On Fri, Jun 15, 2007 at 01:47:32PM -0700, Tom McCabe wrote: > Keep in mind the large lag time in lightspeed > communications. This goes double for uploads and AIs > who probably won't be running at human speed.
Subjective travel time as a photon stream or a material information packet is zero, and even the Moon is subjectively more than two weeks away at 10^6 speedup. Biology doesn't assume any plant leaf in Indonesia can ping any other plant leaf on this planet in finite time in order to do its thing. This planet is full of human agents, most of them rather isolated, though no longer having a communication latency of years, or being completely isolated. > Any element that lacks a decent ore must have a small > market, as it'd be very hard to get large quantities. There are many elements technology only needs in trace quantities which have no real ores, and are produces by enrichening or as waste from other processes. > Any small market will very quickly become saturated > with the space-based production, causing the element > to drop in value dramatically. If you look at a chondrite, or carbonaceous chondrite, it's all the right stuff in the right abundancies. What else do you need? > > Sure, and don't forget to add some hand mirrors, and > > glass pearls. > > Huh? You're estimating future requirements using today's requirements. That's guaranteed to give you completely invalid results. > The Moon has very small concentrations of metal in the > crust due to the method of its formation. There you go again. How much iron or nickel or platinum do you have in your body? Who would assume an advanced culture would use bulk elements for catalysts, that seems like asking what today's market for processed sinew or flint or chert is. > > Good luck finding an insurer for that. > > Also, simply crashing an asteroid onto the planet will > vaporize all the ore and scatter it for dozens of > kilometers in every direction. In practice you can aerobrake a ceramics-coated guided-descent vehicle well enough so you can airdrop your kiloton of titanium profiles to GPS coordinates anywhere, however, in packages of of tons each. You can make a km-sized rock impact Earth, if you have enough time, but it's going to piss a few people off. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&user_secret=7d7fb4d8
