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?

If a teacher have been using pen, paper and textbooks as the primary means for input and output of information you can't expect them to be proficient at teaching using electronic means for input and output. A simple seminar or continuing education program is simply not enough to bring the technological skills of a teacher that has been teaching with pen and paper for who knows how many years up to par. Rigorous training and a willingness for change from the teacher are also required. The idea is noble but it couldn't even be implemented in the US in a large scale.

they probably are

OK I have an issue with #3

Any design can be improved given enough effort? If that was true then a perpetual motion machine would be possible and we all know it is not, well at least according to science.

Ok did the math and your right, the percentage in volume of oil compared to the volume of the earth atmosphere is minuscule.

barrel of oil to KM^3= 1.58^(-10)
BPD=30,000,000
days in a year=365
years of sustained production of oil=?? ( it really doesn't mater what the total is it wont be significant enough but I chose 30 just for fun)

1.58^(-10)*3000000*365*30=51 km^3

  The atmosphere has an estimated volume in the 10^12 km^3 range, so 51 km^3 is indeed insignificant (as far as my argument goes)

I'm talking about the mass and energy. We extract 30,000,000 barrels of substance from the ground every single day. It doesn't matter the way we change that substance, it ends up in the surface or in the atmosphere, be it plastics, heat, kinetic energy, or any sorts of matter that we throw up in the air. The point is that we are taking a huge amount of atoms from under the earth and launching a huge amount of them to the atmosphere. It will definitely have an impact it doesn't matter in what form.

30,000,000 barrels of oil a day are used by man kind. A bit of it is converted to kinetic energy, the rest of it is thrown up in the sky. It is just naive to think this wont have an impact on the climate.