General / Off-Topic Asteroid mining
- Thread starter JohnStabler
- Start date
I'm not really going to discuss Maslow's hierarchy, given that it seems to be evidence-free and is not really related to my question.
Sorry if I was incorrect in your opinion of science. I saw you said that it was in bed with capitalism, and given your views on capitalism... guilt by association etc.
However, you do realise that science doesn't want anything right? It's just a method. The fact that capitalism (or any other ideology) has sullied it reflects badly on capitalism, not science.
But back to my question, which you didn't actually answer (with a lot of words I may add). What is spirit? And you added another word: soul. What is a soul?
Who's going to pay for it when they have irreparably poisoned our water table and the hydraulic fluid they so enthusiastically pump in to the ground starts to leak out into our lakes
Every time I see a massive asteroid in alpha I just wanna land on it, so I can spin about without doing anything...
... maybe thats just me though
... maybe thats just me though
Who's going to pay for it when they have irreparably poisoned our water table and the hydraulic fluid they so enthusiastically pump in to the ground starts to leak out into our lakes
"Socialize the risks, privatize the profits."
Thats how modern corporate economy rolls.
@variform
So you propose we live in some ecocommunistic utopia, then we all go into the woods hold hands and sing Kumbaya?
I've got a video for you about capitalism and greed, it's only two minutes and an easy watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A
So you propose we live in some ecocommunistic utopia, then we all go into the woods hold hands and sing Kumbaya?
I've got a video for you about capitalism and greed, it's only two minutes and an easy watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A
Yaffle
Volunteer Moderator
I thought that too, watching the alpha videos the idea of sitting on an asteroid, powered down bar life support waiting for the juicy miner to come along and mine ore for me...
the fact is we may be happier and even healthier as hunter gatherers singing kumbaya around a camp fire than whith all the technology and lives we now have, but we're obviously not going back.
And why would that be so bad. A cradle sounds like something you grow out of. But is the world a cradle? Or a platform in space that is extremely small on cosmic scales for life to flourish?
Because... one big rock or any other disaster and we're GONE! That's because. I think that's bad!
We need to leave the cradle while we can or else we will die in it.
The earth's resources will obviously not be enough so we will need to find them elsewhere. Step by step we will. Moon, Mars, the belt ...
That is the greatest lie we have been taught to believe, that science is merely a method. But one of the big words in science today is 'valorization'. Like I said, science is not neutral. Saying it is a method sounds like an excuse or pardon in order for it to be kept out of the wind. I mentioned this too, that we like science to do whatever they please because maybe someday some research being done today might lead to the Next Big Thing. Usually a new toy.
Somehow the idea exists that when it is a method, it is benign. Well, cancer also has a method to the reckless abandon with which it invades the host, terminating it in the end, to its own demise. A virus could be another example. There is a method to madness as well, if you believe those who study famous psychopaths. Their minds make sense once you understand the patterns.
I can kill a man methodologically in the most brutal fashion but in court I will be declared guilty nonetheless. Indeed, a jury will be swayed to judge more harshly the more methodological I proceeded.
There was a method to concentration camps to back in the day.
And I think you don't get or want to accept as a possibility, that capitalism and science are closely connected.
There is no science without capitalism in terms of how it is being done today. In all the R&D labs of commercial enterprises a lot of science is being done. Just today I found out that a company researching phase-change memory has stopped its research because there is no market for it.
In the meantime, at some university, the board of directors makes decisions on what research to conduct or finance that is more likely to result in a patent, that they can sell or profit from: that is how they make money.
Other funds for science come from all of us, through taxation of labour and products (VAT) we put money in the treasury and some of it flows directly to universities. In the Netherlands, one third of all money used for scientific studies comes directly from government funding. The rest is either some joint venture with other universities and business partners or from patents and private donations.
The sheer amount of research happening in the world today is a function of the extent to which we can afford to skim money out of the economy and channel it into science, that we hope will result in some marketable product that in turn will keep the economy going.
No man. Science basically is a form of capitalistic enterprise. Science results in technology that gets distributed in open market systems as consumer products and for as much as science has no direct valorization attached to it at any given moment, there is always the draw of future promises.
I am not buying 'method' and neutrality of science. Science is in the end a human endeavor and as such prone to be affected by all the skulduggery that we apply to any other human endeavor.
And that is sad. We are not doing science the right way. And if you look at how deeply ingrained the argument of 'methodology' and neutrality persist it shows science is a paradigm and thought of in axiomatic terms.
Spirit is that secondary quality of matter I referred to when I mentioned Descartes. From wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary/secondary_quality_distinction
"Primary qualities are thought to be properties of objects that are independent of any observer, such as solidity, extension, motion, number and figure. These characteristics convey facts. They exist in the thing itself, can be determined with certainty, and do not rely on subjective judgments. For example, if a ball is round, no one can reasonably argue that it is a triangle.
Secondary qualities are thought to be properties that produce sensations in observers, such as color, taste, smell, and sound. They can be described as the effect things have on certain people. Knowledge that comes from secondary qualities does not provide objective facts about things.
