Apparently there's stuff like gold, iridium, silver, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhenium, rhodium, ruthenium and tungsten.
These might be transported back to earth. Plus there's iron, cobalt, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, aluminium, and titanium for construction of moon settlements and factories.
Hmm, interesting. I was thinking that we could mine fresh debris from the asteroids themselves, in concentrated form. Plus saving the earth, of course.
Plan B. Crash dozens of asteroids onto the moon at a few designated locations. (Use rocks that might hit the earth or pass fairly close). Offer free mining rights to companies on a first-there-first-served basis.
I do eat quite a lot of broccoli but I still don't fancy eating 7 heads every day -- enough to cover two dinner plates.
So I take a magnesium tablet before bed. Less work to prepare and to digest.
The present moral aversion to supplements seems faddish to me. We've gone from one extreme in the 1960s where everyone looked forward to taking all food in pill form, like fictional astronauts, to another extreme where supplements of any kind are frowned upon by many including in the medical establishment. Some supplements don't absorb very well, it's true, and some consumers are irresponsible -- yet atoms are atoms and molecules are molecules regardless of the source.
>With normal healthy food you should get more than enough.
No, I looked into it some years ago and it seems unfeasible. For instance you'd have to eat about 15 stalks/heads of broccoli daily to get the RDA of magnesium, and that amount is likely suboptimal.
Say we were to crash potentially earth-destroying asteroids into the moon and then offer free mining rights to companies on a first-to-get-there basis.
I think we would still hear a a cacophony of moral objections. A spirit of pessimism seems to be hanging over us these days:
Not really -- for instance, at HN we pay more attention to comments that explain stuff well, refer to sources, and so on.
The bots might be a blessing, in some ways, if they result in more people looking for good explanations rather than for assertions or herd direction; assessing ideas rather than their sources.
Fasting is very relevant here because it puts the body deeper into repair and maintenance mode. My guess is is periodic fasting plus a modest regimen of longterm repair supplements would be the optimum strategy.
The difference is that the things that we praise Churchill for, e.g. leading the unpopular fight against the Nazis, were almost unique to him. Yet the charge that 'he favored eugenics and was deeply racist' could be levelled at many or most of his peers.
Absolutely. The greater the man, the greater the flaws. Yet we still need heroes from history to look up to, and we can't judge solely by modern standards.
By analogy consider the contemporaneous movie The Wizard of Oz (1939). It's enjoyable and arguably morally-improving to watch. We are the better for it. Yet a great deal of immorality existed behind the scenes:
>philosophical exports are the kinds of thing that, once you internalize them, just seem like the way things are
Yes; if you like a philosophical idea that's usually sufficient for you to have 'adopted' or 'accepted' it. Yet, in addition, philosophical problems have been solved. It's just that ipso facto they then become part of science or some other discipline, so we don't notice so easily. For example, the theory of evolution was an example of philosophical progress (a new way of thinking about something, in this case life). But it's now part of biology. Another example is that Karl Popper solved the problem of induction. It's controversial that he did so. But if it shelves off into some other field, e.g. AGI, then perhaps his achievement will be more widely accepted as such.
Well I'm not talking about obsession in the sense of a mental disorder -- but in the sense of that one thing X that a particular person happens to be in love with at the moment (could be piano, could be tennis, could be computer programming or could be something socially disapproved of like pokemon or skateboarding or whatever). The obsession creates a depth of knowledge. Even when you try to make such people do other stuff, they'll still be daydreaming about X. So better to work with it.
These might be transported back to earth. Plus there's iron, cobalt, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, aluminium, and titanium for construction of moon settlements and factories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining