[extropy-chat] 10th Planet Discovered

[Brent Neal]

 (3/15/04 10:52) Robert J. Bradbury <bradbury at aeiveos.com> wrote:

>
>
>This mindset will shift significantly when one has the first man-made assembled
>from scratch genome and organisms based on such.  That will happen within this
>decade.

I happen to disagree with your prognosticator on this, unless you are just talking about toy problems. I expect it to take at least 20-30 years before we see bacteria used as assemblers.  (And no, I don't count splicing in genes to create insulin or other moderately complex proteins. Its a different scale of problem.) 

Actually, you stole my thunder a little bit, because I was going to bring that up in the next round. I think that engineered organisms will be vastly more productive than inorganic nanotech in terms of fulfilling the promises that the nanotech advocates have made. Unless the biotech Luddites win, I expect that we'll be engineering custom organisms on a large scale to fill a wide variety of roles by the end of this century.


>
>> We have the technology -right now- to colonize the inner system, were we to
>> bootstrap carefully, and to gain large returns from doing so.
>
>The "large returns" assertion is open to a *lot* of debate.  For example I've
>never seen a comparison between spending $200B to go to Mars (and produce nothing
>for Earth) and spending $200B on standardized solar cell factories that crank
>out lots of low cost solar cells here on Earth every year.

Again, that makes the assumption that you start with something outside of Earth's orbit. A solar power infrastructure in orbit would easily fund the next round of development - whether that be metal refinement and fabrication facilities at L4/L5, a Mars colony, or something I'm not bright enough to foresee.  What is holding progress back is the exorbitant startup cost, but the figures I've seen for the returns range from astoundingly high (Admittedly, this was Gerry O'Neill's analysis, which contained several critical flaws) to well-worth it. As energy demand down here increases, and if energy shortages continue (I've read compelling arguments that the energy shortages here are artificial in origin and equally compelling ones that they are not), that return will begin to look good.  

The Japanese are already looking at SPS systems. And why not? They have a large, densely placed population on an island with no indigenous petroleum reserves. Beaming down megawatts to rectenna farms off the coast of Honshu would make a lot of sense for them.



>
>> Why wait for self-replicating nanomachines?
>
>Because if it is nanotech based its mass is low.  

I assume you you've heard the old story about the guy looking for his fishing net in his boat.



>> Yes, but what does this have to do with whether this body is considered a planet or not?
>
>I think we will need to evolve a new classification system.  One that

Determinine whether something is a planet doesn't make any judgement on whether its useful or not. No one is going to care whether or not our planet/not-planet classification takes into account economic value, because as technology increases, value will change. :) (ObHistoryLesson: Think about the shift in what was perceived as 'value' by the Europeans in N and S. America. The ultimate 'winners' were not the ones who went after spices or gold...)

The astronomers I've read tend to agree that one main distinction between small planet and Kuiper belt/Oort object is whether the core is uniformly solid rock, and not 'large rocky snowballs.'  Since NASA deepsixed the Pluto probe, so it may be a while before we know anything in that regard.  Pluto's orbit is certainly damning, as is Quaoar's and Sedna's. 


B
-- 
Brent Neal
Geek of all Trades
http://brentn.freeshell.org

"Specialization is for insects" -- Robert A. Heinlein