Primary qualities are measurable aspects of physical reality. Secondary qualities are subjective."
Science, as we teach it to children today, focuses solely on the primary qualities. We applaud science for its methodology because the secondary qualities have been stripped away from matter. Science is good at looking deeply at matter and picking things apart to their most basic elements. In doing so, whole generations now believe that science holds they key to the future but are forgetting that secondary qualities are equally important.
The thing is John, that we are brought up in this paradigm, forgetting that this was not always the case, hence my remark on historical appreciation of more ancient times.
Secondary qualities are what makes life worthwhile. It is the appreciation for the sunset and sunrise I mentioned. It is the choice to bestow a preciousness upon the natural world not in terms of it being an exploitable phenomenon but that it has value on and of its own terms. Indeed, nature becomes exploitable in the absence of a recognition of secondary qualities. If you look at a tree and do not believe it is alive or not enough alive to care for it not to be made into paper or makeshift planks, then no wonder we are destroying our climate, strip mining for coal and turning vast swaths of land into a lunar landscape. (USA)
Cognitively we understand and we pay lip service to those green ideals we see pop up around us as more and more people wake up. And yet when it comes to science we don't see how it is connected to the very way we abuse our natural environment. The cause is, the science, after Locke and Descartes and Galileo.
What people are waking up to is what Terrence McKenna once called 'a more perfect logos.' Logos meaning study, so you get a better way of studying nature and scope of knowledge.
So that is why 'spirit' or 'soul' must be restored to science, not because, as skeptics would exclaim, to infiltrate this great method they believe science is, with superstition, but to merge science with spirituality in order for science to come full circle again. I believe science will benefit greatly if we insert this component back into it, because it will more fully be able to help us answer those nagging existential questions we have about the nature of reality and our human self-aware role in it.
And all that in a language not my first. So f'give me if I was unclear the first time.
Last edited:
What is the source of this great quote?
I do not believe in utopia's. The notion of utopianism is that for it to work, for it to accomplish lofty ideals, great repression will be needed of the people living it. It is the idea of the make-able society, where governments can control every aspect of life to such an extent, that there is no longer any risk for a citizen.
The only way to get there is totalitarianism of an unprecedented scale. That is why I am a privacy fighter; out of fear of condemnation, governments remove privacy from the social arena in order for them to be able to control the population and prevent risks, that when someone wrong happens, they will not be blamed for lack of measures.
I don't see why I should further watch your link when you are clearly not intending to make a rational argument and want someone else to make it for you. The very idea of singing songs in a forest shows me enough of the level of what argument you might want to have presented for you.
But it is okay, I get it, I really do. Most people I meet have, beside a small tattoo of their national flag on their private parts, also the word 'science' written there. You are critical of science (or really, any paradigm), you step on, well, something.
Methinks the thread has become derailed a tad. Perhaps a new thread is best for any continued social commentary?
Back on topic.
I guess were a long way from knowing the true value of asteroids in real life, such a big universe so many lumps of rock. Luckily for us E: D's creators know what's what in their universe, and will hopefully decide to make it lucrative for us!
Back on topic.
I guess were a long way from knowing the true value of asteroids in real life, such a big universe so many lumps of rock. Luckily for us E: D's creators know what's what in their universe, and will hopefully decide to make it lucrative for us!
well i'd say if we expend like in frontier games, every world is another opportunity to try something different, another kind of society. to start from scratch on another planet, knowing our earlier mistakes. yes we could also reproduce those mistakes as well.
The great thing about the math vs reality of the Harvard equation is quite simple.
We can check the asteroids before mining them. So who cares if only 1 in 100,000 rocks is "worth lots" when there are millions of them, we aren't going to mine all the worthless ones.
The irony is even better. If we do mine the rocks based on their value, then their value is actually decreased because of the mining.
Imagine that you find a rock that contains 100 tonnes of pure gold (after refining). You stick that much extra gold into the planetary market and it's going to drop the value by a fair chunk.
Now do the same number for platinum or other rare (read expensive) elements and you've got a serious market issue.
You never know, it might turn out that there is so much gold floating around that it replaces copper for wiring...
We can check the asteroids before mining them. So who cares if only 1 in 100,000 rocks is "worth lots" when there are millions of them, we aren't going to mine all the worthless ones.
The irony is even better. If we do mine the rocks based on their value, then their value is actually decreased because of the mining.
Imagine that you find a rock that contains 100 tonnes of pure gold (after refining). You stick that much extra gold into the planetary market and it's going to drop the value by a fair chunk.
Now do the same number for platinum or other rare (read expensive) elements and you've got a serious market issue.
You never know, it might turn out that there is so much gold floating around that it replaces copper for wiring...
I've got to be honest, I think you're a crackpot, but you really should watch the vid, it explains a lot in 2 mins. I shared the vid rather than explaining it because quite frankly I don't want to waste my time typing it out to someone who will reject it out of hand.
edit: I'm a molecular biologist with no skepticism in science, just crazy people.
Last edited:
