Primitive Tin

25 July 2011

Primitive Tin
Is it worth Exploring Outer Space?

In my opinion yes. Wow were do I start, okay.. Gold itself is 1,235.40 $ / troy ounce. It is amazing how much value we put on earthly like elements, it seems so primitive to me, and knowing this it seems to be common sense that other undiscovered elements that already exist in our solar system could really put money back into our economy and really push our technology 10 fold. Imagine coming across a metal so strong and so light it could stretch out like tin foil and stop bullets ? God knows what the hell is really out there. But other than trying to find extraterrestrial life, I personally believe mining our asteroid belts is literally the oil industry of the future. Space is after all " Our Final Destination" And let's face it oil isn't going to last forever.So my question is what do you guy's think about this, when are we gonna settle our differences on earth and get our butt's to mars?

Yes definitely.

But not for the reasons that you have described. The real value of exploring space is twofold:
1) Knowledge is liberating. If we were still stuck in the dark ages and did not know what was only a few miles above us, and were unaware of even the simplest facts that we have today (such as the Earth being round and not at the centre of all creation), we would be enslaved to any despot who claimed to have any esoteric knowledge, however improbable. Today we know that legions of people have been persecuted and suffered in the past because tyrants have risen to power on sheer false knowledge and sought to remove those who would challenge them. Knowledge through science, freely available to all who will listen, liberates us from such tyrants. Nowhere is that more so than in astronomy and space, because for some ancestral reason, the sky is one of the tools that is most open to this kind of abuse.

2) The exploration of space has consistently pushed the limits of technology and made it better, cheaper, and more readily available for earthly purposes. Satellite navigation, communications, computers, weather prediction have all benefited. Next on the agenda is robotics. See here:

http://robonaut.jsc.nasa.gov/default.asp

Esoteric robots costing millions of dollars will one day inhabit our homes, factories and workplaces for the price of a present day television. Just as computers costing millions a few decades ago are now everywhere, so too will robots be in just a few decades.

Cheers!