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they seem to be talking about bringing asteroids or chunks of them back to Earth and doing the processing there, which makes sense from the point of view of skipping the butt-load of technological development that would be needed before we could mine metals in microgravity / no air / no water environment... but there's an obvious economic inefficiency in hauling all of the asteroid to your processing site on Earth (though metallic asteroids are the best candidate for this - the ore has already been concentrated, four and half billion years ago, when larger bodies differentiated and the heavy elements sank to the core, and then some other body collided and blew that larger body up into convenient fragments... you are still talking about bodies that are mostly iron / nickel), and a political issue... people will freak out over asteroids being deliberately hauled into low earth orbit... and bringing asteroids to Earth in small chunks would be inefficient - and so I still question whether it's something that could be profitable in the near-future (as opposed to ~600 years from now when we've exhausted our known iron reserves on Earth)
I've suggested it before, but its relevant here again... human bodies have all that iron... excess population...
Right now we donate our bodies to science, maybe in 600 years we donate our bodies to industry, or there is mandatory corpse recycling in some societies? As Chairman Sheng-ji Yang once (will have) said in _Ethics for Tomorrow_, "It is every citizen's final duty to go into the tanks..."
*actual item in my timeline, need to flesh it out more, but used random Chinese name generator to generate the name Liko Ha, and online translator -- hopefully that title means "Technology and the Means of Production" -- basically some 21st century economic ideology that says because of 3D-printing, automation, artificial intelligence, maybe even nanotechnology, etc., that both capitalism and communism are defunct since they assume human labor as central to economics and we should now do x, y and z
I _WILL_ have my spaceships built like boats instead of towers, gorramit!
* gravity waves exist
* we can detect them now
* we are awesome
* two mid-sized black holes colliding release gravitational energy equivalent to 50 times all of the light shinning in the observable universe
* that is awesome
* that is terrifying
* to date we can only detect gravitational waves from events weighing in at 50 times the energy of the observable universe
* we are pathetic
I think it boils down to being something like the law of the sea... you can fish in international waters, you can own and sell the fish, even if you don't own the waters you fished in... it's not like Antarctica where mining is outright banned alongside territorial claims... but more legal clarity is needed... non-spacefaring poor nations could argue that the space is to be used for the common benefit of all mankind entitles them to a cut of the asteroid mining profits... and be laughed at by the spacefaring powers, whose ultimate recourse is that you can always pull out of international treaties... in the case of the OST: "Article XVI: Any State Party to the Treaty may give notice of its withdrawal from the Treaty one year after its entry into force by written notification to the Depositary Governments. Such withdrawal shall take effect one year from the date of receipt of this notification."
in theory, a country with a nascent asteroid mining industry could give one years notice that it is withdrawing from the OST and thereafter say it recognizes the claims of asteroid mining companies to own the asteroids it is mining (akin to how the Bush administration pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in early 2001)
in theory, space is also supposed to be demilitarized, but there is already a huge gray area - military communications and reconnaissance satellites in low-earth orbit are not weapons, but serve a military purpose.... GPS and meteorological satellites are dual-use civilian and military... US and China have conducted anti-satellite missile tests... plans are underway to install a laser to the International Space Station... to deflect space junk... but still, setting a precedent towards weaponized spacecraft
the possibilities range from:
a) OST stays in place, and you have an evolving corpus of extra-treaty law, such as what the US and Luxembourg are starting (which is still not the same thing as asteroid mining proving to be technically and economically feasible in the short term) which de facto legalize asteroid mining...
