowered further to $10/lb, many more things
>would become economically viable. How about $1/lb? ...or less?
>Rather than saying it will never become economical, we should be working
>toward making asteroid mining economical. How? by supporting cheap,
>reusable, spacecraft. As Jerry says, the Shuttle is not re-usable.
>It's rebuilt before every flight. The Shuttle isn't cheap, since
>it needs about 10,000 support people to get it into orbit and back.
>The Delta-X has been flown succesfully with a total ground crew of
>three (in a trailer). Don't you think it's logical that this spacecraft
>was thunk up by Jerry, and designed on Larry's dining room table?
YEAH! LETS BUILD ORBITAL TOWERS (CLARK TOWERS) JUST LIKE I'VE BEEN SAYING!
(Less than $2 per Kg to geosynchronous orbit! :)
--
'And dawn came on at seven hundred miles per second...It came on like
destiny made visible, a moving wall too big to go around.' -Ringworld
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Thorne Lawler, Ba/BSc II. Send email to tho...@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au
Joseph Askew
>Economical? If the cost of transportation comes down, almost anything
>done in space becomes economical. If the cost of transporting a pound
>of anything to earth orbit and back was lowered to $100, many things
>would become economical. Certainly the use of raw materials from a
>captured comet and used in EO to manufacture orbital goods is a possibility.
What possibly could become economical at $100 per pound? Railways
in the US can move things for about 2.5 cents per ton-mile. Pipe-
lines are often even cheaper. Against that what does LEO have that
you don't have on Earth? Power would be more expensive. Wages much
more so. Building costs likewise. You would have to move most of
your raw materials no matter how you slice it (at $100 per pound
that is one expensive car) The only thing it has is vacuum and
that is of doubtful utility as it is more sensible to use lower
grade but infinitely cheaper systems on Earth.
>If the cost to EO and back was lowered further to $10/lb, many more things
>would become economically viable. How about $1/lb? ...or less?
There is a bare minimum cost. About 12 kWhrs per pound I think.
>Rather than saying it will never become economical, we should be working
>toward making asteroid mining economical. How? by supporting cheap,
>reusable, spacecraft. As Jerry says, the Shuttle is not re-usable.
>It's rebuilt before every flight. The Shuttle isn't cheap, since
>it needs about 10,000 support people to get it into orbit and back.
Why bother if, as it is fairly easy to demonstrate, it will
never be economical to mine asteroids? There is nothing they
have that can't be mined more cheaply on Earth. The Shuttle
is a turkey. A complete waste of time. But so what? May as
well keep all those people employed, that is the most useful
thing you could expect from a space program.
>The Delta-X has been flown succesfully with a total ground crew of
>three (in a trailer). Don't you think it's logical that this spacecraft
>was thunk up by Jerry, and designed on Larry's dining room table?
I somehow doubt both those claims. No I do not think it logical.
Joseph
J. P. Gilliver
_was_ developed; I just don't see it happening, whether by microwave or catapult
assisted launch, fully nuclear, or whatever; I think Clarke's satellite lift
(see `The Fountains of Paradise') is intellectually the most pleasing, but of
course it does rely on the monofibre.
I hope I am proved wrong in my lifetime though! (Even $100/lb would open doors
to a LOT of interesting activities - advertising, unfortunately?, being one of
them.)
J. P. Gilliver
bh...@chevron.com "Matt Hickman" writes:
[]
> Do you know what a couple hundred million tons of nickel-iron (asteroid
> material) would
> could be
> done by automatic machinery. The cost would be that of developing the
> machinery, getting
> it up in orbit and installed on the EO asteroid. Getting the minerals back to
And running it while there. Mining equipment tends to be quite heavy-duty stuff!
Even assuming you use unshielded nuclear reactors to power it, you've still got
to get them there.
> Earth could be
> done using a rail gun or catapult ala _The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress_.
I think there would be problems convincing the nuts of the world that you could
control the projectiles properly; they'd have to be of a reasonable size (tons)
to prevent an uneconomical percentage being boiled off in re-entry. I think this
particular part of the problem could be overcome though (assuming you had
something to power your rail gun).
>
> Further, it could be used as a source of raw materials for building and
> industrializing space. The
Yes, I see this as a more likely use than on-earth use of the resources.
[]
> Quite a bit of good SF has been written about Asteroid mining. Donald
> Kingsbury's "Bring in
> the Steel" comes to mind.
[]
Most s. f. assumes certain problems associated with space travel - mainly
energy supply (or a new form of travel/propulsion) have been solved. However,
I still enjoy s. f.! I am heartened by the amount of enthusiasm my one negative
post has generated!
William Bogen
(I think) "Chocolate-covered Manhole Covers".
SPOILER BELOW!
In this story, two women and two men are kidnapped by the robot
servant of some unseen advanced alien race. They are transported to
a primitive Earthlike planet and released. They are expected to
populate the planet and provide new and improved humans/artisans for
the master race. They are left with the clothes on their backs and
one chocolate-covered manhole cover (read the story). Finis.
So, what would you do? How could you minimize the slide back into
savagery for your children? How do you preserve knowledge with
minimal tools? What cultural inventions do you create? Do you try
to prepare your descendants to confront the Masters? How would this
story fit in the Niven Universe? I would love to read it.
William Bogen
w...@iti.org
David Mix Barrington
: In article <403p9o$a...@newsbf02.news.aol.com>,
: lee...@aol.com (LeeToon) wrote:
: :"You can fly, but we control the lightning"
: :CRIES OUT for a sequel, perhaps dealing with the things mentioned in the
: :spoilers, so we could see what Niven and Pournelle meant by that.
: I have often thought that it'd be fun to do a sequel to LUCIFER'S HAMMER that
: would start by acknowledging it's alternate history - the Hammer pretty much
: has to hit within about two years (plus or minus) of 1981. Pick a definite
: time, trim some background details, and then run with it from there.
This happened to some extent -- I recall reading an outline for a rewrite
of _Buck Rogers_, where the outline was by Niven and/or Pournelle. To
produce something like the race-caricature yellow-menace Han of the original,
they posited a comet strike called Hammerfall in the late 20th century,
followed by some sort of alien miscegenation with the real Chinese to produce
the inhuman Han. I remember that this _could_ have been the far future of
_Lucifer's Hammer_, but there was no explicit continuity that I recall other
than the name _Hammerfall_. I think in _Footfall_ the evil heffalumps also
used a comet strike as a softening-up measure.
Am I entirely delusional? Anybody else ever read this?
Dave MB
marc andrew cooper
One problem associated with commercial exploitation of space is the massive
amount of capital needed to create the infrastructure (ie transportation,
mining equipment, etc) needed. As an example, just look at a project that
our European readers are quite familiar with, the English Channel Tunnel
(Chunnel). The Chunnel has been technologically possible for years and
desireable for an even longer time, yet it was not until the last decade that
cost-benefit analysis indicated that the capital costs could be low enough to
justify building the Chunnel and to produce a future profit. Even now there
are many who wonder if the Chunnel will even break even. The point of all this
is that space mining is technologically possible today, but it is not economica-
ally feasible. Who knows how long it will take to become economically attractive considering that metal ores are hardly scarce. Siberia, western
China, much of Africa, and the ocean floors have not been mined and recycling
is becoming more prevenlent. Until these sources have been exhausted, space
mining will probably remain more science fiction than science fact.
Marc Cooper
Erik Max Francis
> Why bother if, as it is fairly easy to demonstrate, it will
> never be economical to mine asteroids? There is nothing they
> have that can't be mined more cheaply on Earth.
Ah, even in the degenerate case, the Earth will eventually be mind
out enough that it _will_ be profitable to go to the asteroids.
Saying "never" is very slippery business. Eventually it _will_ be
economical to go to the asteroids. The only questions is when.
Michael Sandy
Erik Max Francis <m...@alcyone.darkside.com> wrote:
>"J. P. Gilliver" <G6...@soft255.demon.co.uk> writes:
>
>another consideration: ores are getting harder to come by on the
>Earth. Once extraction and processing costs above a certain amount,
>it will be profitable to look toward the Belt. I can't say how long
>that will take, but it's pretty clear that someday it will happen.
>
>
The costs of getting at ores on Earth will only go up as the concern for the
damage to the enviroment go up. We aren't going to 'run out' of ore on
Earth. However, there will be increasing political and social costs to
extracting them. If we wait until there actually _aren't_ anymore
exploitable resources on Earth before we start exploiting space, we aren't
Homo Sapiens but Homo Ignoramus!
Perhaps a couple of thousand years from now, Solar satellites and nuclear
power plants with fuel mined in the asteroids on the near side of the moon
will beam power to isolated areas. Perhaps computer chip plants which
require a huge radiation source to etch the chips, and noxious chemicals,
will find it cheaper to build on the moon, (providing there is already a
highly educated labor supply there), especially for export to the outer
planets.
Perhaps there will be an application here, an application there, but a really
long time before space based manufacturing becomes more than a blip on the
GDP.
I suppose in not too long both LEO and GEO will become stuffed with
telecommunications and Earth Observer satellites, and some developments
for those purposes will one day enable more exploration of the rest of
the solar system. Note I say exploration, not exploitation. I just
don't see any spinoffs from LEO and GEO leading to asteroid mining.
If they enable _cheap_ exploration and survey they might find a treasure
trove asteroid, which by itself would justify a one-shot exploitation
mission, which would then justify more.
The technology for surveying other planets, moons and asteroids for
exploitable resources will have spin offs.
I can see, eventually, it being cost effective to use minerals in space to
supply industries in space, but that presupposes industries in space
which can generate revenue to justify their launch costs on Earth.
For a science-fiction story you can have a really foolish government
launch all this stuff for political reasons, collaspe due to bankruptcy,
but leave all these conveniently exploitable satellites for your
heroic visionary protagonists. (And how _many_ authors have resorted to
that dodge!)
Michael Sandy
Bernard Peek
>
> Yes, but if you dump a couple of hundred million tons of nikel-iron a today's
> market, bang, no more market - the prices will drop through the floor. Anybody
> interested in asteroid mining will first have to create or wait for a massive
> demand in nikel-iron. Unless you can get DeBeers interested in stockpiling
> the stuff, that is...
Much simpler than that. You park the meteor in orbit, find out who has
the biggest investment in ferrous metals and have them pay you *not*
to mine it.
I always prefer minimum effort solutions.
--
Bernard Peek
I.T and Management Development Trainer to the Cognoscenti
b...@intersec.demon.co.uk
Robert Billing
maco...@krypton.engin.umich.edu "marc andrew cooper" writes:
> One problem associated with commercial exploitation of space is the massive
> amount of capital needed to create the infrastructure (ie transportation,
> mining equipment, etc) needed. As an example, just look at a project that
> our European readers are quite familiar with, the English Channel Tunnel
> (Chunnel).
One of the major problems with the original plan for the tunnel was
getting air in and combustion products out in order to operate steam
traction in a tunnel that long. There was a serious plan to build a row
of artificial islands along the route to provide ventilation, and then
the impossible happened, electric traction was invented. [If you want
to know more about the problems of operating steam trains in long
tunnels read H Gasson's books (published by OPC in the UK).]
Asteroid mining might well go the same way if a significant discovery
is made, and there are several candidates in LN's books. For example
there is plenty of electrical power to be had in space if you spread
out a few square miles of solar panel. Connect that to the JumpShift
hardware, and just send the ore down in buckets. Use the inertial (?)
damper, but no thermal compensation, and the ore will arrive hot enough
to kick start the smelter.
BTW My wife & I were on the 14th fare paying train to Paris through
the tunnel, great experience, and it means that I can now take my wife,
who is always seasick on ferries, to France on holiday.
John Schilling
>In article <405htf$t...@spock.usc.edu>
> schi...@spock.usc.edu "John Schilling" writes:
[history of Delta Clipper spacecraft proposal]
>Niven, Pournelle and Flynn acknowledge the special help of Gary Hudson
>at the end of "Fallen Angels".
Indeed. The "Phoenix" in _Angels_ is taken directly from Hudson's 1980
and 1984 proposals. Delta Clipper has undergone some mutations, and
is being run by McDonnell-Douglas rather than by Hudson's firm, but is
a second-generation descendant of the original Phoenix proposal.
>"The Observer" (British Sunday newspaper) for 6 August has an article
>about a new aircraft being developed as a launcher at Kirtland Air Force
>Base. This is aimed at a launch cost of $225 per kilogram (I make that
>$100/lb, near enough). Its name is "Black Horse". It is rocket powered,
>using kerosene and hydrogen peroxide (which do not need refrigeration).
>It is launched partially fuelled (to save undercarriage weight),
>refuelled at 30000 feet and takes a satellite to 400000 feet. There is
>nothing in the article about injecting the satellite into orbit, but I
>presume the use of small once-only rockets for this delta-v would be
>cheaper than putting the whole aircraft into orbit. The USAF hopes to
>have a prototype by mid-1997. Anyone with more information?
Actually, Blackhorse is supposed to make it all the way to orbit, so no
need to use a rocket stage. The vehicle would be substantially easier
and less expensive to build if it only went halfway, and in fact this
approach is planned for a subscale technology demonstrator (the Black
Colt, of course). However, expendable rocket stages aren't exactly
cheap either, and you only get to use them once. For comparison,
Black Colt payload delivery is expected to cost ~$1500/lb, the bulk
of which goes to the solid-rocket manufacturer.
The project is currently a paper study being run out of an office at
USAF Phillips Lab, Kirtland AFB. No funding for actual hardware yet,
though it is somewhat promising. The guy who came up with this one,
and is running the project (such as it is), is Captain Mitchell Burnside
Clapp, USAF, formerly an instructor at the test pilot school at Edwards
AFB. Also formerly the #3 test pilot on the DC-X project mentioned
earlier.
