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Profit was the motive for funding Columbus to cross the Atlantic, by finding a faster or easier trading route to the Oriental sources of spices and silk. Profi
by T-hawk 15y ago
Profit was the motive for funding Columbus to cross the Atlantic, by finding a faster or easier trading route to the Oriental sources of spices and silk. Profit was still the motive for later explorers of the Americas, in mining or stealing Aztec gold and silver, then tobacco and cotton and sugar plantations.
It's unclear yet where feasible profit opportunities exist for development in space. (Also, we can _see_ space with telescopes, there isn't a Pacific Ocean on the other side of space that we have to send someone to discover.) If you want to see some real space industry, hope that somebody discovers a gold asteroid.
Finally, remember that from Columbus to Jamestown elapsed over a hundred years. Less than half of that timespan has yet elapsed since Yuri Gagarin. These things take time.
- NickPollard 15y ago>> If you want to see some real space industry, hope that somebody discovers a gold asteroid. They already have [1]. And a platinum asteroid. And a palladium asteroid. And an Iron, Nickel, whatever-mineral-you-want asteroid. "At 1997 prices, a relatively small metallic asteroid with a diameter of 1.6 km (0.99 mi) contains more than 20 trillion US dollars worth of industrial and precious metals." "A comparatively small M-type asteroid with a mean diameter of 1 km could contain more than two billion metric tons of iron-nickel ore, or two to three times the annual production for 2004." Supposedly the asteroid '433 Eros' contains more gold than has ever been mined from the Earth in the history of mankind (I can't find a source for this apart from an earlier HN comment though, the paper I found on it was behind a paywall). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining