----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard Baker" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, November 29, 2002 8:57 AM Subject: Business plan competition
> Apologies to people who've already seen this over in the other place, > but I wanted some more opinions from people I respect. > > The Cambridge University Entrepreneurs, a student society, has a > business plan competition in which you can win prizes of UKP30,000 or > UKP10,000. I already have a business about to start operations and my > product-based company ideas aren't at the business plan stage, but I've > had another idea stuck in my head for a few years now: mining near-Earth > comets and asteroids. I'm pretty sure I can write a detailed and > convincing business plan that will bootstrap us in a couple of decades > from a few hundred million dollars of investment right through to solar > power satellites and giant space colonies. I can convincingly explain > why none of this has happened yet and why the inelasticity of the > launcher market makes it unlikely to happen in the near future, but also > that I have insights that can make it happen. I can offer a return on > investment in twenty years or so of at least several trillion dollars. > The plan has a number of fallback positions and alternative options that > make it very robust, and it requires the development of only modest > amounts of new technology (no next-gen launch vehicles or anything like > that). I'd love to see it happen. I believe all the money is "out there". > > Also, I like the idea of standing up in front of the presentations > dinner and starting a presentation with "Who'd like to be a > billionaire? Okay, now who'd like to be a *trillionaire*? Who'd like to > invest in a company which will become the most successful and powerful > organisation in human history? I can offer you all this, and more..." > and then follow up with detailed technical, financial and economic > models showing that I can in fact offer all of that. Raises hand. Counts pocket change. [snip the obvious stuff] > Now we're in the freight business! We can move people's satellites > around for them and even refuel them. We can bring stuff back from > geosynchronous orbit to be returned to Earth in the Shuttle. All > essentially for free, compared with the current way of doing it. Up to this point I'm pretty much with you. > > Next, we design and build a platinum mine and use one of our transfer > vehicles to blast it off to a near-Earth asteroid. We also send a block > of ice there (or maybe we can extract water from the asteroid itself) > and an electrolysis factory. Now we mine deposits of platinum (or > iridium, or other stuff) from the surface of the asteroid and ship them > back to Earth orbit. The average near-Earth asteroid has around five to > ten trillion dollars of platinum group metals in it. If we mine the > surface few metres we ought to get a few tens of billions of dollars > worth. Note that we can also move the mining station from asteroid to > asteroid to re-use it. (We'll leave the electrolysis station there > though because it'll come in useful.) Essentially for the cost of an > electrolysis station we can mine all the surface deposits of the > asteroid. > > Then we sit here manipulating the market for platinum group metals and > making ourselves perhaps a hundred billion dollars a year. (Detailed > calculations to follow.) Have you calculated in the instant devaluation of the metals market that would occur with the appearance of such vast quantities of materials in what I assume to be a refined state? I would think that you would have to prohibit most of the materials being transferred to earth in order to keep the value high. Also that you would have to use most of that material in orbit as part of some manufacturing process that allows you to send finished goods only down to the surface or at least set into orbit as parts of systems that benefit surface dwellers. You might make as much or more from services early in your program. If large amounts of readily useable metals suddenly appear in orbit. it will cause serious displacement in ground based markets. Mines will shut down, there will be considerable unemployment in the mining sector, and that might cause considerable opposition to your plans groundside even before you get started. > > With some of this money, we develop a second type of mining station, > which extracts silica, processes it into amorphous silicon and makes > solar cells from that. We can use these solar cells to power the various > mining and electrolysis stations, but we can also use them to build > solar power satellites in Earth orbit. Probably we'll have to ship some > people out to geosynchronous orbit to oversee construction, but we can > afford that by now. Start by providing power to third and developing world nations. In the developed world you will likely have to supply only your partners at first. Rich Baker might possibly become synonymous with Bill Gates, and we know how much everyone loves *him*. >We can then use our cheap solar cells and cheap > orbital transfer to land helium-3 mines on the Moon. Soon, RichCorp > controls the Earth's energy markets as well as its precious metal > markets. At this stage we buy the Middle-Eastern oilfields, because > hydrocarbons might come in useful. Along the way you will have to hire every lawyer and lobbiest available. It will be a long hard fight against entrenched industries. You are going to destabilise most of the world to some degree or another. > > Anyway, by now we can afford to land larger mining stations on asteroids > and can begin mining bulk materials. Asteroids of the type we mine are > mostly iron. We use this to manufacture steel plates and struts in > orbit. We can use those to help assemble the SPS arrays and also to > build the bulk structures of large, 2001-style stations. (If the joins > aren't good enough, we can spray the insides with plastics to make them > airtight.) We can now build O'Neill-style stations in Earth or Lunar > orbit at reasonable prices (perhaps comparable to building ocean liners > today). We can now start off-world colonisation. (This assumes some way > of getting hundreds or thousands of people off Earth, which we can't > really do yet and which is beyond the assumptions of my plan.) With all that Iron you need to also acquire nuke tech so you can build Orion/Michael type ships so you can extend your reach across the entire system. With this type of ship in operation one could build an "internet" before the people get there! > > Essentially the whole point of everything so far is to be able to mine > the main belt. The resources there utterly dwarf those available in the > relatively small number of near-Earth asteroids. From there we can > bootstrap to the Trojan asteroids, which contain even more material, and > the Kuiper belt, and start mining the gas-giants for helium-3 and other > far-out stuff. And develop usefull nano. And create the singularity! Ahhh the hilarity!!! <G> > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------- > > I can repost some old Culture messages that outline why mining asteroids > and comets is better than mining the Moon, if you'd like. I'll also be > writing some material in the near future on why the inelasticity of the > launcher business means that only items with high complexity and low > mass should be brought up from the surface of the Earth (and clearly > propellants and structural elements are not in this class). Do so please! I think I would enjoy that a lot more than the current political/philosophical discussions we have suffered through lately. <G> > > Rich > GCU You All Thought I Was Joking About That God-Emperor Stuff, Didn't > You? More like God-Gates-Emperor<G> xponent Developing A Suckup Plan <G> Maru rob _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