It is probably true that one of the unofficial requirements of the
Blackhorse project is that the resulting vehicle be one that Mitch
can personally fly into orbit :-)
Minor nit: The craft does not refuel at 30,000 feet; it undergoes
aerial propellant transfer at 30,000 feet. Since the mixture ratio
is about eight parts peroxide to one part kerosene, it makes sense
to transfer only the former. And Mitch is rather concerned that if
people keep referring to in-flight refuelling, some confused second
lieutennant might someday fill the tanker with, literally, fuel.
This would, of course, be a Really Bad Thing, hence "Aerial Propellant
Transfer" rather than "in-flight refuelling".
Other than that, you got it about right. The vehicle is roughly the
same size and (empty) weight as an F-16, but as most of the internal
volume is fuel tank, and kerosene/peroxide is rather dense as propellant
combinations go, it ends up almost an order of magnitude heavier after
propellant transfer. Which winds up being just enough propellant to
take the craft, with two-man crew and a thousand pounds of payload,
into low orbit.
Darrin Lee Bright
>
>> Why bother if, as it is fairly easy to demonstrate, it will
>> never be economical to mine asteroids? There is nothing they
>> have that can't be mined more cheaply on Earth.
>
>Ah, even in the degenerate case, the Earth will eventually be mind
>out enough that it _will_ be profitable to go to the asteroids.
Especially when "green" and environmental groups get much more powerful.
Industry is already bumping heads with environmentalist action groups and
leglislation. When it becomes too expensive to start a mining operation on
earth, mining companies will start looking for other options. Take a look
at some of the population-pressure numbers. We're running out of room on
this planet, pretty soon there might not be enough space to support any
mining operations.
And keep in mind, it is *EXTREMELY* cheap to send raw materials DOWN a
gravity well. Heinlein's _The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress_ has already been
mentioned. What is NOT economical is getting the labor and equipment UP the
gravity well... we need to get rid of the Space Shuttle and try some of the
cheaper re-usable alternatives.
--
"Uh...yeah, I uh... suck blood all the time..." - The Tick
--
* * * Darrin Bright - Duck Ezra - Muse of Tedium * * *
= = ============================================ = =
Alan C Gore
>done in space becomes economical. If the cost of transporting a pound
>of anything to earth orbit and back was lowered to $100, many things
>would become economical. Certainly the use of raw materials from a
>captured comet and used in EO to manufacture orbital goods is a possibility.
Who cares about transporting space materials back to Earth, anyway? What's
important economically is their use IN PLACE, by settlers. Let the trade be
information going down for necessities (hydrogen, carbon,...) coming up.
And ditto for space-generated energy. It's easy to generate solar power up
there (we've been doing it for years) but all those schemes for beaming it
back to Earth seem difficult and expensive - and the Luddites will smash your
receiving antennas anyway. Use it in place!
sof...@indirect.com | "Giving money and power to the government
Alan Gore | is like giving whiskey and car keys
Software For PC's | to teenaged boys"
Phoenix, Arizona | -P J O'Rourke
Erich Schneider
>Asteroid mining might well go the same way if a significant discovery
>is made, and there are several candidates in LN's books. For example
>there is plenty of electrical power to be had in space if you spread
>out a few square miles of solar panel. Connect that to the JumpShift
>hardware, and just send the ore down in buckets. Use the inertial (?)
>damper, but no thermal compensation, and the ore will arrive hot enough
>to kick start the smelter.
Oh, sure, if we find ways to violate fundamental laws of physics,
plenty of things become economical. Then again, whole economic vistas
would open up before us if, say, we found genies in bottles.
There's a big difference between incremental improvements of present
technology and overturning physical law as we know it. It's pointless
to make plans based on the latter since there's no evidence for or
against it.
--
Erich Schneider er...@bush.cs.tamu.edu http://bush.cs.tamu.edu/~erich
"The Hierophant is Disguised and Confused."
wolf_359
On Mon, 07 Aug 95 23:31:31 GMT
Ken Moore <K...@hpsl.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> "The Observer" (British Sunday newspaper) for 6 August has an article
> about a new aircraft being developed as a launcher at Kirtland Air Force
> Base. This is aimed at a launch cost of $225 per kilogram (I make that
> $100/lb, near enough). Its name is "Black Horse".
> Anyone with more information?
There was a huge, persnickety, sometimes interesting,
sometimes tiresome discussion of Black Horse (DC-X as well) going
on over in rec.arts.sf.science a few weeks back. I haven't been
by there in a while. May still be going on. Nip over there, you
may still be able to catch some of it.
Mike.
--------------------------------->o<-------------------------------------
Michael Weholt >{-o-}< ...the only relief is in
wolf...@delphi.com {---o---} making up other worlds...
Robyn McNamara
>ster...@netcom.com (Mike Stern) writes:
>>would become economically viable. How about $1/lb? ...or less?
>>Rather than saying it will never become economical, we should be working
>>toward making asteroid mining economical. How? by supporting cheap,
>>reusable, spacecraft. As Jerry says, the Shuttle is not re-usable.
>>It's rebuilt before every flight. The Shuttle isn't cheap, since
>>it needs about 10,000 support people to get it into orbit and back.
>YEAH! LETS BUILD ORBITAL TOWERS (CLARK TOWERS) JUST LIKE I'VE BEEN SAYING!
> (Less than $2 per Kg to geosynchronous orbit! :)
pay no attention - I think Thorne has shares in the company that makes
Clarke Orbital Towers[tm]. (besides, what's the conversion factor
pounds->kg, anyway? :)
--
Robyn A. McNamara The Cosmic Froggy
fro...@zikzak.net
"Was that a parable or a very subtle joke?"
Mike Stern
: ster...@netcom.com (Mike Stern) writes:
: >J. P. Gilliver (G6...@soft255.demon.co.uk) wrote:
: [economics of asteroid mining]
: [low-cost space travel]
: >The Delta-X has been flown succesfully with a total ground crew of
: >three (in a trailer). Don't you think it's logical that this spacecraft
: >was thunk up by Jerry, and designed on Larry's dining room table?
: That would be "DC-X", a subscale test vehicle for a proposed spacecraft
: called "Delta Clipper".
: And it wasn't thunk up by Pournelle or Niven, but by a guy named Gary
: Hudson, who ha substantially more experience and expertise in such matters
: than N&P. He presented the idea to N&P circa 1980, and was ignored due to
: all of the attention then being paid to the shuttle program. Presented it
: again circa 1984, and was not ignored.
: Niven and, especially, Pournelle, played a substantial role in mobilizing
: the *political* support needed to get the project underway. They had little
: to do with the technical aspects, and do not claim otherwise.
I did not mean to imply that either was one of the designers of the DCX.
However, Jerry did pull some "high-powered tech types" together for a
meeting at Larry's house. The SSTO was first drawn on Larry's dining
room table.
Yes, Jerry has had a lot to do with the political side of the DCX, especially
in cajoling funds for it's continued existance. Jerry has also been
a lot more than just a political fund-raiser for the DCX, though. He's
a visionary that will do anything to acheive the goal of inexpensive
space flight. Ask him. He'll tell you that he's a single-issue person.
--
Mike Stern
ster...@netcom.com
"A waste is such a terrible thing to mind"
Anonymous Garbage Dump Supervisor
Mike Stern
: In article <570F0c...@alcyone.darkside.com>,
: >
: >Regardless of their bountiful availability in the Belt, there's always
: >it will be profitable to look toward the Belt. I can't say how long
: >that will take, but it's pretty clear that someday it will happen.
: >
: >
: >Erik Max Francis, &tSftDotIotE ...!uuwest!alcyone!max m...@alcyone.darkside.com
: The costs of getting at ores on Earth will only go up as the concern for the
: damage to the enviroment go up.
Erik, are you taking the position that we will discover some more large
ground-level ore deposits of (name any metal)? If you are, you are plain
deluded. Today, we have to dig deeper, and refine finer because we have
to process lower-quality ore from places that are difficult to get to.
It's not only concern for the environment that's driving costs up. Ex-
ploration (finding the stuff) costs are skyrocketing, and higher tech-
nology is needed to locate the ore than previosly needed.
: We aren't going to 'run out' of ore on
: Earth.
Probably not... Earth has a LOT of mass. Easily exploitable ore, on the
other hand...
: However, there will be increasing political and social costs to
: extracting them. If we wait until there actually _aren't_ anymore
: exploitable resources on Earth before we start exploiting space, we aren't
: Homo Sapiens but Homo Ignoramus!
So, what are you doing to make it happen, besides griping that it won't?
: Perhaps a couple of thousand years from now, Solar satellites and nuclear
: power plants with fuel mined in the asteroids on the near side of the moon
: will beam power to isolated areas. Perhaps computer chip plants which
: require a huge radiation source to etch the chips, and noxious chemicals,
: will find it cheaper to build on the moon, (providing there is already a
: highly educated labor supply there), especially for export to the outer
: planets.
I don't understand why you are talking 1000's of years, when only a hundred
ago, almost everybody was using a horse, and "fly to the moon" was an
expression used to denote crazy behaviour.
: Perhaps there will be an application here, an application there, but a really
: long time before space based manufacturing becomes more than a blip on the
: GDP.
: I suppose in not too long both LEO and GEO will become stuffed with
: telecommunications and Earth Observer satellites, and some developments
: for those purposes will one day enable more exploration of the rest of
: the solar system. Note I say exploration, not exploitation. I just
: don't see any spinoffs from LEO and GEO leading to asteroid mining.
: If they enable _cheap_ exploration and survey they might find a treasure
: trove asteroid, which by itself would justify a one-shot exploitation
: mission, which would then justify more.
: The technology for surveying other planets, moons and asteroids for
: exploitable resources will have spin offs.
: I can see, eventually, it being cost effective to use minerals in space to
: supply industries in space, but that presupposes industries in space
: which can generate revenue to justify their launch costs on Earth.
^^^^^
Gee, didn't I say we should lower the costs? I read in the newspaper today
that IBM and Toshiba are going to be building a Billion-dollar microchip
factory. The money to build is available. The cost to build does not
compete at this time. Space, however, does have some advantages for
high-tech manufacture.... the proximity of a very high vacum means that
processes that require it might be cheaper than on earth.
: For a science-fiction story you can have a really foolish government
: launch all this stuff for political reasons, collaspe due to bankruptcy,
: but leave all these conveniently exploitable satellites for your
: heroic visionary protagonists. (And how _many_ authors have resorted to
: that dodge!)
How about "a visionary governmant places LEO and GEO research facilities
as national laboratories". You presuppose that space will bankrupt the
U.S. Would you explain how that's going to happen with cheaper launch
costs?
Joseph Askew
> Your argument assumes that resources will continue to be available
>cheaply on Earth. This is a bad assumption. The supply of
>easily-mineable minerals on Earth is finite and will eventually be
>exhausted. When the minerals which are in shortest supply begin to run
>out, it may well become economically feasible to mine asteroids for those
>substances.
Actually it is an excellent assumption. Easily-mineable compared
to what? It will never be easier to go to the asteroid belt than
to any place on the planet. We do not use minerals up either by
and large. We simply throw them away because it is not worthwhile
recycling most of them. Long before it becomes sensible to mine
asteroids it will be sensible to mine garbage dumps. What is more
the supply of the vast majority of minerals is growing. They are
cheaper now than at any time in the past. Paul Erlich lost a bet
on this after all. We have only literally scratched the surface
as far as mining operations go and there is plenty of evidence
that there are as many minerals 1 km down as there are in the
top one kilometre.
> A second thing you've ignored is that it only has to be expensive to
>get mass *up* to space. In principle, you can send things *down* from
>orbit much more cheaply.
In principle perhaps. Getting them down safely (remember tMiaHM)
and without excessive jarring is another matter. Also the key
issue is really Delta-V which is not cheap. There are no minerals
in LEO, there are some in asteroids but they are far away in
real energy terms.
>Once you have a fleet of ships out of Earth's
>gravity well, they can stay up there and send things down by means of a
>relatively low-mass ground-to-orbit ship, or some sort of one-shot reentry
>vehicle manufactured in orbit.
But in whose gravity well are they going to find these minerals?
>Furthermore, if you want to use the mined
>resources in space, you don't have to worry about Earth's gravity well at
>all. Moving resources from the asteroid belt to Earth orbit for use in
>space construction there could be quite cheap compared to bringing
>construction materials up from Earth.
No it isn't. You need a delta-v of 11 km/sec or so to get it
into LEO, you certainly need about that to get it from the
asteroid belt to the Earth. On top of that you have to send
all your equipment and most of the supplies for your miners
as well as providing them with special housing and danger pay.
> I recognize that this is all far-off stuff. We won't be mining the
>asteroids anytime soon. Saying that asteroid mining will "never" be
>economical is far too short-sighted, however.
No it isn't. It is a matter of working figures out for
the likely costs.
>You can't predict what our
>technology will be like in 200 years anymore than people in the 1700s
>could have predicted today's technology.
That is true but mining has changed surprisingly little
since the 1700s. Open cut mining is on a larger scale and
we do go much deeper but the basic technology is remarkably
similar. Mining has not been one of the break-through sectors
in terms of new technology. The best thing we have done is
applied pump technology and that is old.
Joseph
Robert Billing
er...@csdl.cs.tamu.edu "Erich Schneider" writes:
> Oh, sure, if we find ways to violate fundamental laws of physics,
Larry's JumpShift does not violate any laws of physics, see "Theory &
Practice of Teleportation", and to the early Victorian engineer
electric traction did appear to "violate the laws of physics" because
it made use of laws of physics not yet discovered. Anyway this is
alt.books.larry-niven not alt.physics.not.discovered.yet so I feel that
I can introduce anything in LN's books into the argument. :-)
> There's a big difference between incremental improvements of present
> technology and overturning physical law as we know it. It's pointless
> to make plans based on the latter since there's no evidence for or
> against it.
