Asteroid Resources Could Make Science Fiction Dreams and Nightmares a Reality

The space mining buzzing is increasing lately. "Everyone on Earth would be a billionaire if we use the resources in the asteroid belt" claims R. Branson.

Well Richard, are you going to tell me that if we assimilate the resources the result won't be a handful of gazzilionares that will order planets at Magratea and the rest of us would slave it "Blade runner style". You wanna tell me that magically, incredibly our socioeconomic system will disappear overnight? Provided that by definition the people who can change the system are the greatest benefactors of it, so why will they want to change it?

A billion dollars will be pocket change? How much of it will "trickle down" to my "middle class, ever decreasing buying power because of financial frauds by greedy people" pocket, Richard? It does not matter at all how much resources we can lay our hands on. We will grow, expand, waste them even more recklessly as we do now and eventually finish them off....while all the evils of the socioeconomic system will be with us all the time. Don't fool yourself Richard. Don't try to fool me too!!

But you know, Richard, actually your lie is the way to go from purely egoistic, survival point of view. If we want to make it to the Star Trek era [in one piece] we have to change and I don't mean Obama's change here. I mean paradigm change. I mean the simplest idea of all time - limited growth in an practically infinite Universe. Everyone has their human needs fulfilled. That's just the starting point.

All the above is why I stopped being excited about technology news whatsoever. We made an engine that uses half the fuel? Well, we will just buy twice as many engines because they will be cheaper and besides the whole fraking world including politics, business and religion (but not art and science mind you) constantly, relentlessly screams "more people, more money, only infinite growth is possible, if we stop wasting ever more the economy will collapse, the world would burn and we will be back to the caves, we need more growth, more children or our pensions will be gone, we need more believers in the true faith, we need more, more, more, more, more.....).

Our civilization has no redundancy, no back-up, no long-term planning at all. It is the sloppiest piece of engineering of all time.....no decent geek would ever dream of putting his/her signature on such a piece of crap! And we all live by it, die by it, are run by it! It's horrifying that we first waste the most accessible and the least replaceable resources. That is the way of our system; nothing in it that contradicts this behavior survives. We are re-active not pro-active. Our leaders never lead, they follow, adapt and mimicry.

I will finish this rant by respectfully altering the last sentence from Richard Feinman's "addendum" to the NASA report about the Challenger disaster:

"For a successful civilization reality must take precedence over politics, business and religion *, for Nature cannot be fooled"

* politics, business and religion all operate without any regard of reality [they are all ideologies] and are therefore in the form they are, highly dangerous for the survival of Homo Sapiens

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/dD80LkLuSy4/story01.htm

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