But they don't say anything like this:

They didn't address the "what if everything changed in an instant" case in their article.

the visa numbers wil probably go down, hurting US business.

And the problem is?

In my experience (as a dev team lead and interviewer) foreign workers are generally more educated, more productive and more willing to got the extra mile than the local self-entitled bunch

Sounds like you've got the skill set to be a significant player in, say, the Indian IT business. So, move there where your skills are desired, and your pay check will probably go considerably further.

OK, you'd have to learn several more languages, but that's not exactly a problem. The reduced taxes from getting out of the clutches of the US tax people may be welcome too.

You must be new here.

Knowing what you're talking about is shockingly rude behaviour on Slashdot. Keep it up!

This is exactly why it is impossible to predict the finding of "life" in non-earth environments

Pessimist!

I don't automatically assume that "hard" = "impossible".

We may not have many data points, and acquiring in situ measurements may be a long way off in the future (not less than decades, maybe not less than millennia). But that's still not "impossible". Just "harder than we can do at the moment".

every friend of mine who's virus ridden computer I end up cleaning

They stopped asking me after I stopped attempting to save their data. Makes life simpler.

will remain a mystery in sloppy reporting.

I think you may have solved the mystery.

they tend to form in useful deposits only old vocanic areas, which have very hard stone matricies that need to be mined

Most often as cumulate texture mineral grains in large gabbroic to ultrabasic intrusions. These MAY be associated with surface volcanism, but mostly very indirectly.

It is pretty tough mining though. But that's what machines are for - unless you're South African, in which case you kill poor people.

Iron is the 4th most abundant element in the Earth's crust with 5% concentration.

Iron is the commonest element in the core of the Earth at around 70% v/v or w/w, with some 10+% of nickel (much, much rarer on the surface), around 10% of oxygen and sulphur combined (the exact proportions are unsure), several percent of potassium (several times it's concentration on average on the surface, but concentration varies considerably between rock types ; responsible for about a half of the radiogenic heat budget) and traces of others. Gold, for example may be as high as a ppm, some thousands of times it's concentration at the surface.

This means that you also need to get rid of a lot of kinetic energy very quickly, which makes things very hot.

Meteorites of more than a few kilogrammes that have been observed to fall and recovered within seconds or minutes are cold to the touch - sometimes very cold. The surface can get very hot - incandescent - but that is because most rocks are pretty poor conductors of heat. As the heating rate increases, even solid metals can't keep up, as study of the flow patterns on impactors and tektites have shown for as long as meteorites have been a topic of serious study.

What's the alternative motivation besides profit? How do you get some people to do what you want without paying them?

Fear won't work. People can just decide not to be afraid. And, since doomsday predictions have always been wrong, they would be wise not to fear the end you're warning them about. Altruism won't work either.

People focus on profit/money because its a clear way to motivate others. Everything else is just salesmanship, putting a gun to someone's head, or asking "pretty please".

That's not what the original article says.

Considering the terrible back luck all space agencies seem to have had with deploying tethers (getting stuck, snapping, etc) - they plan on deploying 4 per satellite? I hope there are contingency plans or someone really thought long and hard about possible failure modes and engineered around them.

Yes.

Real-world limits tend to preclude taking "every" opportunity. A more realistic approach would be to do things that might help a lot and not do things that take time and effort and won't help much.

open source? You'd better re-read your TOS. It belongs to Facebook now, most certainly not open source.