We aren't making plans, we are discussing the works of LN, or at least
we were until we wandered off topic.
Paul Dietz
> Take a look
> at some of the population-pressure numbers. We're running out of room on
> this planet, pretty soon there might not be enough space to support any
> mining operations.
Nonsense. The earth is far from running out of room, is unlikely to
become very much more populated (a factor of 3, perhaps), and the
prices of minerals are in long term decline. We get better at mining
faster than we use minerals.
The material which we mine the most of (the largest component of
"demandite") is fossil carbon and hydrogen. Switch away from fossil
fuels -- which doesn't require pie-in-the-sky SPS systems -- and the
biggest need for mining disappears. After that, the largest mines are
for cheap materials like aggregate, limestone, and iron ores, which
are not going to be imported from space anytime soon.
One might also want to look at the seafloor mineral situation before
becoming so enamored with asteroids. The quantity of metals in
manganese nodules, sulfide crusts, and (ultimately) red muds is
enormous.
Paul
STEIN RASMUSSEN
References: <408elt$j...@PEAK.ORG> <807745...@soft255.demon.co.uk> <570F0c...@alcyone.darkside.c
As mentioned in this thread, there is really too many resources on earth
still unexploited for asteroid or lunar mining to be economically
viable. In addition we're getting better at recycling the mined
resources.
On the other hand I see the need for keeping an earth in inhabitable
condition requires restriction to unlimited exploitation of its
resources. So space-mining *could* be the way of having heavy industries
without the danger of polluting our habitad.
You wouldn't have to worry about pollution (if you need fission to
produce something, no worry about radiation, either from the reactor or
its waste products).
You have lots and lots of cheap energy from the sun all the time (no
clouds, no atmospheric reduction).
The load on earth based energyproducers (coalpower,oilpower and nuclear
power) will be reduced with the heavy industry in orbit, to further
reduce pollution.
It's cheap transporting goods down the gravity well to earth (just drop
it in the right place, and it'll end up floating outside the coast of
the buyer, or near by the pickup-boats, whatever).
The *next* step would be colonizing space. As worker colonies at first,
then gradually as more and more economical independent units of
settlement.
Regards,
-StOR
stein.r...@norway.bbs.no
---
ž RM 1.3 ž Eval Day 100 ž .....Gene Police: Hey, You! Out of the pool.....
STEIN RASMUSSEN
References: <4091qa$l...@zikzak.zikzak.net> <402vef$2s...@news-s02.ny.us.ibm.net> <807745...@soft255.demon.co
RM> (besides, what's the conversion factor pounds->kg, anyway? :)
Roughly .5 kg = 1 lb. Not 100% correct, but enough to get the idea.
Regards,
-StOR
stein.r...@norway.bbs.no
---
ş RM 1.3 ş Eval Day 100 ş ..Sysop not found. Enter forbidden subjects? [Y] [n]
Bruce Baugh
bar...@fiji.cs.umass.edu (David Mix Barrington) wrote:
:: I have often thought that it'd be fun to do a sequel to LUCIFER'S HAMMER
that
:: would start by acknowledging it's alternate history - the Hammer pretty
:This happened to some extent -- I recall reading an outline for a rewrite
:of _Buck Rogers_, where the outline was by Niven and/or Pournelle. To
:produce something like the race-caricature yellow-menace Han of the original,
:they posited a comet strike called Hammerfall in the late 20th century,
:followed by some sort of alien miscegenation with the real Chinese to produce
:the inhuman Han. I remember that this _could_ have been the far future of
:_Lucifer's Hammer_, but there was no explicit continuity that I recall other
:than the name _Hammerfall_. I think in _Footfall_ the evil heffalumps also
:used a comet strike as a softening-up measure.
"Evil heffalumps" is hands down the funniest descriptive phrase I've read in a
while. Pause to recuperate...okay. Now then. I've never heard of the outline
you mention here, whic sounds vaguely entertaining.
bru...@teleport.com _____________ http://www.teleport.com/~bruceab/
List Manager, Christlib, for Christian and libertarian concerns
Preview S.M. Stirling's forthcoming novel DRAKON at my home page
"Encrypt! Encrypt! OK! All-One-Key-Steganography-Privacy!
God's law prevents decryption above 1042 bytes - Exceptions? None!"
Bill Snyder
<b...@intersec.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>Much simpler than that. You park the meteor in orbit, find out who has
>the biggest investment in ferrous metals and have them pay you *not*
>to mine it.
>I always prefer minimum effort solutions.
Yes, but so will your "competition." And when they figure out that
they can perturb the orbit for a fraction of what you're demanding in
return for getting it into that orbit in the first place... Hope your
liability policy is paid up.
--
-- Bill Snyder [ This space unintentionally left blank. ]
Andrius Tamulis
>I would love to read a novel-length sequel to the short story called
>(I think) "Chocolate-covered Manhole Covers".
"What Can You Say About Chocolate-covered Manhole Covers?" (I think)
>
>
...
>
>So, what would you do? How could you minimize the slide back into
>savagery for your children? How do you preserve knowledge with
>minimal tools? What cultural inventions do you create? Do you try
>to prepare your descendants to confront the Masters?
Um... you try but you fail. You know about Tolstoy and Bach and calculus
and quantum mechanics, but your children won't, for two reasons. One, they
don't have Tolstoy to read or Bach to listen to; your stories won't
make an impression. And they don't have texts for learning hard
science. Two, everyone is too busy finding food to have a lot of time
for schooling, which, in our system, takes ~16 years.
>How would this
>story fit in the Niven Universe?
Badly. The Masters would have to be the Pak protectors.
>
>William Bogen
>w...@iti.org
>
andrius tamulis
Matt Hickman
<deletions>
> It will never be easier to go to the asteroid belt than
>to any place on the planet. We do not use minerals up either by
>and large. We simply throw them away because it is not worthwhile
>recycling most of them. Long before it becomes sensible to mine
>asteroids it will be sensible to mine garbage dumps. What is more
>the supply of the vast majority of minerals is growing. They are
>cheaper now than at any time in the past. Paul Erlich lost a bet
>on this after all. We have only literally scratched the surface
>as far as mining operations go and there is plenty of evidence
>that there are as many minerals 1 km down as there are in the
>top one kilometre.
Let's postulate Von Neuman machines - self-replicating robots. Further,
design them so that they are adapted for existence amongst the
asteroids and program them so that we can signal any number of them
to migrate to Earth and make safe, soft landings. Then mining
garbage heaps and tearing up the surface of the Earth makes no sense
at all.
We won't even need for them to transport raw material, the
Von Neuman machines themselves might have the utility value that the
Plains Indians of North America found in the bison.
Matt Hickman bh...@chevron.com TANSTAAFL!
OS/2 Systems Specialist, Chevron Information Technologies Co.
"Max sat down across the fire from the tramp. He was not
even as well dressed as Max and he needed a shave.
Nevertheless he wore his rags with a jaunty air
and handled himself with a sparrow's cockiness."
- Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988)
_Starman Jones_ (c. 1953)
Douglas A. Tricarico
|> --
|> I am Robert Billing, Christian, inventor, traveller, cook and animal
|> lover, I live in southern England, close to 0:46W 51:22N. "...Trurl,
|> who vowed by everything that was ever held sacred never, never again to
|> make a Cybernetic model of the Muse." Stanislaw Lem in the Cyberiad.
Not to get too off-topic, but... Robert, if you are truly a Christian,
then you SHOULD be into animal husbandry. Otherwise you're sinning.
Something in the dogma, I think.
Oohhh... crime and "pun"ishment.
"And the hits just keep on coming!"
-- Tom Cruise, A Few Good Men
We now return you to your regularly scheduled newsgroup.
Kenneth C. King
>In article <40772j$d...@nnrp.ucs.ubc.ca> stev...@unixg.ubc.ca (Steven Leffler) writes:
[ munch, munch, munch, ... mmmmmm, tastes good! :]
>>You can't predict what our
>>technology will be like in 200 years anymore than people in the 1700s
>>could have predicted today's technology.
>That is true but mining has changed surprisingly little
>since the 1700s. Open cut mining is on a larger scale and
>we do go much deeper but the basic technology is remarkably
>similar. Mining has not been one of the break-through sectors
>in terms of new technology. The best thing we have done is
>applied pump technology and that is old.
>Joseph
greetings:
i believe he was talking about *space* technology. the cost to
move asteroids, cost to lift mass out of gravity wells,... most
of the science fiction 'fantasy' lift vehicles are certainly less
difficult to concieve than the 'net would have been to those pilgrims!
'a network of computers...., what's a network? oh. how do they
talk to eachother? oh, what's a binary? well, why don't they just
use english/german/spanish/french/whatever? oh, then they really
*aren't* all that smart, eh? what's algebra, differential equations
and spreadsheets? and why on earth would i need to do these things?
later,
kc
--
"ooooh, crumbs!"if the world is nite, shine my life like a lite"live your life
with PASSION"hey waiter, there's a transvestite in my soup"hey mister, are you
tall?"all alone in the nite"son of a son of a sailor"John DeArmond fanclub #13
"he's dead, jim"he's not dead, he's electroencephalographically challenged" kc
John Schilling
>John Schilling (schi...@spock.usc.edu) wrote:
>: That would be "DC-X", a subscale test vehicle for a proposed spacecraft
>: called "Delta Clipper".
>: And it wasn't thunk up by Pournelle or Niven, but by a guy named Gary
>: Hudson, who ha substantially more experience and expertise in such matters
>: than N&P. He presented the idea to N&P circa 1980, and was ignored due to
>: all of the attention then being paid to the shuttle program. Presented it
>: again circa 1984, and was not ignored.
>: Niven and, especially, Pournelle, played a substantial role in mobilizing
>: the *political* support needed to get the project underway. They had little
>: to do with the technical aspects, and do not claim otherwise.
>I did not mean to imply that either was one of the designers of the DCX.
>However, Jerry did pull some "high-powered tech types" together for a
>meeting at Larry's house. The SSTO was first drawn on Larry's dining
>room table.
This is, quite simply, wrong. Whoever told you this probably misunderstood
something he heard elsewhere. The design for _Phoenix_, the ancestor of the
various current VTVL SSTO proposals such as _Delta Clipper_, was created in
Gary Hudson's office, at a time when he had nothing to do with Niven and
Pournelle. Stories about Great Ideas That Will Change The World being
created in Niven's dining room are greatly exaggerated, and told by the
principles largely in jest. A number of Great Ideas have *passed through*
said dining room, and benefited greatly from doing so. They were not created
there.
>Yes, Jerry has had a lot to do with the political side of the DCX, especially
>in cajoling funds for it's continued existance. Jerry has also been
>a lot more than just a political fund-raiser for the DCX, though. He's
>a visionary that will do anything to acheive the goal of inexpensive
>space flight. Ask him. He'll tell you that he's a single-issue person.
I have. And I know how much he has done to further the goal of inexpensive
space flight. However, AFIK (which is quite a bit on this specific issue),
everything he has actually accomplished falls in the category of building
political support and securing funding. He is very good at that, less so
at the technical aspects, so he concentrates his efforts on the areas where
he can make a difference.
Joseph Askew
>Take a look
>at some of the population-pressure numbers. We're running out of room on
>this planet, pretty soon there might not be enough space to support any
>mining operations.
Rubbish. Mining takes up tiny amounts of room. Hardly
worth even discusssing. Even open cut mines aren't that
big. OK they are big, but not compared to all the room
we have available. Also the population pressure myth is
a myth. The birth rate of the species is dropping and
has dropped consistently for as long as there are good
figures. Most First World Populations (actually all but
the Irish and some minority religious groups) are into
negative growth. As are most of the developing East Asian
Tigers. Population growth plots nicely on to a curve with
economic growth. The higher economic development the lower
the birth rate. Eventually the entire population will be
so properous that no one will have any children and we will
disappear as a species.
Joseph
Joseph Askew
>Erik, are you taking the position that we will discover some more large
>ground-level ore deposits of (name any metal)? If you are, you are plain
>deluded.
I'll put money on it. The process of discovery has been
going on at a fair speed for decades and shows no signs
of slowing down. Especially as the former USSR is now
opening up. You name the metal and I'll bet that in ten
years time it is cheaper in real terms than it is now.
Paul Erlich lost a $15,000 bet this way and he got to
choose a basket of metals.
>Today, we have to dig deeper, and refine finer because we have
>to process lower-quality ore from places that are difficult to get to.
Yet oddly enough nearly all metals are cheaper now than
at any time in the past. The truth is that new and rich
sources are opening up all the time and a good half of
the world has yet to be properly explored. More than that.
>It's not only concern for the environment that's driving costs up. Ex-
>ploration (finding the stuff) costs are skyrocketing, and higher tech-
>nology is needed to locate the ore than previosly needed.
Nonsense. Newer technology means it is easier to find ore
bodies than it ever was before. In the past you had to send
someone out with a hammer to look. Now you can do it with
satellite systems and airborne radars. Costs are falling.
Joseph
Kevin B. O'Brien
wrote:
>Much simpler than that. You park the meteor in orbit, find out who has
>the biggest investment in ferrous metals and have them pay you *not*
>to mine it.
>I always prefer minimum effort solutions.
I would expect the market price to respond to the presence of the
asteroid in any event. Take a look at how spot markets in commodities
operate.
Kevin B. O'Brien
ko...@ix.netcom.com
Paid for by the Tirebiter for Political Solutions
Committee, Sector R
Erik Max Francis
> Mining corps are gonna start to find out that they
> can't spit out a rat without hitting somebody's back yard. Ever tried to
> start a mining operation in someone's back yard? Its not a pretty
> picture...
As it happens, most areas that are best for mining are not the kind of
land that is considered very good real estate -- in other words, the
good mining land will be bought up last. And since there's plenty and
plenty of good real estate (we're talking on the whole planet, here)
that is _not_ good mining land, I think this is the least of the
issues that will come into play.
Erik Max Francis, &tSftDotIotE // uuwest!alcyone!max, m...@alcyone.darkside.com
San Jose, CA, USA // 37 20 07 N 121 53 38 W // GIGO, Omega, Psi // the 4th R!
H.3`S,3,P,3$S,#$Q,C`Q,3,P,3$S,#$Q,3`Q,3,P,C$Q,#(Q.#`-"C`- // kmmfa // folasade
_Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt._ // mc2? oo? Nah. // http://www.spies.com/max/
William Bogen
: >So, what would you do? How could you minimize the slide back into
: >savagery for your children? How do you preserve knowledge with
: >minimal tools? What cultural inventions do you create? Do you try
: >to prepare your descendants to confront the Masters?
: Um... you try but you fail. You know about Tolstoy and Bach and calculus
: and quantum mechanics, but your children won't, for two reasons. One, they
: don't have Tolstoy to read or Bach to listen to; your stories won't
: make an impression. And they don't have texts for learning hard
: science. Two, everyone is too busy finding food to have a lot of time
: for schooling, which, in our system, takes ~16 years.
But you could teach them the scientific method, the alphabet,
arithmetic, writing, basic physics, biology, astronomy, metallurgy,
agriculture, weaponry. Really, it's amazing how much time is
available when you have no television! Also you could make
records of as much useful information as you can recall and make
them part of your Holy Scriptures. Your descendants will know that
they are significant and study them closely.
As for schooling, I am more interested in education, most of which
takes place outside of schools. In an environment where every hand
counts, a kid can learn a lot in their 1st 16 years just helping Mom
and Dad.
: >How would this
: >story fit in the Niven Universe?
: Badly. The Masters would have to be the Pak protectors.
Not necessarily. The robot that dropped them off may have been
lying about details.
Anyway, I still feel this story presents a fascinating challenge in
designing a world.
William Bogen
w...@iti.org
Richard Treitel
|> Despite my earlier comments, I'd be DELIGHTED if `a cheap
|> earth-to-orbit tug' _was_ developed; I just don't see it happening,
|> whether by microwave or catapult assisted launch, fully nuclear, or
|> whatever
Well, fingers crossed, it may yet happen; the technologies to do it
are largely within reach, the main problem being that gov't funded
space programs have so little incentive to make things cheap (cheap to
build *or* cheap to run). Larry N. himself is rather keen on the
DC-X, or rather on the true spaceships that McD would like to build
using what they learned from the DC-X.
-- Richard
"Some magics *are* distinguishable from any advanced technology."
(If my employer holds these views, it hasn't told me.)
Jeffrey A. Pleimling
: "J. P. Gilliver" <G6...@soft255.demon.co.uk> writes:
: |> Despite my earlier comments, I'd be DELIGHTED if `a cheap
: |> earth-to-orbit tug' _was_ developed; I just don't see it happening,
: |> whether by microwave or catapult assisted launch, fully nuclear, or
: |> whatever
: Well, fingers crossed, it may yet happen; the technologies to do it
: are largely within reach, the main problem being that gov't funded
: space programs have so little incentive to make things cheap (cheap to
: build *or* cheap to run). Larry N. himself is rather keen on the
: DC-X, or rather on the true spaceships that McD would like to build
: using what they learned from the DC-X.
Delta Clipper/SSRT (Single Stage Rocket Technology) Program has a
*very* intersting web site. The url is:
http://gargravarr.cc.utexas.edu/delta-clipper/title.html
check it out, *interesting* stuff.
One of the model rocket makers (Quest) has a flying model of the
DC-X. I haven't seen it, but the reports show it performs very
well, even though it doesn't have fins.
Jeff
--
Jeffrey A. Pleimling | j...@interaccess.com
In Time, all things come to pass;
The Neglected become Loved, The Loved become Hated, -Arthur Samuel Hyun
And the heroes feel the cold grip of death around their throats...
Darrin Lee Bright
Joseph Askew <jba...@MFS06.cc.monash.edu.au> wrote:
>In article <408vfn$23...@cymbal.aix.calpoly.edu> dbr...@cymbal.aix.calpoly.edu (Darrin Lee Bright) writes:
>Rubbish. Mining takes up tiny amounts of room. Hardly
>worth even discusssing. Even open cut mines aren't that
>big. OK they are big, but not compared to all the room
>we have available. Also the population pressure myth is
>a myth. The birth rate of the species is dropping and
>has dropped consistently for as long as there are good
>figures. Most First World Populations (actually all but
>the Irish and some minority religious groups) are into
>negative growth. As are most of the developing East Asian
>Tigers. Population growth plots nicely on to a curve with
>economic growth. The higher economic development the lower
>the birth rate. Eventually the entire population will be
>so properous that no one will have any children and we will
>disappear as a species.
Not rubbish.
Yes, Mining doesn't take up much space. Most of it is undergound and nobody
really seems to care what you're doing under there anyway. But the
population IS going up, which means more JoeBlows are going to be buying
a 1,200,000 dollar home and sticking it on some hillside (in a 100 year
floodplain, of course), and of course he's gonna want a back yard and a
front lawn which is absolutely useless other than the fact that you need to
water it. At any rate, what I mean to say is that we're going to be running
out of REAL ESTATE. Mining corps are gonna start to find out that they
can't spit out a rat without hitting somebody's back yard. Ever tried to
start a mining operation in someone's back yard? Its not a pretty
picture...
As for the whole birth-rate bullshit, my personal philosophy is that it'll
take a nose dive as soon as we run out of food.
--
"Uh...yeah, I uh... suck blood all the time..." - The Tick
--
* * * Darrin Bright - Duck Ezra - Muse of Tedium * * *
= = ============================================ = =
Bronis Vidugiris
Joseph Askew <jba...@MFS06.cc.monash.edu.au> wrote:
)The higher economic development the lower
)the birth rate. Eventually the entire population will be
)so properous that no one will have any children and we will
)disappear as a species.
I dunno about that.
I can think of at least two other possibilities:
1) Society will become enlightened, and provide incentives to have and
raise children to it's citizens. Esp. the ones who do the nurturing
(who may or may not be women). Nahh - this seems a bit too logical and
idealistic. So, how about......
2) Society will ban birth control and abortions and attempt to force
people to have kids, continuing current stereotyped sex roles
(man pays, woman nurtures) along with the usual moral posturing about
zippers and responsibility. Possibly society will even go so far
as to extend the current practices of holding 12-year-old boy rape
victims "responsible" for "their kids" to 12-year old female rape victms
as well (including forcible as well as statuatory rape unlike the
current practice).
But this seems a bit too pessimistic and irrational. So how about
3) Something totally off the wall that's hard to predict, but
very strange, probably some sort of half-assed hybrid of #1 and #2.
Mark Eaton
McNamara) wrote:
> jba...@MFS06.cc.monash.edu.au (Joseph Askew) writes:
>
> >Nonsense. Newer technology means it is easier to find ore
> >bodies than it ever was before. In the past you had to send
> >someone out with a hammer to look. Now you can do it with
> >satellite systems and airborne radars. Costs are falling.
>
> Hang about - are you trying to say that satellite systems and airborne
> radars are cheaper than a man with a hammer? :)
>
> I will grant you that they're _faster_, but I can't buy a GIS at my
> local hardware shop for $7.95.
>
you're no Assayer either. :) the satellite may be more expensive but I bet
its a lot more efficient! IE the amount of ore that 7.95 and a field
geologist will buy you is less than the amount that a survey satellite
would find...
Richard Kellman
There is serious talk of mining helium 3 on the moon and either bringing
it back here, or using it for fusion in space and beaming the power back
here. My distant cousin is working on this very project at the UW madison.
Is that whacky enough for you ?
Just thought you'd like to know
Stephen Hinchey
In article <1995Aug9.1...@news.cs.indiana.edu>,
<atam...@cherry.ucs.indiana.edu> writes:
> >So, what would you do? How could you minimize the slide back into
> >savagery for your children? How do you preserve knowledge with
> >minimal tools? What cultural inventions do you create? Do you try
> >to prepare your descendants to confront the Masters?
>
> Um... you try but you fail. You know about Tolstoy and Bach and calculus
> and quantum mechanics, but your children won't, for two reasons. One, they
> don't have Tolstoy to read or Bach to listen to; your stories won't
> make an impression. And they don't have texts for learning hard
> science. Two, everyone is too busy finding food to have a lot of time
> for schooling, which, in our system, takes ~16 years.
>
> >How would this
> >story fit in the Niven Universe?
>
> Badly. The Masters would have to be the Pak protectors.
>
I think otherwise. I believe one of the threads of that story was that
earthlings had originally been raised for food. So the masters wouldn't care
if this group slide back into savagery. As long as they populated the planet.
(Hm, doesn't the bible tell man to go forth and populate the earth??? ;) )
J. P. Gilliver (John)
<fro...@zikzak.zikzak.net> writes
[]
>>YEAH! LETS BUILD ORBITAL TOWERS (CLARK TOWERS) JUST LIKE I'VE BEEN SAYING!
>> (Less than $2 per Kg to geosynchronous orbit! :)
>
>pay no attention - I think Thorne has shares in the company that makes
>Clarke Orbital Towers[tm]. (besides, what's the conversion factor
>pounds->kg, anyway? :)
>
>
"Two and a quarter pounds of jam
weigh about a kilogramme" (2.2 is closer in fact, but this silly rhyme
is IMO easy to remember!)
--
J. P. Gilliver (John)
Turnpike evaluation. For information, see http://www.turnpike.com/
Robyn McNamara
>In article <sternkinD...@netcom.com> ster...@netcom.com (Mike Stern) writes:
>>Today, we have to dig deeper, and refine finer because we have
>>to process lower-quality ore from places that are difficult to get to.
>Yet oddly enough nearly all metals are cheaper now than
>at any time in the past. The truth is that new and rich
>sources are opening up all the time and a good half of
>the world has yet to be properly explored. More than that.
This is probably true; however:
* 2/3 of this planet's surface is under non-trivial amounts of water.
Once you start looking at mining the ocean floors, space starts to
look comparatively attractive;
* mining is a pretty damn disgusting business, environmentally - you
wouldn't want to be down-river from a mine, especially when the
mine owners are under no particular obligation to clean up after
themselves - and so, although the territory consumed by the actual
mine may be negligible, a large chunk of land may be downgraded by
the process (contaminated water table, erosion of soil due to
clearing, heavy-metal contamination of fisheries, etc...)
* slice it any way you want to, the planet is finite and its resources
are finite. It is true that new deposits are being found and exploited
at an ever-increasing rate, but this does not imply that new deposits
are being *formed*; eventually, we're going to run out of "accessible"
mineral deposits.
>>It's not only concern for the environment that's driving costs up. Ex-
>>ploration (finding the stuff) costs are skyrocketing, and higher tech-
>>nology is needed to locate the ore than previosly needed.
>Nonsense. Newer technology means it is easier to find ore
>bodies than it ever was before. In the past you had to send
>someone out with a hammer to look. Now you can do it with
>satellite systems and airborne radars. Costs are falling.
Hang about - are you trying to say that satellite systems and airborne
radars are cheaper than a man with a hammer? :)
I will grant you that they're _faster_, but I can't buy a GIS at my
local hardware shop for $7.95.
>Joseph
(see, Thorne - I do *too* post signal. :)
--
Robyn A. McNamara The Cosmic Froggy
fro...@zikzak.net
"Was that a parable or a very subtle joke?"
Mr TH Lawler
>In article <807921...@tnglwood.demon.co.uk> Robert Billing <uncl...@tnglwood.demon.co.uk> writes:
>>Asteroid mining might well go the same way if a significant discovery
>>is made, and there are several candidates in LN's books. For example
>>there is plenty of electrical power to be had in space if you spread
>>out a few square miles of solar panel. Connect that to the JumpShift
>>hardware, and just send the ore down in buckets. Use the inertial (?)
>>damper, but no thermal compensation, and the ore will arrive hot enough
>>to kick start the smelter.
>Oh, sure, if we find ways to violate fundamental laws of physics,
>plenty of things become economical. Then again, whole economic vistas
>would open up before us if, say, we found genies in bottles.
Hmmm, let me see, wasn't there a fairly firmly held belief among a
large proportion of America's aerospace engineers at the time of Chuck
Yeager's pioneering flight that exceeding the speed of sound would involve
violating a dozen odd physical laws? :)
I recall vaguely that they even had some kind of 'rigorous
mathematical proof' at the time.
However, this is only one measley example. I'm sure that a quick
search of the engineering library would _never_ reveal n other examples
of exactly the same 'provable' narrow-mindedness.
(Where n is large.) :)
--
'And dawn came on at seven hundred miles per second...It came on like
destiny made visible, a moving wall too big to go around.' -Ringworld
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Thorne Lawler, Ba/BSc II. Send email to tho...@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au
Eric Pawtowski
Ken Moore <K...@hpsl.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>$100/lb, near enough). Its name is "Black Horse". It is rocket powered,
>using kerosene and hydrogen peroxide (which do not need refrigeration).
