Replies

Guys like you were standing on the Spanish shore telling Columbus that he was wasting his investors' money.

Ney sayers are a dime a dozen. It take very little effort to criticize the doers in life. If you don't like the odds of someone's business plan, don't invest. But to catagorize all such efforts globally and forever to be frauds is specious. Sure many of these efforts are terminally naive. But they do have the right to try. And potential investors have the right to pass over their prospectuses for more desireable investments. That's the way the market works.

Last I checked the job of God was taken, therefore you are oversteeping your bounds by making the proclaimations that you have.

ROFLMAO! Maybe they'll change their outlook on the whole thing if they realize a lot of us capitalist pigs would move there given half a chance. That leaves the earth to them to return to it's pristine state. We'll take over the rest of the solar system. Bwahaaa!

Last I checked the job of God was taken

I saw the following on a sign outside a church the other day: Many are willing to serve the Lord, but only as advisers.

Seems to me it is you with delusions of being god, Columbus, or some like visionary. I'm just telling you the way it is. And Columbus' task was orders of magnitude easier than planetary exploration, even goven today's technology. Columbus wasn't even the first to cross the Atlantic. Brendan beat him by about 700 years in a hide-covered boat.

Read sci-fi about this stuff, yes, but don't encourage the investment con-artists.

I'm reminded of the people who want to colonize Mars to relieve population problems, when it would be orders of magnitude easier to colonize Antarctica, and we've yet to do that. I wouldn't advise investment in Antarctica Acres either.

As for investments, if dot-coms were built on nothing and a promise, they were BLUE CHIPS compared to these sucker-schemes.

Again, if the moon was made of gold, one still couldn't make a business case for exploiting it. Kind of tells you where the break-even point lies. Hell, if it was made of DIAMONDS ready to be scooped up, it wouldn't be worth it, even if diamond prices held. For a quick illustration, let's say that the moon was made of 3-carat (3 gram) cut diamonds worth $10,000 each. For each $100 million a sample-return mission would cost, it would be necessary to return 30,000 (30 kg) of diamonds. If the mission cost was $500 million, 150 kg of payload needs to be returned. Kind of hard, seeing as how a $1.5B Mars sample-return mission slated for 2005 will only return two beer-can size containers of material.

In contrast, Queen Isabella's gamble, while large, was nowhere near in this realm of impossibility of success. The Columbus voyage cost 1,500,000 maravedis. Gold in those days went for 3,000 maravedis per ounce. So the break-even point was equivalent to about 500 ounces of gold. Not hard to envision that kind of return.

And if you believe a planetary mission can be paid with ad revenue, you probably also believed that the Internet could be supported by pop-up ads. Another sucker scheme in the tank.

These "privatize space" schemes are at best a distraction. We should vigorously explore space, and realize that it will come out of taxes.