----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Minette" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, November 02, 2000 10:27 PM
Subject: Re: The Space Station
> Peter Horton wrote:
>
> >The main benefit for going OUT THERE is obvious. The continued >survival
> >of our species. To put it simply, if you put all of your >eggs in one
> >basket (the Earth) all it takes is one rock (a medium >sized asteroid) to
> >destroy all your eggs (us).
>
> Lets calculate the odds on that. I'm not at home now, so forgive my lack
of
> research, but the evidence that I see indicates that a worldwide mass
> extinction even happens only once in multiple millions of years. The
> dinsaours exticntion is an example of this...and it appears that the
period
> of this is in the hundreds of millions of years.
>
> So, I'm not really worried about this happening in the next thousand
years.
> The odds are strongly against it.
The odds of being killed by an asteroid are greater that being struck by
lightning or being killed in a plane crash. It sounds strange, but asteroids
(like weapons of mass destruction) kill so many when a fall does occur, that
it greatly increases the odds for a single individual.
>
> Not only that, but sending a few folks to Mars in the near future has
> virtually nothing to do with saving the population of the earth. A much
> more plausable use of space technology would be the mapping of all of the
> near earth objects of sufficient size to cause this type of difficulty,
and
> the development of the technology needed to nudge these objects in their
> orbits as need be. You'll be surprised at how small the nudge can be if
it
> is given early enough.
I disagree. The vast amounts, availability, and sometimes even the purity of
materials in asteroidal bodies is going to make the first people to exploit
them incredibly wealthy.
Can you say "Gold Rush"?
xponent
rob