>It is launched partially fuelled (to save undercarriage weight),
Black Horse is discussed more on sci.space.policy. In addition, there is a
Web page dedicated to it, although I don't have any idea what the
address is. Start at one of the NASA pages, and perhaps you'll find it.
Black Horse's emphasis is on getting small payloads into orbit, quickly,
and without any infrastructure more complicated than a normal Air Force
Base. It's a military project, after all. The entire US military depends
heavily on it's birds in orbit, and in time of war, they might have to
launch more quickly (either for the increased capacity or to replace
ones that were shot down). They do not want to have to depend on
shuttles.
It will also be much cheaper than a shuttle to operate (what wouldn't be?)
and lower cost is at least one of the reasons behind it, but it's not
quite as much of the main driving force, as is the case with the DC-X and
the NASA X-33 and X-34 projects.
Eric
--
epaw...@vt.edu----------------------------------------------------
Technicon 13 - SF&F return to SW Virginia! March 22-24, 1996.
Guests: Author L.E. Modesitt and Games designers Lori&Corey Cole
J. P. Gilliver (John)
IMO, this thread has (a) got well off-topic from LN (partly my fault)
and (b) had a heartening, but noentheless wishful, disregard for physics
and economics. (Asbestos on!) For example - `spread out a few acres of
solar panels' - even assuming someone properly cracks the amorphous
problem, _and_ we get economies of scale, this will still not be cheap!
Also: a few people have said it takes little to get down from LEO.
Unless you use atmospheric braking - possible I suppose - it still
requires a certain amount of energy to change an orbit (including to
drop out of it). I agree with those who say use the stuff up there.
Finally, there are _still_ the energy questions, both to get stuff up,
and to run equipment while up there. The raising of material from Earth
- whatever it is - requires a certain amount of energy; from school
physics, the joules is approximately g (acceleration due to gravity -
assume a low enough orbit that this isn't much lower, it makes the maths
easier) x weight in kilogrammes x height - that's to get it up; plus 1/2
mass x velocity squared - that's to get it moving sideways. There are
some savings, such as using the earth's spin. This energy from whatever
source does cost something, and for the lower parts of the trajectory
(which are the most energy-hungry), you won't be allowed to use nuclear,
as it would be similar to atmospheric bomb tests in the fallout it would
generate. (Am I wrong, or are these tests popular at the moment?!?)
Running heavy machinery in orbit might be possible using unshielded
reactors - nothing else of which I am aware would have the power output
required for, for example, refining ore.
All of which does not alter the fact that I hope to see some
discovery/invention in my lifetime which disproves all I have said;
maybe LN/JP/ACC etc. can help it on its way, technically or politically,
if it does appear!
--
J. P. Gilliver (John)
Turnpike evaluation. For information, email: in...@turnpike.com
Joseph Askew
>>Yet oddly enough nearly all metals are cheaper now than
>>at any time in the past. The truth is that new and rich
>>sources are opening up all the time and a good half of
>>the world has yet to be properly explored. More than that.
>This is probably true; however:
>* 2/3 of this planet's surface is under non-trivial amounts of water.
> Once you start looking at mining the ocean floors, space starts to
> look comparatively attractive;
Well yes and no. There are all sorts of possibilities for
remotely operated machinery and robots on the sea floor.
But I was referring to the land area anyway. Africa has
hardly been looked at yet. You can graph the amount of
coal available in any suitably large region and the state
of economic development. There is a strong correlation.
The more developed a region is the more coal it has. As a
general rule. This does not apply to small regions such as
France or Italy or even Japan, but it does apply to Europe,
North America, the former USSR, Africa, India, South America,
Australia, China and the Middle East. Africa has virtually
none. North America has huge amounts. It follows that probably
all the world is sitting on coal only no one has bothered to
look for it in Africa yet (outside South Africa and Zimbabwe)
>* mining is a pretty damn disgusting business, environmentally - you
> wouldn't want to be down-river from a mine, especially when the
> mine owners are under no particular obligation to clean up after
> themselves - and so, although the territory consumed by the actual
> mine may be negligible, a large chunk of land may be downgraded by
> the process (contaminated water table, erosion of soil due to
> clearing, heavy-metal contamination of fisheries, etc...)
This may be true although mines are getting cleaner all
the time. It is a matter of passing on costs not of a
fundamental flaw in the process. It may be true that space
mines won't have the same problems but they will have some
problems. Floating debris in space is a bad idea. Also some
of the contamination comes *after* they have been mined.
Either at the point of use or at disposal. These problems
won't be solved this way.
>* slice it any way you want to, the planet is finite and its resources
> are finite. It is true that new deposits are being found and exploited
> at an ever-increasing rate, but this does not imply that new deposits
> are being *formed*; eventually, we're going to run out of "accessible"
> mineral deposits.
But eventually is a funny concept. Eventually the sun is
going to explode and eventually the Universe in probably
going to collapse into a very small point. If the Earth
has enough minerals to last a suitably long time (as it
does more or less for fissionable fuels) then it may as
well be considered lasting forever. Even space resources
are finite in that sense even though we will never use
them all.
>>Nonsense. Newer technology means it is easier to find ore
>>bodies than it ever was before. In the past you had to send
>>someone out with a hammer to look. Now you can do it with
>>satellite systems and airborne radars. Costs are falling.
>Hang about - are you trying to say that satellite systems and airborne
>radars are cheaper than a man with a hammer? :)
No but it is often cheaper than ten thousand men with hammers.
Especially if they are from First World countries. China can
afford to use many men with hammers but it is a little hit and
miss. Often literally so.
Joseph
Steven Leffler
: >* slice it any way you want to, the planet is finite and its resources
: > are finite. It is true that new deposits are being found and exploited
: > at an ever-increasing rate, but this does not imply that new deposits
: > are being *formed*; eventually, we're going to run out of "accessible"
: > mineral deposits.
: But eventually is a funny concept. Eventually the sun is
: going to explode and eventually the Universe in probably
: going to collapse into a very small point. If the Earth
: has enough minerals to last a suitably long time (as it
: does more or less for fissionable fuels) then it may as
: well be considered lasting forever. Even space resources
: are finite in that sense even though we will never use
: them all.
The timescales you're talking about here are vastly different. The
time before the Sun explodes or the Universe implodes is long enough that
we don't have to worry about it. We might start running out of *some*
resources in as little as a few hundred years, on the other hand.
--
Steven Leffler
lef...@physics.ubc.ca
Leviathan
Description of the Niven/Pournelle outline for Jim Baen's Buck Rogers
update series snipped.
>
>Am I entirely delusional? Anybody else ever read this?
>
>Dave MB
No, you're sane. I read a couple of the novels, and was corresponding
with Larry at the time. He told me explicitly that he and JP were placing
the "Rogers" series after Hammerfall.
Jonathan Andrew Sheen
http://www.iii.net/users/jsheen/
Leviathan of the GEI (Detached.)
jsh...@levstu.iii.net
Sig? No, thanks. I don't smoke....
Jonathan Woodward
> I would love to read a novel-length sequel to the short story called
> (I think) "Chocolate-covered Manhole Covers".
> In this story, two women and two men are kidnapped by the robot
> servant of some unseen advanced alien race. They are transported to
> a primitive Earthlike planet and released. They are expected to
> populate the planet and provide new and improved humans/artisans for
> the master race. So, what would you do? How could you minimize the
> slide back into
> savagery for your children?
-You can't. Four people is just not enough genetic material.
Count yourself extremely lucky if your great-grandkids _survive_, much
less remember anything resembling "culture" and "technology"
-JW
--
Jonathan Woodward wood...@ftp.com or @io.com http://www.io.com/~woodward/
A!JW2 WAR++ BR+++i^ SL+++!^ RI+++! BU+i MM+^/+++! Dpfdo[s] $+++ Vrj++ TBrain
GCS/O a- C+++$ W++>+++$ N++ w++ t++ 5+ R+>+++$ b+++ DI++++ G++>++++ T+++$ y+
OLAO, excl.: "Oh, Look, An Opinion." Frequently appropriate Usenet comment.
Klaus Ole Kristiansen
>I think otherwise. I believe one of the threads of that story was that
>earthlings had originally been raised for food. So the masters wouldn't care
>if this group slide back into savagery. As long as they populated the planet.
>(Hm, doesn't the bible tell man to go forth and populate the earth??? ;) )
Aren't you thinking of Bordered in Black?
Steve Glover
>>Much simpler than that. You park the meteor in orbit, find out who has
>>the biggest investment in ferrous metals and have them pay you *not*
>>to mine it.
>>I always prefer minimum effort solutions.
>Yes, but so will your "competition." And when they figure out that
>they can perturb the orbit for a fraction of what you're demanding in
>return for getting it into that orbit in the first place... Hope your
>liability policy is paid up.
Um, how does it go again?
Falling down on Milton Keynes
Falling down on Milton Keynes
(crucial line missing)
Falling down on Milton Keynes
This would be a place to plug next year's UK filk con: Obliter8, to be
held in that self-same city of concrete cows...
Steve FQF (but who named Contabile, and has been to all british filk cons
except Treble, Fourplay, Pentatonic, the sixth one (whose name I've
forgotten, so it must have been an awful pun) and the seventh one
(can't have been Consept -- Transept?))
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Soliciting for Intersection issue of Etranger: topics include morality in
works of people called Smith or about people called Smith; net stuff of likely
interest to SF fans, art... Deadline 15-JUL-1995: steve_...@hicom.lut.ac.uk
Paul Dietz
> * 2/3 of this planet's surface is under non-trivial amounts of water.
> Once you start looking at mining the ocean floors, space starts to
> look comparatively attractive;
Nonsense. Mining on the seafloor is comparatively easy, compared to
mining in space. Heck, there were serious plans to collect manganese
nodules back in the 1970s, when metal prices were higher (total mass
of Mn nodules is as much as 10^12 tons, and they contain on the order
of a percent of copper, nickel and cobalt, which is what would be
recovered). The technology is much easier than for asteroid mining,
if for no other reason than the time and cost of transportation to the
mine site is so much lower. Maintenance is easier (you can transport
the equipment back to shore, for example). Supporting the people
working with the equipment is easier (there is a ready nearby supply
of air, food and water, and facilities for maintaining their living
quarters).
>* slice it any way you want to, the planet is finite and its resources
> are finite. It is true that new deposits are being found and exploited
> at an ever-increasing rate, but this does not imply that new deposits
> are being *formed*; eventually, we're going to run out of "accessible"
> mineral deposits.
"Accessible" is a function of technology. We are mining copper ores
100x less concentrated than in the time of the Roman Empire, and 1000x
less concentrated than those mined in earlier history, yet the cost of
copper (in man-hours of labor per pound of metal) is much lower now
than then. The ultimate (second law) cost of recovering a dilute
mineral goes as the *logarithm* of its concentration. There is no
inherent reason (due to fundamental laws) why recovery of elements at
their average concentration in the crust should be impractical.
"Eventually" means not soon at all, in the case of metals. At least 30
elements are known to be available on earth in essentially unlimited
supply at prices not much above today's (see a paper by Goeller and Zucker
in Science, I believe in the late 1970s). The quantity of a metal
typically increases as concentration of the metal decreases. For
example, oceanic red muds contain perhaps 700 ppm copper, and are
so voluminous they could supply the world's current copper demand
for a good fraction of a million years.
Finally: just as new deposits can't be found indefinitely, we can't
import metals indefinitely. If a world of 10 billion people imported
iron from the asteroid belt at today's US per capita rate of
consumption, and discarded the iron without recycling, the earth would
become uninhabitable within about 10^6 years, due to deoxygenation of
the atmosphere by corrosion of that metal. Recycling is going to
be essential in the long term even in the absence of mineral resource
constraints, just to avoid ever increasing piles of waste and their
side effects.
Paul
Richard Treitel
|> Once extraction and processing costs above a certain amount,
|> it will be profitable to look toward the Belt. I can't say how long
|> that will take, but it's pretty clear that someday it will happen.
Not that clear. Aluminium is already being recycled in substantial
quantity, and smelters have been recycling scrap iron for many years,
simply because it's a cheaper source of iron than the available ores
(after adjusting for ease of processing and so on). If the total
amount of minerals *in use* doesn't grow by large factors, it may be
that there will always be a usable supply of medium-grade ore in our
dumps and landfills. This depends on recycling/extraction
technologies and will doubtless be different for different minerals.
Well, there will be gradual loss into hard-to-recover sites such as
the ocean. Oh yeah -- have you read Clarke's _The Man Who Ploughed
The Sea_?
James Nicoll
Bronis Vidugiris <b...@areaplg2.corp.mot.com> wrote:
on declining birth-rates and increasing wealth:
>
>I dunno about that.
>
>I can think of at least two other possibilities:
>
>1) Society will become enlightened, and provide incentives to have and
>raise children to it's citizens. Esp. the ones who do the nurturing
>(who may or may not be women). Nahh - this seems a bit too logical and
>idealistic. So, how about......
>
>2) Society will ban birth control and abortions and attempt to force
>people to have kids, continuing current stereotyped sex roles
>(man pays, woman nurtures) along with the usual moral posturing about
>zippers and responsibility. Possibly society will even go so far
>as to extend the current practices of holding 12-year-old boy rape
>victims "responsible" for "their kids" to 12-year old female rape victms
>as well (including forcible as well as statuatory rape unlike the
>current practice).
Romania tried fairly draconian measures to increase their birthrate
with poor results (Although the supply of caucasian orphans for sale went
up, which was handy for some find-a-baby companies. Pity so many had grotty
diseases due to horrific living conditions, as it drove the market value
down).
>But this seems a bit too pessimistic and irrational. So how about
>
>3) Something totally off the wall that's hard to predict, but
>very strange, probably some sort of half-assed hybrid of #1 and #2.