b) all the new problems - asteroid mining, space junk, etc. creates the impetus to amend or replace the OST with a new treaty (especially if early asteroid mining leans towards hauling sizeable asteroids into low earth orbit, creating the mother of all NIMBY issues)
c) the anti-asteroid mining side overplays their hand, and the pro-asteroid mining side gets their countries to pull out of the OST... a Wild West / Law of the Jungle situation applies, but in this case, the jungle only has the spacefaring powers prowling in it... and eventually they probably reach some kind of new deal that suits them (e.g. a multi-lateral treaty more like the founding statue of OPEC than the UN OST)
one idea I had for the name of an asteroid mining corporation was Croesus (as in the quasi-mythical Greek king that gave rise to the phrase "as rich as Croesus), but it may not be the one big colossus dominating the industry... I figure aside from the current crop of start-ups like Deep Space Industries, once there is existence proof, you'll have a rash of asteroid mining corporations being founded, or existing aerospace companies making their own subsidiaries... there are thousands and thousands of asteroids out there, it's not like the early movers could feasibly claim them all
also... because Hollywood and television wants to put actors and actresses on screen, and because we have this deep historical well to tell stories about evil mining companies oppressing workers and miners getting black lung, etc., I think our frame of reference for asteroid mining gets horribly skewed towards asteroid mining being a manpower-intensive thing, when really, it's going to be automated as much as possible (cheaper to send a robot out there than a human being who requires life support)... lunar mining will be done by drones and tele-operators, asteroids that can be hauled into cislunar space can also be done by tele-operation... asteroid mining farther away where time-lag becomes an issue will be done with more autonomous drones (like how the Mars Rovers now operate - daily commands, but with built in fail-safes like not going over an obvious cliff)... the mental image of what asteroid mining would be like should be more call centers in Calcutta than coal mines in West Virginia
bq. hard to understate the gravity of the situation
You should be ashamed of yourself. Heck, your family should be ashamed of that pun, simply by association with you! :P
A more pressing part of my OCD attempt to write the history of the future:
!http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/npunk_timeline/40996480/606689/606689_900.png!
(projected GOP map after Super Tuesday, red is Trump, orange is Cruz)
like... dude... I'm a registered Democrat, but when I have my sci-fi timeline writing hat on, I try to check any and all biases at the door... a year ago, I would have dismissed Donald Trump winning the GOP nomination as the living embodiment of every liberal stereotype of Republicans as sexist, racist, asshole billionaires, etc. as wildly unrealistic and suspiciously in line with my own biases
now I have to seriously consider the possibility that a) Trump will win the GOP nomination, b) will pro-lifers bolt to support a third-party (e.g. Constitution Party), c) will "RINOs" run there own third party candidate to try and preserve the GOP brand?, d) will this lead to an anti-Trump landslide in November? or e) is my own biases clouding my perception of probable events / what my own country is like and will Trump actually rip apart the Clinton dynasty as well and totally as he just ripped apart the Bush dynasty?
If all that goes awry though, and we have Clinton up against Trump, I begin to worry (there is a large contingent of anti-Clinton voters).
Year: Predicted Victor / Predicted Rival / Actual Victor / Actual Rival
1976: Carter / Ford / Carter / Ford
1988: Dole / Dukakis / George HW Bush / Dukkais
2008: Obama-Edwards / Giuliani-McCain / Obama-Biden / McCain-Palin
2012: Obama-Clinton / Romney-Ryan / Obama-Biden / Romney-Ryan
2016: Sanders / Bush / ??? / ???
1) n is only 4, or 4 and half if you count the 2016 election... they didn't even simulate 1980, 1984, 1992, 1996, 2000 or 2004 elections... so "correct every election cycle since 1975!" is over-selling it
2) they have only correctly predicted the winning party 4 out of 4 times, which is nice, but actually not as impressive as it sounds... there is good reason to think the electoral map favors Democrats in 2016, just as there was good reason to think it favored the Dems in 1976, 2008 and 2012, and the GOP in 1988
3) 1976 - correctly predicting Carter would be the Dem nominee in 1975 is pretty impressive, predicting Ford would be the GOP nominee was a no-brainer since he was the incumbent POTUS
4) 1988 - they incorrectly picked Dole as wining over incumbent veep George HW Bush - that was a pretty bad guess (incumbent veeps are usually a shoe-in after a two-term presidency... it's actually pretty weird that Biden isn't running right now)... but Dole was eventually the GOP nominee in 1996 and Dukkakis was the Dem nominee, and he did lose, so not that horrible
