"NINETY YEAR RULE" between epochs cum generations : ideas don't change, merely die out

   If Romanticism was born in the heady atmosphere of the 1790s, its replacement by Scientism in the 1870s might have no more significance than Scientism's replacement, in turn, in the 1960s : all were victims of the "Ninety Year Rule" .

   All of these replacements weren't the result of the intellectual triumph of exciting new ideas, but merely the fact that the last of the powerful men holding older, once-exciting, ideas had finally died.
   Depressing, because we may not have the luxury - this time - of waiting till the last of the Modernist/Scientism Limit-Deniers finally dies out some time in the 2030s...

the kindergarten arithmetic of asteroid IRON mining ...

Michael Marshall

Its not the higher mathematics so many of our scientists have trouble with - its primary school arithmetic.

For decades many scientists have been seriously talking, out in the POPULAR SCIENCE world, about mining asteroids for IRON , and all the other scientists have let them get away with it.

Oh, they would be severely shellacked for saying the same thing inside an article they wanted a peer-reviewed journal to publish.

But as long as you just say it to 6 billion civilians , instead of to 6000 fellow scientists, well that is alright then.

"Mustn't slight a fellow colleague, no matter how asinine, in public - lowers the tone, lowers our pay packet."

Well it isn't alright.

As the NRA is wont to say, "Public Science (science inside the hothouse of the peer-reviewed Beltway) doesn't kill people, Popular Science (day-to-day science) kills people".

Our world has real problems - but mining distant asteroids for iron isn't the solution - it is a senseless,hare-brained, diversion.

Iron is so abundant on the Earth's surface - still, after 10,000 years of use - that it remains cheap. Even now, our sloppy recycling efforts does a pretty good job about recycling most big bits of iron.

God would have to wing asteroid iron on the backs of celestial angels to beat the current - and future - price of iron on Earth.

Put a penny on this side of the classroom and pour a million pennies on that side of the classroom (representing the delivered cost of a gram of iron, from future earth sources versus future asteroid iron) and ask a four year old which pile is bigger.

Then ask the PhDs of the limit-denying asteroid mining lobby the same question and watch them waffle....