We may very well have the technology to bring babies
to term without an actual mother involved as a life-support system
fairly soon. While this might allow a more sensible birth rate
(No 'baby booms', for example), who pays to produce the kids, and
who pays to raise the kids will still be a problem.
James Nicoll
--
"Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects."
Lester B. Pearson
Hans Mikelson
b...@areaplg2.corp.mot.com (Bronis Vidugiris) wrote:
> In article <jbask1.97...@MFS06.cc.monash.edu.au>,
> Joseph Askew <jba...@MFS06.cc.monash.edu.au> wrote:
>
> )The higher economic development the lower
> )the birth rate. Eventually the entire population will be
> )so properous that no one will have any children and we will
> )disappear as a species.
>
>
> 1) Society will become enlightened, and provide incentives to have and
> raise children to it's citizens.
>
Well since this thread is already drifting pretty far off topic how about
a further push...
People won't have children anymore but the species won't disappear because
they will be immortal having cured all illnesses and stopped aging. Of
course Niven already covered this in detail in "A World Out of Time" I
think.
| | | \ | / Hans P. Mikelson
| __ | __/ | \ | E-Mail: ha...@primenet.com
|__ |__ |__ |__ \_ |__ http://www.primenet.com/~hans
jba...@cc.monash.edu.au
>Yes, Mining doesn't take up much space. Most of it is undergound and nobody
>really seems to care what you're doing under there anyway.
Fine. So mining is not a problem.
>But the
>population IS going up,
Yes but the rate is going down.
> which means more JoeBlows are going to be buying
>a 1,200,000 dollar home and sticking it on some hillside (in a 100 year
>floodplain, of course), and of course he's gonna want a back yard and a
>front lawn which is absolutely useless other than the fact that you need to
>water it. At any rate, what I mean to say is that we're going to be running
>out of REAL ESTATE.
Not at all. Most of these newly rich people are going to be in less
developed nations as they catch up. Most of them have plenty of
room for 1,200,000 dollar homes. Not places like China of course
but Africa remains one of the least densely populated continents
on Earth (I think I am living on the least of all if you don't count
Antartica) Not even America is densely populated and by one of
the ironies of life as America has become more wealthy it has
become more concentrated. Most of America is largely empty
with most people preferring to live in or near cities.
>Mining corps are gonna start to find out that they
>can't spit out a rat without hitting somebody's back yard. Ever tried to
>start a mining operation in someone's back yard? Its not a pretty
>picture...
People do it all the time around here. People don't like to live in
the sorts of places most mines are. Mines are dirty, loud and
generally nasty places. So not many people do. The richer the
population is the more choice they have about where to live.
A wealthy world wouldn't have a problem.
>As for the whole birth-rate bullshit, my personal philosophy is that it'll
>take a nose dive as soon as we run out of food.
Which we won't do in my lifetime barring a cure for old age.
Joseph
jba...@cc.monash.edu.au
>1) Society will become enlightened, and provide incentives to have and
>raise children to it's citizens. Esp. the ones who do the nurturing
>(who may or may not be women). Nahh - this seems a bit too logical and
>idealistic. So, how about......
Society already does in the form of child allowances. These were
pioneered by the French but they have had little real impact. You
have to offer a lot of money to make it worth someone's while to
have more children. Even then you get inner city street criminals
if you are unlucky. Incentives work best on the poorest.
>2) Society will ban birth control and abortions and attempt to force
>people to have kids, continuing current stereotyped sex roles
>(man pays, woman nurtures) along with the usual moral posturing about
>zippers and responsibility. Possibly society will even go so far
>as to extend the current practices of holding 12-year-old boy rape
>victims "responsible" for "their kids" to 12-year old female rape victms
>as well (including forcible as well as statuatory rape unlike the
>current practice).
France tried this too. Especially in the post WW1 years. Didn't
work. France has had some immigration, but little natural growth
over the last 100 years or so. At least when compared to other
countries near by. Of course they were a little too civilised to
hold 12-year-old rape victims responsible, they just banned all
abortions and contraception.
>But this seems a bit too pessimistic and irrational. So how about
>3) Something totally off the wall that's hard to predict, but
>very strange, probably some sort of half-assed hybrid of #1 and #2.
How about no one does anything? Sounds far more likely.
Governments don't do things unless kicked and people are
not going to get worked up over the shortage of children.
Joseph
Chris Knight
: But you could teach them the scientific method, the alphabet,
: arithmetic, writing, basic physics, biology, astronomy, metallurgy,
: agriculture, weaponry. Really, it's amazing how much time is
: available when you have no television! Also you could make
: records of as much useful information as you can recall and make
: them part of your Holy Scriptures. Your descendants will know that
: they are significant and study them closely.
I wouldn't suggest the 'Holy Scripture' idea. It discourages people from
challenging the ideas set down, and limiting their horizons.
And, of course, for those who do challenege them... Inquisition and holy
wars.
-ck
Jeffrey A. Pleimling
: William Bogen (w...@iti.org) wrote:
: : available when you have no television! Also you could make
: : records of as much useful information as you can recall and make
: : them part of your Holy Scriptures. Your descendants will know that
: : they are significant and study them closely.
: I wouldn't suggest the 'Holy Scripture' idea. It discourages people from
: challenging the ideas set down, and limiting their horizons.
: And, of course, for those who do challenege them... Inquisition and holy
: wars.
I think one of the main problems is how do you *prevent* a new set of
'Holy Scriptures' from coming into existance. After a couple of
generations anything passed down is bound to get distorted to some
degree. Even a simple 'don't eat candy before supper' rule can become
'Thou shalt not eat suger before sundown sayth the lord'.
And what do the children/grandchildren/... think about being told that
they were originally from a different planet and were resettled by
an alien. Think of what *that* turns into in a couple of hundred
years. Or, do you not tell them and let them come up with their own
versions of their existance?
Remember, they don't have paper. They are going to have to learn how
to make it for local material and then ink. If the material they
produce lasts for more then a generation they are very lucky.
Robyn McNamara
>In article <40dbsh$1...@zikzak.zikzak.net> fro...@zikzak.zikzak.net (Robyn McNamara) writes:
>>* 2/3 of this planet's surface is under non-trivial amounts of water.
>> Once you start looking at mining the ocean floors, space starts to
>> look comparatively attractive;
>Well yes and no. There are all sorts of possibilities for
>remotely operated machinery and robots on the sea floor.
How come it'd be cost-effective to design and build robots to mine
undersea (at great pressure and in a rather corrosive environment)
but not to design and build robots to do the same in space?
I remember reading an Asimov short story with a similar premise -
undersea colonies that turned out in the end to be a "practice run"
for space exploration.
>But I was referring to the land area anyway. Africa has
>hardly been looked at yet.
This will probably surprise the South Africans. Where are you getting
your data?
>You can graph the amount of
>coal available in any suitably large region and the state
>of economic development. There is a strong correlation.
>The more developed a region is the more coal it has. As a
>general rule. This does not apply to small regions such as
>France or Italy or even Japan, but it does apply to Europe,
>North America, the former USSR, Africa, India, South America,
>Australia, China and the Middle East. Africa has virtually
>none. North America has huge amounts. It follows that probably
>all the world is sitting on coal only no one has bothered to
>look for it in Africa yet (outside South Africa and Zimbabwe)
Oh. _That's_ where you're getting your data from. <sigh>
I don't think those sorts of analogies necessarily work in the
context of geography. It's kind of like saying "there is lots of land
in the Northern Hemisphere, therefore it follows that probably there is
lots of land in the Southern Hemisphere only no one has found it yet."
>>* mining is a pretty damn disgusting business, environmentally - you
>> wouldn't want to be down-river from a mine, especially when the
>> mine owners are under no particular obligation to clean up after
>> themselves - and so, although the territory consumed by the actual
>> mine may be negligible, a large chunk of land may be downgraded by
>> the process (contaminated water table, erosion of soil due to
>> clearing, heavy-metal contamination of fisheries, etc...)
>This may be true although mines are getting cleaner all
>the time. It is a matter of passing on costs not of a
>fundamental flaw in the process.
This discussion is supposed to be about the relative costs of space vs.
terrestrial mining. If the mining company has to clean up after itself,
then that will increase their costs.
> It may be true that space
>mines won't have the same problems but they will have some
>problems. Floating debris in space is a bad idea. Also some
>of the contamination comes *after* they have been mined.
>Either at the point of use or at disposal. These problems
>won't be solved this way.
I'm a proponent of public transport. I was involved in a discussion
of the pros and cons of trains and trams with a car lobbyist once. He
argued that, although cars produce air pollution, trains and trams use
electricity which is generated by burning brown coal. (I'm in Victoria,
Australia).
My response to this is that, given that transport is necessary and that
it will cause a certain amount of pollution, I'd prefer that the pollution
occurred where it will inconvenience as few people as possible. Space
is a pretty good place to have pollution, in my view. :)
Also, flying debris in the sense of "bits of rubble in orbit" is not
really likely. I mean, you are *mining* something - there's likely to
be a nice handy gravity well there for them to fall into, unless you're
mining asteroids - and I think the Moon and the nearer planets will be
a much better place to start mining presuming there are suitable
mineral reserves there. The asteroid belt is quite a long way away.
>>* slice it any way you want to, the planet is finite and its resources
>> are finite. It is true that new deposits are being found and exploited
>> at an ever-increasing rate, but this does not imply that new deposits
>> are being *formed*; eventually, we're going to run out of "accessible"
>> mineral deposits.
>But eventually is a funny concept. Eventually the sun is
>going to explode and eventually the Universe in probably
>going to collapse into a very small point. If the Earth
>has enough minerals to last a suitably long time (as it
>does more or less for fissionable fuels) then it may as
>well be considered lasting forever. Even space resources
>are finite in that sense even though we will never use
>them all.
So is "Accessibility" a funny concept. As your own argument states,
advancing technology makes formerly unviable deposits commercially
extractable. My contention is that a combination of depletion
of terrestrial deposits and advancing space technology will make
extraterrestrial deposits commercially extractable. I was not saying
"eventually there will be no more ores in the crust", I was saying
"eventually it'll be cheaper to go off-planet than to mine here".
Big difference in time scale.
Robyn McNamara
>In article <40d6hu$1n...@cymbal.aix.calpoly.edu> dbr...@cymbal.aix.calpoly.edu (Darrin Lee Bright) writes:
>>But the
>>population IS going up,
>Yes but the rate is going down.
The population is increasing. Joseph is saying that the rate of increase
is decreasing - but the population will not start to decrease until
the rate of increase becomes negative.
I would like more information about this. In particular, what's the third
derivative of population? :)
>>water it. At any rate, what I mean to say is that we're going to be running
>>out of REAL ESTATE.
>Not at all. Most of these newly rich people are going to be in less
>developed nations as they catch up. Most of them have plenty of
>room for 1,200,000 dollar homes. Not places like China of course
>but Africa remains one of the least densely populated continents
>on Earth (I think I am living on the least of all if you don't count
>Antartica) Not even America is densely populated and by one of
>the ironies of life as America has become more wealthy it has
>become more concentrated. Most of America is largely empty
>with most people preferring to live in or near cities.
<grumble> Here we go again with the ghost of the old "Populate or Perish"
hooey. The population of Australia divided by the area of Australia
is tiny. However, most of Australia isn't arable and has no supply of
drinking water.
Most of America (and, for that matter, the arable bits of Australia) is
_farmland_. Farming has become less labour-intensive, and consequently
fewer people farm. However, the amount of space necessary to grow,
say a carrot has not really decreased much (the same is not true of
meat animals, alas) and is unlikely to decrease in the future unless
micro-veggies are invented.. Thus, even if an increasing population
does not require much more land for living space, it *will* require
more land to be cultivated.
The fact that living standards are increasing in many highly-populated
areas will also probably increase the demand for food.
>>Mining corps are gonna start to find out that they
>>can't spit out a rat without hitting somebody's back yard. Ever tried to
>>start a mining operation in someone's back yard? Its not a pretty
>>picture...
>People do it all the time around here. People don't like to live in
>the sorts of places most mines are. Mines are dirty, loud and
>generally nasty places. So not many people do. The richer the
>population is the more choice they have about where to live.
>A wealthy world wouldn't have a problem.
If everyone was wealthy, nobody would have to live near a mine?
Even though you've been advocating more mining? Can money buy
rainfall?
You're willing to countenance the expenditure required to shift people
away from mine sites en masse and to (presumably) irrigate central
Australia and western Africa, but "Space will never be commercially
exploitable - too expensive"?
The reader is encouraged to draw his or her own conclusions. :)
douglas brandt rusch
Jeffrey A. Pleimling <j...@interaccess.com> wrote:
>Chris Knight (ckn...@crl.com) wrote:
>: William Bogen (w...@iti.org) wrote:
>: : available when you have no television! Also you could make
>: : records of as much useful information as you can recall and make
>: : them part of your Holy Scriptures. Your descendants will know that
>: : they are significant and study them closely.
>: I wouldn't suggest the 'Holy Scripture' idea. It discourages people from
>: challenging the ideas set down, and limiting their horizons.
>
>: And, of course, for those who do challenege them... Inquisition and holy
>: wars.
>
>I think one of the main problems is how do you *prevent* a new set of
>'Holy Scriptures' from coming into existance. After a couple of
>generations anything passed down is bound to get distorted to some
>degree. Even a simple 'don't eat candy before supper' rule can become
>'Thou shalt not eat suger before sundown sayth the lord'.
>
>And what do the children/grandchildren/... think about being told that
>they were originally from a different planet and were resettled by
>an alien. Think of what *that* turns into in a couple of hundred
>years. Or, do you not tell them and let them come up with their own
>versions of their existance?
