Sunday, August 29, 2010

Growing Awareness of Solar System's Population Density

The image above looks only at the inner solar system. If you expand the view to include the outer system and the huge cloud and belt of comets and asteroids extending far out from the planetary orbits, you may begin to appreciate some of the material resources of this one solar system.

There is a huge amount of valuable real estate swirling around our solar system, waiting to be claimed by bold explorers and prospectors. Who will be the ones to lay claim to the richness of the asteroids, the outer system, the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud? Who are the brave adventurers and explorers, and who are the good-for-nothing incompetent couch potatoes?



Created by British astronomer Scott Manley, the three-minute clip – which is the equivalent of two months per second – starts with a sprinkling of white ‘dust’ around the edge of the planets....The footage shows the discovery of every new asteroid over the past three decades and charts it on an increasingly congested map of the solar system.

Over the years, and as more telescopes are added to the experiment and detection methods improve, this becomes a dense green ‘ring’ as the number of ‘minor planets’ found in the asteroid belt increases. _ImpactLab_from_DailyMail

Humans are faced with many challenges -- challenges both true and fabricated. Many of these "earth-shaking" challenges can only be taken seriously if humans are to be stuck on this one planet for the next thousand years, restricted to using technologies of the past and confined by nonsensical rules based upon phantom fears such as carbon hysteria.

If, on the other hand, we unleash the human imagination and human resourcefulness, we will begin to discover resources far beyond our ability to exploit for tens of thousands of years.

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