Sounds to me like we have reach a tipping point where the "Rain" part of the rain forest is not enough to overcome the intense heat from the tropical sun. If that is the case we are royally fracked.

Everyone has some skin in the game, even if a person owes no taxes at the end of the year. Our major contributions to society, are the decisions that we make everyday at every moment. Taxes are only the way we pool our resources together for the benefits of all (in theory). In our society we believe that the whole is better when all the parts are doing well, so perhaps the $10 dollars is not much for you but for someone that might be significant. Everyone already pays sales taxes anyways.

If anything consumes everything, does the anything becomes everything?

Instead of thinking about the speed of light as the universe's speed limit, you can think of it as a peculiarity, like the sound barrier but more fundamental.

Acquisitions Incorporated

Thanks man, I'm attempting to quit right now. I just tried your suggestion and it helps a lot!

Kids that were born under the dactile input instead of mouse are just reaching Kindergarten. Prosessing speeds of tablets are just coming online with low power laptops. This technology is part of the technological evolution of education. What it is lacking seriously behind is the training of teachers and software that takes full advantage of the multimedia capabilities of tablets. I was hoping that MS Surface would be the next step. That is a very disappointing statement from Mr. Gates.

I agree, but at some point humanity needs to gain something more tangible than knowledge or value, we'll have to bring stuff down. Now, it doesn't have to be even a piece of the meteorite, I'll settle for orbital power beaming.

wouldn't this have to be a huge meteorite, I mean much larger in scale than a 500 ton rock?

Mining the moon scares me a whole lot more. I mean the tides are important!

But the issue really is distance. And the Moon is a LOT closer than the asteroids.

Asteroids are differentiated. Some are mostly pure nickel-iron. Never heard of that being available on the moon.

Why wouldn't there be a vein of iron ore on the Moon? There are veins of it on the Earth.

Sure, you might have to dig a bit for it. But digging on the Moon means a LOT less travel than scouting the asteroid belt.

I think distance is not the real issue, the real issue its efficiency. Maybe there is a meteorite out there who's orbit and mineral concentration make it a particularly good target for resource extraction. If we can get those resources down safely, and cheaply it would be like a new, world wide, gold rush.

Besides, extracting 500 tons of anything from the moon sounds extremely costly compared to some solar powered ion engine designed to over the years alter the orbit of an asteroid.

True, perhaps I should add

1. How are they suppose to get 500 tons of anything to the ground in a controlled manner.

Actually, I have never understood why so many people wouldn't t vote for someone who didn't stand a chance to win. Whether a candidate has a chance to win shouldn't weight in your decision at all. Weather you can trust the candidate or not seems like the most important element when voting. Personally, I would vote for Obama, he seems a heck of a lot more trustworthy than Mitt "etch-a-sketch" Romney, but at state level I'm voting for a third party, because I can't trust the two main parties. I know my governor candidate won't win, but at least I'll have a clear conscience.

Using it for orbital construction sounds great but processing all that ore up there might be expensive. I wonder how efficiently could be done.

1. How are they suppose to get 500 tons of anything to the ground? 2. What would be the best resource to get? Gold? for what it would just cause a drop in the gold market. Perhaps some resource that can be used in a massive scale to lower the cost of launching the mission ( both energetically and monetary) 3. How cheaply can they do it? Space X might simplify the math but it would still be in the hundreds of millions just to get stuff up. 4. how many times an already launched vehicle can be re-used?