Tevatron is shutting down today.

[BlackCat]

Unfortunatedly the women wasn't prepared for it

[Lorizael]

The SSC was a 40 billion dollar boondoggle that probably would have ballooned into an 80 billion dollar boondoggle if it hadn't been cut.

I have no idea why anybody other than physicists (and ex-physicists who benefit due to increased demand for close substitutes for their labor) are in favor of these things, when nobody other than the groups mentioned will ever have any understanding of the results or benefit in any concrete way.

I didn't state that I was necessarily in favor of the SSC. But aside from that, I am in favor of the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake, pure and simple.

[C0ckney]

If Columbus had not been incompetent and risked death by bad calculation, the discovery of the new world would have been delayed by perhaps a century

although i agree with your general point, this isn't true. it would have been a few years, at most. the portuguese already had the ships and were exploring the african coast. they would pass the cape and 'discover' india a few years later and brasil at around the same time. lots of other explorers were thinking about the western route at the time. if it hadn't been columbus, it would have been someone else very soon after 1492.

[DinoDoc]

So yeah, moon bases are worthless.

Supervillain HQ's? Mining? Or would that last one only really apply to asteroids?

[giblets]

What would we mine on the moon that we can't mine on earth? Or from asteroids, for that matter.

[DinoDoc]

What would we mine on the moon that we can't mine on earth?

Supposedly there are large deposits of Helium-3 on the moon.

Or from asteroids, for that matter.

One NASA report estimates that the mineral wealth of the asteroids in the asteroid belt might exceed $100 billion for each of the six billion people on Earth.

[giblets]

Supposedly there are large deposits of Helium-3 on the moon.One NASA report estimates that the mineral wealth of the asteroids in the asteroid belt might exceed $100 billion for each of the six billion people on Earth.

Sure, there's probably a large amount of minerals in the asteroid belt, but if they're minerals we can find on earth (I'm guessing they are and people already mine them, or else it would be hard to estimate how many dollars they're worth) then it doesn't make sense to extract any minerals from the asteroid belt. I imagine the transportation costs would be really high.

You could be right about the Helium-3, for all I know.

[loinburger]

Assuming we were able to mine a largish asteroid (a kilometer or so in radius) then we would be able to extract more gold and platinum from the asteroid than we could from the Earth over the next ten years (this is an estimate that James Burke made in the late 80's and it was probably a napkin calculation, so this number may be off by a factor of two or more, but the point is still valid). Yes, we can get gold and platinum out of the earth, that doesn't mean that mining an asteroid wouldn't make sense if we could find a viable means of doing so.

[DaShi]

No surprise that DD is on Ben's side of this argument.

[DinoDoc]

... if we could find a viable means of doing so.

There's always a catch and that's the big one.

[loinburger]

I can just imagine the fun and games if somebody came up with an economical way to bring a mile wide asteroid close to Earth for mining. "Oh don't worry, I'm sure it won't crash into the planet!"

[DinoDoc]

[giblets]

Okay, so if we can get 2500 tonnes of gold a year on earth then that's 25000 tonnes of gold from the asteroid, if gold is $1600 an ounce and a kilogram is ~32 troy ounces then the asteroid operation gets ~$130 billion in gold. This ignoring the possibility of the price of gold falling: Wikipedia says a total of 165,000 tonnes of gold have been mined in human history, and a 15% increase in the gold supply could have a significant impact on what the gold is worth. Assuming the gold price wouldn't fall by more than half, then we have at least $60-70 billion worth of gold from the operation.

This website claims global platinum production is ~200 tonnes a years, ten years worth of that is 2000 tonnes, if platinum is $1500 an ounce then we're looking at ~$10 billion of platinum from the asteroid.

How much would mining a largish asteroid cost? I don't know, but Wikipedia claims that NASA said that the Apollo program cost $170 billion in 2005 terms. So I guess that flying out to an asteroid with the crew and equipment needed to mine a kilometer wide asteroid would need to be cheaper than visiting the moon and bringing back a few moon rocks.

[loinburger]

Why are you treating this as anything other than a hypothetical? Nobody is saying that mining an asteroid is economically viable at present.

[giblets]

I never said it wasn't a hypothetical.