Nope, asteroid mining will not solve that issue - the issue is kickstarting it, expending the energy to actually get the necessary mining and refining gear up there in the first place. To get all the minerals out of the ore and to refine it into high quality metals, build the necessary alloys and cast them under microgravity will make it necessary to lift hundreds of thousands of tons of stuff up there. Not to mention that most of our refining techniques, e.g. floatation, will not work in microgravity, so completely new ones will have to be designed. At the moment the startup costs kill the whole endeavour. We need cheaper lifting capacity first. Orders of magnitude cheaper. That's what we have to research before producing vaporware by tagging asteroids.

Nope, gotta be heavy enough to get roughly spherical under its own gravity, too. No grains of sand in the planet club, we have to keep the riff-raff out, now don't we?

Yup. If only NASA were gone, the crowd funders would have discovered the planet using data from their own frigging telescope, instead of NASA's Kepler. And call me when the "asteroid miners" produce anything but vaporware. Meanwhile, NASA is doing meaningful science.

Because any usable ore refinery would take up just about 1000 times the mass of the ISS and require a daily input of energy and consumables which no one can actually generate in situ respectively lift to orbit at a reasonable cost?

To meaningfully own an asteroid you gotta have a way to actually exploit it. That, so far, is pure vaporware. Or vacuumware?

Well, half the thread is about how well revolvers work in space and how to most efficiently shoot someone there.... I don't think that some people have advanced civilizationally in any significant manner, do you?

Yeah. *dons Captain Obvious Cape* Sometimes you have to state the glaringly obvious, because some people don't seem to get it. My work is necessary, citizen!

This could get interesting when coupled with some powerful image recognition. Say, for example, you want to repair something on your car. Load up the repair manual, and let the overlay show you step by step what to do, e.g. a certain screw gets highlighted right were it is and the popup text tells you to now fasten this screw to this-and-that torque.

I think you are getting to the bottom of this. Top work!

I am not talking about Spain, France or Germany. Those weren't exactly horsemen, no? I was talking about their encounters with nomadic horsemen around the lower Danube.

So, both sides of a false dichotomy get modded up "insightful" on slashdot these days. Good to know. March of the Morons, anyone?

Yeah, except Rome fell about 400 years later. You could argue that the decline of Rome began with the end of the Republic, but that decline was a drawn out process. It's more of an ideological point. The economically most prosperous years probably were under the Emperors...

The Roman expansion seemed to have stopped whenever they ran into cavalry-heavy enemies. They got to Asia Minor, but not into the steppe beyond. Enemies not fighting ordered battles might have been somewhat detrimental to Legion tactics. Hit and run, deny an orderly battle - asymmetric warfare of the ancient world if you like. Not that they ventured often into those territories, but if I recall correctly, whenever they did, it was without significant success.