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Trump signs an executive order allowing mining the moon and asteroids:
In 2015, the Obama administration signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (CSLCA, or H.R. 2262) into law. This bill was intended to "facilitate a pro-growth environment for the developing commercial space industry" by making it legal for American companies and citizens to own and sell resources that they extract from asteroids and off-world locations (like the moon, Mars or beyond).
On April 6th, the Trump administration took things a step further by signing an executive order that formally recognizes the rights of private interests to claim resources in space. This order, titled "Encouraging International Support for the Recovery and Use of Space Resources," effectively ends the decades-long debate that began with the signing of the Outer Space Treaty in 1967.
This order builds on both the CSLCA and Space Directive-1 (SD-1), which the Trump administration signed into law on December 11th, 2017. It establishes that "Americans should have the right to engage in commercial exploration, recovery, and use of resources in outer space, consistent with applicable law," and that the United States does not view space as a "global commons."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday April 15 2020, @11:24AM (4 children)
We are grossly overtaxing the carrying capacity of the planet by current methods of production. But we are on the cusp of another huge revolution in material science. Several, actually. Better energy storage via new battery technology is almost there. Better energy generation via renewable means is almost there (fusion won't be along for another 50 years). Additive manufacturing + better recycling will greatly alleviate human pressure on the environment. Carbon nanotubes and graphene by themselves revolutionize energy transport, storage, and computation, and serve many structural requirements, too; we have plenty carbon, enough to last us 1,000 lifetimes.
So we don't need to eat a diet of yeast and microbes. Though I am curious to try Impossible Human (tm).
And as far as room to put people goes, gosh do we ever have so, so much room to put more people if we want to. Even California, the most populous state in America, has gobs and gobs of room to put more people: there's almost as much room in that state east of the Sierra Nevadas as there is west of them. The Central Valley has tons of room, too (if you can bring yourself to live there). If we employed Japanese densities we could almost fit the population of the entire nation in California's area.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday April 15 2020, @02:11PM (3 children)
>So we don't need to eat a diet of yeast and microbes. Though I am curious to try Impossible Human (tm).
So, what do we eat then? We're currently consuming a year's worth of ecological production in a few months, the rest of the year we "eat the capital", so that next year it takes longer to get the same amount of production (slightly, we've got a whole lot of capital, so the change over a single year is small - but you only need to compare oceanic "trophy fish" pictures from 50 - 100 years ago to see how quickly it adds up). It might not have to be microbes, but it can't be farmed "naturally", we'll need some sort of "industrial" food production with a drastically reduced ecological footprint.
Space for people themselves is not the problem - space for all the things people need to survive (including a healthy global ecology) is the problem.
And yes, large-scale recycling would help immensely, as would pivoting away from making non-recylable products. I don't see how additive manufacturing would have much effect though - the waste from subtractive manufacturing is generally extremely easy to recycle, and injection molding is far more efficient for everything except extremely small production runs.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday April 16 2020, @11:54AM (2 children)
Balderdash. We produce far more food than we need. We are not starving, and we are not eating our seed corn. And that's with traditional means of food production. If people repeal civic codes that prevent people from gardening and keeping food animals like chickens, then we'd produce even more food. If we get a little more creative we can raise that an order of magnitude (urban farming, hydroponics, etc).
Additive manufacturing plus recycling lets you throw that broken bowl into the hopper and print yourself a new one. It costs energy to do that, but far less than shipping the thing from China and transporting it overland all over creation.
Plunk a community down in Northwestern Colorado, in the middle of fucking nowhere, with efficient solar panels and they have all they need. You could do that with half the population of China and you'd have plenty of middle-of-fucking-nowhere in Colorado left over.
We are not out of food. We are not out of space. We are not out of resources. We are not out of energy. Humanity has many tricks up its sleeve to play.
But I am 1000% with you that the 19th century bullshit we've been coasting on must go. The miscreants who want us to keep coasting on it must go, preferably with rope.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday April 16 2020, @01:10PM (1 child)
The problem is not that we can't farm enough food - it's the ecological toll that farming takes. Which includes the damage from mining for fertilizers that get shipped halfway around the world, the poisoning of ecosystems downstream with herbicides, insecticides, and fertilizer overdoses, etc. Combine that with the tolls for livestock, fishing, lumber, etc., etc., etc. We make great demands on the planet's ecology, far more than it can recover from in a year. (I think current estimates are we consume about 3 years worth of ecological production per year)
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday April 21 2020, @04:37AM
That's partly a matter of process, partly of perspective, and partly of time scale. Hog farms, for example, produce a lot of effluent. It has to be contained, remediated, before it can be released into a watershed. But that effluent is incredibly valuable fertilizer; at least, it would be if it were collected, composted, and returned to farms as an input. It would close the loop. It could even be further used to produce biogas as an energy source, to cut the costs of closing the loop further. That is, the process could change such that we think of closing loops in our economic processes instead of our old, linear processes that will always race to depletion.
Whether the effluent being released into a watershed is a pollutant/poison is also a matter of perspective. When effluent is released into watersheds there are often algal blooms. Those are called negative effects by most current pundits. But for the algae, it's a mega bonanza. Suddenly, a rich, new food source has dropped out of the clear blue sky and boy are they thriving. Creatures that eat the algae also get a bonanza, as do the creatures that eat those creatures, and so on. So, for Life Writ Large, the pollution represents a win for some, and a loss for others. Who are we to say that humans deserve what they desire more than the algae do? That's specie-ist.
Finally, there's timescale. Plastics were introduced on a large scale in the middle of last century. The stuff has been filling up landfills and fouling bodies of water since. But recently scientists have discovering microbes that seem to enjoy eating the stuff. If plastics stick around long enough, there will be other lifeforms that adapt to eat it. It's evolution at work, and only a matter of time until it exploits the new niche humans have created.
In short, Life will be just fine on Earth no matter what we humans do, given a long enough timeline. Humans, on the other hand, might be screwed, but, then, we too are pretty goddamned adaptable. We didn't get to be kings of the Earth for nothing.
Washington DC delenda est.