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[EconLog: Library of Economics and Liberty] Robin Hanson to Technophiles: Get Real, Bryan Caplan | EconLog ...: Most any ambitious tech project, like floating cities, 3DTV, or robot mules, gives similar indirect tech spinoffs per dollar spent, and surely we can find other projects with larger direct payoffs. Sure the Chinese might have colonized the Americas, but we can see now there are no similarly lush gardens accessible in space - we'll colonize Antarctica and the Earth oceans long before, as these are far less harsh environments with plenty of the sunlight and materials which are mainly what space has to offer.Technophiles, I beg of you - don't throw Robin out the airlock!

[Tony Graham] Tony Graham - Twitter.com/eggtea: Hackerspace in Dallas goo.gl/fb/Nz7V #webstream #robotics #; 22:46 Interview with Glenn”¦ goo.gl/fb/hcMd #webstream #art #design #fashion #favorite #illustration #inspiration #;

[Chaos Program] NASA Could Have Mattered | Chaos Program: When they establish bases on the Moon or in orbit, when they begin looking into economic uses (such as asteroid mining or zero-g manufacturing), this alone could spur interesting competition. Competition does not directly lead to violence, of course.

[A Bit More Detail] rfmcdpei: [FORUM] What do you think about manned space travel?: (No, I don't think that mining of anything is going to be relevant, mainly since the value of the materials that can be transported to Earth is risible and there's no way short of a space elevator or a dinosaur-killer impact to bring the masses of potentially useful metals in the asteroid belt down to Earth. Yes, maybe emergent space colonies might make things easier, but don't count on them to mature into usefulness for a while.)

[mkgray | BoardGameGeek] 3 player RFTG game, complete log | Race for the Galaxy | BoardGameGeek: C: New Sparta, Investment Credits, Expedition Force, Interstellar Bank, Free Trade Association(0vp), Space Marines, Black Market Trading World, Comet Zone, Galactic Federation(10vp), Galactic Survey:SETI(7vp), Galactic Engineers, Alien Robot Scout Ship

[Television Tropes & Idioms - Recent Changes] Asteroid Miners - Television Tropes & Idioms: Catch That Rabbit by Isaac Asimov features a lonely asteroid mining station as the location for an intractable robot mystery and tangle. The Rolling Stones by Robert A Heinlein features the titular family Stone travelling to the Asteroid .

[TechCrunch] MMORPG Operator Claims World Record For Most Expensive Virtual ...: For the record (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), the previous world record as registered by the authorative Guinness World Records book in 2008, was also a sale of a virtual property in Planet Calypso. The amount paid for that property was much smaller though, with a reported $100.000 USD being spent on a Virtual Space Resort and Nightclub now dubbed Club Neverdie.

[robots.net] robots.net - No Autonomous Mining Robots, says Minsky: I think the only place robot miners will go is to the moon or asteroid or somewhere out there where humans can't stay. As dangerous a place as a mine shaft is, a robot would have to be smarter than a human for humans to trust it not to cause a cave-in (or drive a car, but I digress).

[JoNova] 10 Wong Reasons to Tax us « JoNova: The coal seams were getting thinner and thinner and the cost of mining coal more and more expensive. The cost of importing coal to the UK from Australia or Gillette, Wyoming is prohibitive, and importing from the Soviet Union was unthinkable.

[Balloon Juice] Balloon Juice » Blog Archive » Budget Question: NONE of the other planets are feasible to land on, and ALL of their moons are Hellishly difficult places - frigid with extremely toxic atmospheres (if any at all) ....

[Charlie's Diary] Charlie's Diary: What have the Romans done for us ...?: Not mentioned so far is the idea that we could, possibly save ourselves from a catastrophic asteroid impact. The technolohy is not there yet, but without a manned space program, impossible to even think about (except possibly using modified ICBMs and making things possibly even worse).

[The Official Star Wars Blog] The Official Star Wars Blog » One Death Star for $15 Septillion?!: Yeah, a more realistic figure for the cost should take into account that most all the materials are acquired from orbital asteroid mining. The technology to do that exists now, we just aren’t using it because it’s only economical for building really big stuff in space.

[THE BEAT] THE BEAT » Blog Archive » The Beat's Annual Year-End Survey, 2010 ...:  People want escapism, and comics continued to provide that and I am thankful to the fans that continued to support the industry when so many other industries and print media went under in 2009.”¨”¨What will be the biggest story in comics in 2010?  I think the continued success of the individual issue format (I refuse to join those ringing the death knell of the paper comic) is something we will keep seeing from an industry standpoint.  From a personal standpoint, I think the HEROIC AGE at Marvel is going to surprise a lot of people in a lot of ways, month after month.

[Accelerating Future] Accelerating Future » Virgin and Google Team Up for Mars Base: Think of the extreme reliability and redundancy necessary for machinery on a base so far from Earth, and the cost of ferrying kilotons of supplies to Mars using chemical rockets. The whole Apollo Mission package weighed a couple dozen tons, you’d need orders of magnitude more material for a prolonged, isolated, self-sustaining stay on the Red Planet.

[Untitled] Weirdwarp - Alien Civilization Types From 1 To 7: There could be lots of unique things about the earth from the tilt to the Moon producing tides and it’s protection from asteroids, comets, and radiation.

[Hit and Run] Is NASA Necessary? - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine: Trivia: Do you know that the Earthly economy already relies uponthe Asteroid Belt as the source of at least 10%-20% of the world'snickel? (And a lot of copper and platinum.) Two billion years ago,an asteroid about 5-10 miles wide hit the region that is nowSudbury Ontario and made a nice deposit.

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