ot: 1 min of silence

[El_Phil]

Well remembering all that took a while, so I didn't actually see your newer post before I finished.

If your kicking it out that far then no-one's can claim to make a stab based on anything other than guess work. So here goes

I'd guess that once most of the solar system is colonised and/or terraformed that's when asteroid mining is going to come into it's own. Loads of cheap fusion or cleverer power, funky hi-powered lasers or some clever anti-matter explosives to break the buggers up and robotic processing plants. Let's be honest with enough power to throw at a problem you can normally solve it.

Finally once you've gone to all the effort of terrafroming a planet you're going to want to keep it nice and clean, so planetery mining isn't going to be popular.

[dogscoff]

{going to mars} But we are talking a massively expensive project...

The answer is both simple and on-project: The Catholic Church should fund the next Mars mission. They've got loads of money, and a mission like this could really help improve their image of being out-of-date and out-of-touch. Nothing would bring them up to the cutting edge like a boundary-pushing science project.

I'm sure some justification could be invented: extra real-estate needed for the vatican, searching for heaven/ God, want to test the power of prayer at relativistic speeds... someone will think of something.

Once they've put the money in, tried the hardware and proven the concept, the rest of us can follow in their footsteps and colonise Mars.

It's not actually such a crazy idea: Way way back the church used to be at the forefront of astronomy and the sciences- until scientists started getting burned alive for discovering the wrong things anyway.

[TurinTurambar]

oopss.... we almost went back on topic there. careful.

Turin[img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Dagger.gif[/img]