5) 2008 - Giuliani flopping was one of the great upsets of conventional political wisdom, so them predicting Giulani-McCain ticket doesn't seem that bad, even if it was, you know,incorrect, and Obama winning went against the grain of Clinton's "inevitability", depending on how early in 2007 they made that prediction, I'd be impressed... Edwards as a running mate was a reasonable guess (personally, Edwards always gave me this creepy vibe... ambulance chasing lawyer, coiffured hair, the ah shucks persona, my daddy worked in a saw mill, etc., I canvassed for Obama in 2008 before Edwards had pulled out and we were under instructions to not bad mouth the other candidates, and so it was always interesting to knock on the door of an Edwards supporter... who correctly pointed out there was little policy difference between Clinton, Obama and Edwards and I couldn't say he was a creepy slimeball... of course, it turned out he was cheating on his cancer-stricken wife and I felt totally vindicated and perplexed by the Edwards supporters who voiced shock and outrage... there is definitely an alternate history in which Edwards was Obama or Clinton's running mate in 2008, or the nominee, and that affair came out as an "October Surprise", leading to the election of McCain)
6) 2012 - predicting Obama as the Democratic nominee was a no-brainer, don't give them credit for that... LOLing at the prediction he'd drop Biden and pick Hillary as running mate... but maybe I'm just biased for Joe Biden. Romney was the utterly predictable nominee, even if there was a crazy circus before it wound up being the predictable nominee... props for correctly predicting Ryan as his running mate (I think he was in the top 10 veep possibilities, but by no means the top of the list)
7) GOP 2016 - Predicting Bush as the GOP nominee seems akin to predicting Giuliani as the nominee in 2008 --- totally conventional wisdom a year out, totally wrong went the rubber met the road
7a) damn it, I actually felt sorry for Jeb! when he dropped out
7b) hell, I felt a weird kinship for the 0.2% of Nevada GOP caucus-goers who still voted for Jeb! in the face of the trifecta of shitty choices the GOP now has
7c) actually, guess it's still technically possible Bush will wind up the nominee... a contested convention is a distinction possibility... some sort of compromise like Rubio-Cruz or Trump-Cruz is more likely, but you can't rule out delegates going wild on the umpteenth round if the unholy trinity can't cut a deal... I just don't see Trump or Cruz delegates ever voting for Jeb!
8) Dem 2016 - picking Sanders as the nominee still seems like a stretch... he's done better than many might have supposed, but even after the NH blowout, he was never more than a 50/50 odds... now that NV has shown he isn't making that much of inroads into the African-American vote, and he isn't driving turnout to Obama/2008-like levels... he'll get crushed in SC and spanked in Super Tuesday... he'll have some good results after that (doing better in non-southern primaries and open primaries instead of closed primaries) and take it all the way to the convention to force a leftward shift in the platform, but he's not gonna pull ahead in the delegate count
bottom line - I think WIU prediction that the Dems will win is well-grounded, they've only been right on the winning candidate 75% of the time, they've only been right on the winning candidate when it wasn't a total no-brainer who the most-favored-to-win's party's nominee would be 50% of the time... so... I wouldn't put much weight in their prediction of Sanders being the Democratic nominee
I'm just going to assume that you put a lot more effort into researching that than my approach (i.e. reading the headline of one article), so I'll also assume your bottom line was well founded. :D
Needless to say, I'm not that interested in politics, unless its political humor...
my only other note is to say WIU's projected electoral college map for 2016 speaks to the consumption of certain recreational pharmaceuticals that aren't legal in Illinois (yet, at any rate):
!http://wiumpe.com/faqs/results/files/stacks_image_26950.jpg!
seriously, there is no universe in which the GOP wins Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Maryland and especially Hawaii without winning a whole lot of other states still shown in blue on this map... and no universe in which the Dems have won Idaho/Montana/Wyoming/Utah/Alaska and not already also won Nevada, Arizona and Texas
Eh, I don't recall, it was a month ago or so. An Israeli coworker sent the link to me - I think he's enthused about a viable Jewish candidate.
do think Bernie-style Democratic Socialism is the future of the Democratic Party: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2013-12-06/americas-social-democratic-future?sp_mid=44799204&sp_rid=YXpnZW9kb2dAeWFob28uY29tS0 , but, also remember the 2008 primaries a little too well (and the 2000 ones too for that matter, establishment Gore defeating insurgent Bradley)... the only way Obama beat Hillary was getting both the white liberals and southern blacks to come out and support him, in record numbers... Democratic primary turnout is lower than 2008, and the Nevada results show Hillary has the vast majority of the African-American vote in her corner... she'll run away with South Carolina this weekend, and then Super Tuesday will also be in heavily southern terrain...
also, super-delegates, when 2008 began, she had ~150 pledged to her, versus ~50 for Obama...
!https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/silver-superdelegates-1.png!
now it's ~300 for Hillary versus ~0 for Sanders... and really hasn't budged.... objectively speaking, Obama was "alternate establishment" in 2008, not "anti-establishment"... the GOP establishment may be losing control right now, and I think there are underlying base-vs-establishment issues in the Democratic Party as well, but it would be extraordinary if both political parties were collapsing in the same election cycle
the Bernie people I tend read seem to be a little too confident that because Obama did it in 2008, they can also defeat the Clinton dynasty/machine, and not appreciating or acknowledging they have a steeper hill to climb
twigs
"I met a traveller from an antique land....."
CotM May 2016: Mysteria: set in Wolfgang Baur’s MIDGARD.
Previous CotM Aug 2012: Shimring: High Level Multiplanar Campaign
Inner Council Member
Saying all of this with the benefit of hindsight - a year ago I bought into the conventional wisdom it would be a dynastic replay of 1992: Bush vs Clinton... also, Trump had been saying he was thinking about running for President almost every election since 1980... it was easy to buy into the theory he was all bluff and had too many skeletons in his closet and would never want to subject his finances to that level of scrutiny... only this week you have Romney starting to attack Trump for not releasing his tax returns
Taking a step back and trying to make this about RPGs so I feel less bad about hijacking an RPG forums with politics... the rise of Trump speaks to a problem I have in my sci-fi timeline writing: feel like I make safe/boring choices about what is predictable, given the information that is readily available, and reality is *always* going to be crazier... also, I am biased against too much crazy shit happening in the very near future, and tend to push things off:
The closest I came to predicting Trump was having a third-party racist demagogue run in a US Presidential election in the late 2030s/early 2040s... because I looked at the projected demographics of when non-Hispanic whites become a plurality instead of a majority and brainstormed off of that, thinking, okay, maybe you have a resurgent KKK or something like that in response... had only the vaguest ideas about this candidate as the last battle-cry of white supremacy, and doing well for a third party, but not coming close to winning or anything... I didn't imagine the "we're losing our country" reaction to come this soon or be this big
In a similar vein, I had predicted a Russo-Ukrainian War in the late 2030s / early 2040s, brainstorming off of when the lease on Sevastopol (Russian naval base in Crimea) was going to expire and playing it out in my head as Russia supporting Crimean separatism as the Ukrainian government refused to renew the lease... in reality of course, the Second Crimean War / Russo-Ukrainian War came sooner and was bigger than I predicted
Trying to suss out what this might mean in terms of guiding principles for sci-fi timeline writing - one thing that seems related is all the punditry you can read is skewed towards the short-term, and tends to be pessimistic... the world is going to hell and in the next 5-10 years you can expect "all of the above": major terrorist attacks, Second Korean War, NATO-Russia War, South China Sea War, Saudi-Iranian War, etc., and when I take a step back and look at the whole timeline - suddenly 2015-2025 looks like a feeding frenzy, and 2025-2125 looks like everything just abruptly calmed down... so I was trying to counter that bias, and pushing off anything that seemed "yeah, probably will happen someday", like the Crimea Hotspot exploding, or an Openly Racist Demagogue running for US Presidency into "some other decade besides the one I am currently living in"
twigs
"I met a traveller from an antique land....."
CotM May 2016: Mysteria: set in Wolfgang Baur’s MIDGARD.
Previous CotM Aug 2012: Shimring: High Level Multiplanar Campaign
Inner Council Member
otherwise... yeah, I need to find a place to spew my OCD need to post about politics (yo yoing between expressing personal opinion and trying to make a realistic model for what is likely to happen - as opposed to what I want to happen)... either on fakebook (where I had made a Chinese New Years Resolution not to post about politics anymore, have too many friends divided over Bernie and Hillary and I have nothing constructive to say), or maybe restart my livejournal, or make some other blog, or commit spiritual suicide and sign up to somewhere like reddit and post instead of lurk...
actually have a weird nostalgia for the Berlin Wall... when we lived in Soviet-occupied Poland, we went on shopping trips to West Berlin and once got stuck in a Red Army convoy... missed being there for the fall of the wall by only a few days
twigs
"I met a traveller from an antique land....."
CotM May 2016: Mysteria: set in Wolfgang Baur’s MIDGARD.
Previous CotM Aug 2012: Shimring: High Level Multiplanar Campaign
Inner Council Member