[ExI] Mining the Sky SL Talk I gave today

David Lubkin lubkin at unreasonable.com
Fri Apr 30 18:01:07 UTC 2010


Spike wrote:

>It isn't impossible, just very difficult.  It's one of those chaos things: a
>very tiny uncartainty in the input makes an enormous uncertainty in the
>output.  In the case of an asteroid, the unknowns in the aerodynamics makes
>it durn near impossible to guess where it would land.

Could the robots that are building the stone or iron shells for the
rare metals install a device that will survive re-entry and can
pinpoint the impact site?

I'm deliberately vague about device. I don't care whether it's
some kind of radio transmitter, a reflective surface or paint
with a pattern that can be located by image processing....
And I don't care if it's built on-site or brought up with the
robots.

The key is the concept: Rather than worrying about predicting
where it will land, why not try to make it easy to find once it has?

(BTW, I'm back to reading and posting. Hi, y'all.)


-- David.




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