>
It would probobly be best to start a religon with a strong emphasis on
the study of the natural world. Earth could be seen as the garden of eden
and your children could be given the task of returning to it. The aliens
(aka devils) could be described as well as humanities unnatural presence.
In a few hundred years science (especially biology) would easily be
able to verify some of these facts thereby justifying the religous cause.
Doug
Bruce Baugh
fro...@zikzak.zikzak.net (Robyn McNamara) wrote:
:Most of America (and, for that matter, the arable bits of Australia) is
:_farmland_.
This is widely behaved, but is actually far from the truth. The details will
vary depending upon whose definitions you use, but even if you throw in all
rangeland, less than half of the land in America is used for growing animals
or plants to eat.
Grabbing the first almanac that comes to hand, I find a total land area for
the US of 1,937,725 kilo-acres. Of non-federal land, there are (or were, in
1991) 420,994 ka of cropland, 132,356 ka of pastureland, and 405,914 ka of
cropland. The federal land total was 404,063 ka, and I don't seem to have a
handy breakdown for that, but even so. And since you specified farmland, your
figure seems pretty substantially off.
bru...@teleport.com _____________ http://www.teleport.com/~bruceab/
List Manager, Christlib, for Christian and libertarian concerns
Preview S.M. Stirling's forthcoming novel DRAKON at my home page
"Encrypt! Encrypt! OK! All-One-Key-Steganography-Privacy!
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Ken Larson
(Bruce Baugh) wrote:
-> In article <40i8qj$8...@zikzak.zikzak.net>,
-> fro...@zikzak.zikzak.net (Robyn McNamara) wrote:
->
-> :Most of America (and, for that matter, the arable bits of Australia) is
-> :_farmland_.
->
-> This is widely behaved, but is actually far from the truth. The details will
-> vary depending upon whose definitions you use, but even if you throw in all
-> rangeland, less than half of the land in America is used for growing animals
-> or plants to eat.
->
-> Grabbing the first almanac that comes to hand, I find a total land area for
-> the US of 1,937,725 kilo-acres. Of non-federal land, there are (or were, in
-> 1991) 420,994 ka of cropland, 132,356 ka of pastureland, and 405,914 ka of
-> cropland. The federal land total was 404,063 ka, and I don't seem to have a
-> handy breakdown for that, but even so. And since you specified
farmland, your
-> figure seems pretty substantially off.
Hmmmmm....
420,994 ka Cropland
+404,063 ka Cropland
__________________
=825,057 ka Cropland
Even if what you wrote is just a typo and not a freudian slip, a large
percetage of America is used as food producing land, almost all of the
land that will support agriculture is used for just that. Just because we
have a lot of land that doesn't mean it's usable.
Certainly people can move to areas that farming is not possible but I can
tell you I'm not moving to Death Valley ;-)
--
-Ken Larson Bodhran, it rhymes with Moron
bod...@teleport.com bod...@eworld.com
http://www.teleport.com/~bodhran
Erik Max Francis
> In article <570F0c...@alcyone.darkside.com>,
> Erik Max Francis <m...@alcyone.darkside.com> wrote:
>
> >Regardless of their bountiful availability in the Belt, there's always
> >another consideration: ores are getting harder to come by on the
> >Earth. Once extraction and processing costs above a certain amount,
> >it will be profitable to look toward the Belt. I can't say how long
> >that will take, but it's pretty clear that someday it will happen.
>
> Erik, are you taking the position that we will discover some more large
> ground-level ore deposits of (name any metal)? If you are, you are plain
> deluded. Today, we have to dig deeper, and refine finer because we have
> to process lower-quality ore from places that are difficult to get to.
Why would you think I was saying that? I was saying just the
opposite. That's what "someday it will happen" means.
Erik Max Francis, &tSftDotIotE // uuwest!alcyone!max, m...@alcyone.darkside.com
San Jose, CA, USA // 37 20 07 N 121 53 38 W // GIGO, Omega, Psi // the 4th R!
H.3`S,3,P,3$S,#$Q,C`Q,3,P,3$S,#$Q,3`Q,3,P,C$Q,#(Q.#`-"C`- // kmmfa // folasade
_Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt._ // mc2? oo? Nah. // http://www.spies.com/max/
Erik Max Francis
> In article <570F0c...@alcyone.darkside.com>, m...@alcyone.darkside.com (Eri
>
> |> Once extraction and processing costs above a certain amount,
> |> it will be profitable to look toward the Belt. I can't say how long
> |> that will take, but it's pretty clear that someday it will happen.
>
> Not that clear. Aluminium is already being recycled in substantial
> quantity, and smelters have been recycling scrap iron for many years,
> simply because it's a cheaper source of iron than the available ores
> (after adjusting for ease of processing and so on). If the total
> amount of minerals *in use* doesn't grow by large factors, it may be
> that there will always be a usable supply of medium-grade ore in our
> dumps and landfills. This depends on recycling/extraction
> technologies and will doubtless be different for different minerals.
True; but that just offsets the time when we have to look toward
offworld sources; it doesn't do away with that eventuality.
After all, no recycling process can be 100% efficient, so there's
always going to be a net loss of ores. Naturally, the ores don't
really go anywhere -- there's still on Earth -- but they leak away
in very small quantities into hard-to-get places.
Eventually, enough of the stuff is so hard to get that it becomes
profitable to go to the Belt. Even if you come up with new mechanisms
which can start the recycling process again, that dosen't change the
fact that when _that_ recycling process starts to come up shallow,
you're forced to consider the Belt again.
Graydon
: Remember, they don't have paper. They are going to have to learn how
: to make it for local material and then ink. If the material they
: produce lasts for more then a generation they are very lucky.
It's called mud and a sharp stick. Ask the Summerians.
--
saun...@qlink.queensu.ca | Monete me si non anglice loquobar.
Christopher Knight
: available when you have no television! Also you could make
: records of as much useful information as you can recall and make
: them part of your Holy Scriptures. Your descendants will know that
: they are significant and study them closely.
And this will be a source of gene-pool weeding at a later time. As the
smarter will someday oppose the 'now religous' sciences in the scripture,
this will be an endless source of holy wars.
Sound familiar? We don't have much hard science in our religious texts,
but then again, that's after generations of being passed on verbally...
-ck
Joseph Askew
>>Well yes and no. There are all sorts of possibilities for
>>remotely operated machinery and robots on the sea floor.
>How come it'd be cost-effective to design and build robots to mine
>undersea (at great pressure and in a rather corrosive environment)
>but not to design and build robots to do the same in space?
Response time for one. Repairs. Replacements. Transport.
>I don't think those sorts of analogies necessarily work in the
>context of geography. It's kind of like saying "there is lots of land
>in the Northern Hemisphere, therefore it follows that probably there is
>lots of land in the Southern Hemisphere only no one has found it yet."
No it isn't actually.
>This discussion is supposed to be about the relative costs of space vs.
>terrestrial mining. If the mining company has to clean up after itself,
>then that will increase their costs.
To some extent it will. Or move somewhere they don't have
to pay out for such costs. Most mine technology is not
inherently polluting or destructive and so the cost are
really quite small. Refining is more of a problem. There
is no way that a couple of holding dams adds up to the
cost of sending entire factories into space.
>> It may be true that space
>>mines won't have the same problems but they will have some
>>problems. Floating debris in space is a bad idea. Also some
>>of the contamination comes *after* they have been mined.
>>Either at the point of use or at disposal. These problems
>>won't be solved this way.
>I'm a proponent of public transport. I was involved in a discussion
>of the pros and cons of trains and trams with a car lobbyist once. He
>argued that, although cars produce air pollution, trains and trams use
>electricity which is generated by burning brown coal. (I'm in Victoria,
>Australia).
So am I by the way if you looked.
>My response to this is that, given that transport is necessary and that
>it will cause a certain amount of pollution, I'd prefer that the pollution
>occurred where it will inconvenience as few people as possible. Space
>is a pretty good place to have pollution, in my view. :)
Not if it means that your mines will have to either close down
because the transport for your product keeps getting hit by
very large very fast lumps of slag material or invest heavily
in protection.
>Also, flying debris in the sense of "bits of rubble in orbit" is not
>really likely. I mean, you are *mining* something - there's likely to
>be a nice handy gravity well there for them to fall into, unless you're
>mining asteroids - and I think the Moon and the nearer planets will be
>a much better place to start mining presuming there are suitable
>mineral reserves there. The asteroid belt is quite a long way away.
The asteroid belt is probably far more sensible than either of
the two nearest planets. Venus is out for a start - you think
mining the sea is difficult try a 90 bar atmosphere at 750 K
with no oxygen down a gravity well about the same as Earth's.
The energy costs from the surface of Mars are about the same
from many asteroids if I remember right although there are
much nearer ones and much further ones. Bits of floating debris
is highly likely if you mine any sort of asteroid even even if
you simply travel. What are you going to do with your human
waste by products for a start. Why bother disposing of waste
if you can just tip it over the side and let someone else suffer?
>So is "Accessibility" a funny concept. As your own argument states,
>advancing technology makes formerly unviable deposits commercially
>extractable. My contention is that a combination of depletion
>of terrestrial deposits and advancing space technology will make
>extraterrestrial deposits commercially extractable. I was not saying
>"eventually there will be no more ores in the crust", I was saying
>"eventually it'll be cheaper to go off-planet than to mine here".
>Big difference in time scale.
There is a minimum energy requirement for mining and for
travelling. No matter how efficient your systems are there
is no way to get around that. From the surface of Mars you
are talking about 11 km/sec, about the same from the asteroids
and about the same as going from the surface to LEO. You just
cannot get away from the fact that this transportation will
put a minimum cost on your mining operations anywhere off the
planet. Added to the cost of extracting and mining.
Joseph
Joseph Askew
><grumble> Here we go again with the ghost of the old "Populate or Perish"
>hooey. The population of Australia divided by the area of Australia
>is tiny. However, most of Australia isn't arable and has no supply of
>drinking water.
This just ain't so, or at least in the way you mean it. Large
parts of northern Australia have huge supplies of water. Some
two thirds of all water in Australia is concentrated in the
North. Not many people there though. Where I grew up (Adelaide)
a respectable proportion of the drinking water is piped from
the Murray in Summer (I know, I'm still just as disgusted as
you and I had to drink it) so the supply argument is somewhat
specious. Mexico City brings in a third of its drinking water
from 2,000 metres down. How far away I am not sure, it is the
up part that costs. Hong Kong and Singapore have both outgrown
their native water supplies. I see no problems there.
>Most of America (and, for that matter, the arable bits of Australia) is
>_farmland_. Farming has become less labour-intensive, and consequently
>fewer people farm. However, the amount of space necessary to grow,
>say a carrot has not really decreased much (the same is not true of
>meat animals, alas) and is unlikely to decrease in the future unless
>micro-veggies are invented..
Actually it is true of both carrots and cows that the space
needed has shrunk. We get more off each acre than we ever
did and new (and personally disgusting) forms of meat raising
technologies have enabled us to raise cattle, pigs, chickens
and others in small areas. I don't like feed lots myself and
see no need for them in this country but they are small.
>Thus, even if an increasing population
>does not require much more land for living space, it *will* require
>more land to be cultivated.
Or yields per acre will have to go up. As they have been
steadily for some time.
>The fact that living standards are increasing in many highly-populated
>areas will also probably increase the demand for food.
So it will. Hooray for technology and economic development.
>>The richer the
>>population is the more choice they have about where to live.
>>A wealthy world wouldn't have a problem.
>If everyone was wealthy, nobody would have to live near a mine?
Only the mine workers. Everyone else could buy a house on
the Gold Coast and fly into work.
>Even though you've been advocating more mining? Can money buy
>rainfall?
No but it can buy something even better - irrigation.
>You're willing to countenance the expenditure required to shift people
>away from mine sites en masse and to (presumably) irrigate central
>Australia and western Africa, but "Space will never be commercially
>exploitable - too expensive"?
Yep. The costs are totally out of proportion. You don't have
to shift people en masse. Most mine sites are rural with low
population densities. Suppose that a mine site is a point mass
and you don't want anyone living within ten kilometres. That's
about 315 square kilometres per mine. Much of my home state
has less than one person per square kilometre. Suppose that
on average there are ten people. That's a total of 3150 people
and a ten km radius is very very generous. My brother lives
closer than that in Broken Hill and while I don't recommend
the town to anybody it isn't as bad as all that.
>The reader is encouraged to draw his or her own conclusions. :)
Please do.
Joseph
Christopher Knight
: I would expect the market price to respond to the presence of the
: asteroid in any event. Take a look at how spot markets in commodities
: operate.
You could plan the feeding your mined ore down slowly, to try to get
maximum profit, but the market is going to drop anyways. The metal
commodities market is largely based on speculation and hunches, and only
fractionally based on demand. Anyone who wanted to justify such an effort
would have to take into consideration the fraction of current value that
that ore is going to be sold at once the market has bottomed out.
So, brining back an asteroid may not be a good idea if you are a mining
company, or other agency that would be selling the ore or refined
product. Where does that leave us?
I could forsee the best solution as convincing a company that BUYS a
large qty of nickle-iron that they would cut expenses for the next XX
years if they obtained their own source of materials. That way, a drop
in market would not affect the book-keeping. (Once you got it through
your accountant's head that your action caused the drop, and that if you
hadn't fetched your own asteroid, the price WOULD NOT have dropped on
it's own.)
-ck
Christopher Knight
: In article <40asm7$8...@news.iadfw.net>, Bill Snyder <bsn...@iadfw.net> wrote:
: >Yes, but so will your "competition." And when they figure out that
: >they can perturb the orbit for a fraction of what you're demanding in
: >return for getting it into that orbit in the first place... Hope your
: >liability policy is paid up.
: Um, how does it go again?
I believe "perturb the orbit" is a polite euphamism for the old phrase
"Blow it out of the sky."
It would not take much, in the form of nuclear missiles, to "perturb the
orbit" of your floating mine, and cause it to leave it's orbit on a new
outbound mission.
A well-placed, succesfully lobbying, corporation might even convince the
government that the 'parked' asteroid is dangerous to the population and
needs to be 'displaced'.
Do I really seem this cynical in real life? I hope this is just a 'net
personna.
-ck
David P Norwood
Joseph Askew (jba...@MFS06.cc.monash.edu.au) wrote:
: In article <40i8qj$8...@zikzak.zikzak.net> fro...@zikzak.zikzak.net
: (Robyn McNamara) writes:
: >Most of America (and, for that matter, the arable bits of Australia) is
: >_farmland_. Farming has become less labour-intensive, and consequently
: >fewer people farm. However, the amount of space necessary to grow,
: >say a carrot has not really decreased much (the same is not true of
: >meat animals, alas) and is unlikely to decrease in the future unless
: >micro-veggies are invented..
Actually, only a minority of America is farmland, but at 40%, it is a respectable
minority (I was quite surprised when I worked it out). That said, I agree with
your (Robyn's) basic point, which is that food production is the key. I takes
roughly an acre of land to produce enough food to feed one person (I worked this
out from first principles a few years ago [so much food for so many calories with
so much yeild from so much land] and have since seen about the same number
published in various places [among them, _Lucifer's Hammer_, which, I suppose
justifies adding to this thread]). You can quickly work out that the maximum
carrying capacity of the planet is in the ten's of billions range, and we'll be
there in about a century.
: Actually it is true of both carrots and cows that the space
: needed has shrunk. We get more off each acre than we ever
: did and new (and personally disgusting) forms of meat raising
: technologies have enabled us to raise cattle, pigs, chickens
: and others in small areas. I don't like feed lots myself and
: see no need for them in this country but they are small.
For carrots, the space needed hasn't shrunk that much. We've greatly increased
the area on which we can grow carrots (irrigation for dry land, fertilization for
bad land, etc.) but each carrot needs just about as much room as it ever did. The
livestock issue is a red herring (so to speak) because no matter how small a room
the calf is in you have to grow something to feed him. Ultimately, the energy we
need to live day-to-day comes from the sun via a miserably inefficient process
(photosynthesis, the only game in town). We can further process that energy into
cows, but it doesn't change the fact that the choke point in the whole system is
photosynthesis. (Incidentally, the old "be a vegetarian and save the world" jazz
doesn't work. It takes a lot of grain to make a pound of flesh, but that pound of
flesh has a much higher food value).
: >Thus, even if an increasing population
: >does not require much more land for living space, it *will* require
: >more land to be cultivated.
: Or yields per acre will have to go up. As they have been
: steadily for some time.
But not nearly as fast as the population.
: >The fact that living standards are increasing in many highly-populated
: >areas will also probably increase the demand for food.
: So it will. Hooray for technology and economic development.
Technology will only take you so far. I'm a scientist, I believe in science and
technology (when properly used) as a means to make a better life for everyone
(which, I suppose, defines "proper use"). But I caution against the notion that
the boys in the lab coats will always save our butts. Yes, so far they have, but
like they say, "It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end".
dave
dave's sig
David P Norwood
: In article <ERICH.95A...@csdl.cs.tamu.edu>
: er...@csdl.cs.tamu.edu "Erich Schneider" writes:
: > Oh, sure, if we find ways to violate fundamental laws of physics,
: Larry's JumpShift does not violate any laws of physics, see "Theory &
: Practice of Teleportation", and to the early Victorian engineer
Actually, I think it violates local conservation of energy.
dave
dave's sig
Mr TH Lawler
>In article <40i7ai$8...@zikzak.zikzak.net> fro...@zikzak.zikzak.net (Robyn McNamara) writes:
>>>Well yes and no. There are all sorts of possibilities for
>>>remotely operated machinery and robots on the sea floor.
>>How come it'd be cost-effective to design and build robots to mine
>>undersea (at great pressure and in a rather corrosive environment)
>>but not to design and build robots to do the same in space?
>Response time for one. Repairs. Replacements. Transport.
Hmmm. you seem to have plenty of time for the rest of this reply...
At any rate, (see below for info on spaceborne mfg.) it would actually
be much cheaper to build repairs and/or replacements in space than on
earth. Self replicating robots have been successfully built, and can only
await a suitable application. Take one of these new multi-purpose japanese
mfg. robots and modify it to allow self-replication, and you've got an
instant- industry which will require _no maintenance_!
>>I don't think those sorts of analogies necessarily work in the
>>context of geography. It's kind of like saying "there is lots of land
>>in the Northern Hemisphere, therefore it follows that probably there is
>>lots of land in the Southern Hemisphere only no one has found it yet."
>No it isn't actually.
OH PLEASE! Y'know what this reminds me of?
] This isn't a pantomime!
} Oh Yes it is!
] Oh no it isn't!
} OOOOHHH YES IT IS!
] OOOOOOOOHHH NO IT ISN'T!!
etc.
>>This discussion is supposed to be about the relative costs of space vs.
>>terrestrial mining. If the mining company has to clean up after itself,
>>then that will increase their costs.
>To some extent it will. Or move somewhere they don't have
>to pay out for such costs. Most mine technology is not
>inherently polluting or destructive and so the cost are
>really quite small.
Again, Joseph, the question arises: WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU BASING THIS ON?
If, as has been the case before, this statement about real world
data comes completely off the top of your head, then STOP IT! Back up
your meaningless staements with some verifiable sources!
> Refining is more of a problem. There
>is no way that a couple of holding dams adds up to the
>cost of sending entire factories into space.
Aha! And here is where you are wrong. Suppose I need to refine the
hypothetical nickel-iron asteroid mentioned in several earlier articles in
this thread. Firstly, I would indeed need to send an item into space: A
smooth spherical lump of thermoplastic with a spherical water-filled
cavity in its center. Call the total payload about half a metric ton.
(This assumes no prior infrastructure in space, except the mining robot
which first retrieved the asteroid. In reality, it might be possible to
produce plastics from asteroidal materials in situ). This plastic sphere
could be shuttled into orbit. It would then be simply a case of placing the
sphere outside the shuttle in direct sunlight, with a slight spin (the sun
should lie in the plane of this spin). As the raw sunlight heats the
plastic, it softens, and the water inside expands. The boiling point of
water is proportional to atmospheric pressure, so it will boil vigorously.
When this sphere has reached the desired size, (say 1km diameter) a small
pin-prick hole can be made in it, and the steam released. This should be
timed to coincide with sunset, so that the plastic cools in a perfect
(huge) sphere. This sphere can now be coated with a metallic reflecting
agent produced from the asteroid. (If the sphere were a conducting
polymer, you could just electroplate it. This is also easy in zero-g,
but a description would take time. Mail me if you _really_ want one).
You now take your mirror-coated sphere, cut it in half, and, voila! A
pair of roughly parabolic (the sphere was spinning as it cooled; sphere
isn't really an accurate name any more) mirrors, each one km across!
These mirrors will collect and focus freely available sunlight enabling
easy smelting of _any_ quantity of metal. Once liquified, magnets can be
used to separate ferrous from non-ferrous, and more-ferrous from less.
(you can make a perfectly good magnet from nickel-iron, and there's solar
power there to run it).
Got any problems with that? =)
>>it will cause a certain amount of pollution, I'd prefer that the pollution
>>occurred where it will inconvenience as few people as possible. Space
>>is a pretty good place to have pollution, in my view. :)
>Not if it means that your mines will have to either close down
>because the transport for your product keeps getting hit by
>very large very fast lumps of slag material or invest heavily
>in protection.
I haven't got the figures on me right now, but I _will_ find them:
The probability of being hit by debris at any appreciable speed in the
asteroid belt is almost nil at any time, provided you are also moving
at orbital velocity. As for industrial by-product, what were you thinking
of? Jettisoning human waste, for instance, is hardly going to be a problem
unless you throw it away Real Hard. Orbital mechanics says that it'll only
come back going as fast as you threw it. Newton says if you don't throw it,
it won't go anywhere, and quite frankly, why bother? If you're worried about
it going places, just tether it all to a nearby asteroid.
>>Also, flying debris in the sense of "bits of rubble in orbit" is not
>>really likely. I mean, you are *mining* something - there's likely to
>>be a nice handy gravity well there for them to fall into, unless you're
>>mining asteroids - and I think the Moon and the nearer planets will be
>>a much better place to start mining presuming there are suitable
>>mineral reserves there. The asteroid belt is quite a long way away.
>The asteroid belt is probably far more sensible than either of
>the two nearest planets. Venus is out for a start - you think
>mining the sea is difficult try a 90 bar atmosphere at 750 K
>with no oxygen down a gravity well about the same as Earth's.
>The energy costs from the surface of Mars are about the same
>from many asteroids if I remember right although there are
>much nearer ones and much further ones.
Nonetheless, Robyn's point still holds. Why not just drop your
waste on mars or jupiter? No real effort involved either, just
throw it in the right direction, and Fred's your half-brother.
>There is a minimum energy requirement for mining and for
>travelling. No matter how efficient your systems are there
>is no way to get around that. From the surface of Mars you
>are talking about 11 km/sec, about the same from the asteroids
>and about the same as going from the surface to LEO. You just
>cannot get away from the fact that this transportation will
>put a minimum cost on your mining operations anywhere off the
>planet. Added to the cost of extracting and mining.
(Sigh) Just in case you didn't hear me the first time, THIS IS NOT
A PROBLEM!!! Orbital Towers are comparitively cheap to build (compared
to repeated shuttle-missions, anything looks cheap!) and they cut
your transport costs to _High earth orbit_ (none of this LEO crap)
down to about $2 - $8 per kg. Transport down is free. (and safe)
Just incidentally, a solar power station on top of an orbital tower
doesn't need any 'power-beam' to deliver unlimited power to the ground.
To all you people who are following this thread and aren't
Joseph, sorry about the wordiness. I really do LIKE this subject. :)
--
'And dawn came on at seven hundred miles per second...It came on like
destiny made visible, a moving wall too big to go around.' -Ringworld
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Thorne Lawler, Ba/BSc II. Send email to tho...@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au
Christopher Knight
: Yet oddly enough nearly all metals are cheaper now than
: at any time in the past. The truth is that new and rich
: sources are opening up all the time and a good half of
: the world has yet to be properly explored. More than that.
Yep! All we have to do is clear off that useless forest/prarie/(insert
other fragile ecology here), and the way to another 50 year supply is
ours!!!! But, please, let's not think about what happens after that...
-ck
Chris Knight
: they were originally from a different planet and were resettled by
: an alien. Think of what *that* turns into in a couple of hundred
: years. Or, do you not tell them and let them come up with their own
: versions of their existance?
It probably doesn't mutate into anything more sinistar than "God placed
Adam and Eve in the garden. Ours was a metal god who likes Chocolate
Covered Man Hole Covers and insane riddles. Do not riddle my children,
lest you be abandoned by God onto an empty land..."
-ck
Mike Stern
: : William Bogen (w...@iti.org) wrote:
: : : available when you have no television! Also you could make
: : : records of as much useful information as you can recall and make
: : : them part of your Holy Scriptures. Your descendants will know that
: : : they are significant and study them closely.
: : And, of course, for those who do challenege them... Inquisition and holy
: : wars.
[snipped]
: Remember, they don't have paper. They are going to have to learn how
: to make it for local material and then ink. If the material they
: produce lasts for more then a generation they are very lucky.
Why should they use paper? This is a perfect example of being stuck in
a paradigm. I can think of lots of alternatives, some of which would
last a long time. The use of paper isn't written in stone, y'know. :)
--
Mike Stern
ster...@netcom.com
"A waste is such a terrible thing to mind"
Anonymous Garbage Dump Supervisor
Robert Billing
d...@mailhost.tcs.tulane.edu "David P Norwood" writes:
> Robert Billing (uncl...@tnglwood.demon.co.uk) wrote:
> : Larry's JumpShift does not violate any laws of physics, see "Theory &
> : Practice of Teleportation", and to the early Victorian engineer
>
> Actually, I think it violates local conservation of energy.
I am curious about this, as Larry seemed to have been very careful that
it did not. The only possible flaw that I saw in it was that the drop
in temperature when going uphill might represent a fall in entropy. Can
anyone else comment?
--
I am Robert Billing, Christian, inventor, traveller, cook and animal
lover, I live in southern England, close to 0:46W 51:22N. "...Trurl,
who vowed by everything that was ever held sacred never, never again to
make a Cybernetic model of the Muse." Stanislaw Lem in the Cyberiad.
Robert Billing
ckn...@shell1.best.com "Christopher Knight" writes:
> Sound familiar? We don't have much hard science in our religious texts,
> but then again, that's after generations of being passed on verbally...
Actually this isn't true. The oldest mss of the New Testament are
within one or two generations of the events they describe. It is
commonly believed that they are much later, but this is a myth
which is passed on verbally from generation to generation... :-)
Pixellle
examples of castaways trying not just to survive but also to maintain or
duplicate civilization and science and technology. There must be many
more examples of this category than I'm aware of: a Swiss Family Robinson/
more-optimistic-version of "Lord of the Flies" sort of thing. Will
someone enlighten me? (Should post-holocaust novels count? I think not,
since most of them show a new type of society already established... But
if you think one fits into the "trying not to lose our human knowledge and
civilization" category, then say so.)
Beth