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A comment on Calico, Google’s Anti-Aging Company, Announces New Research Facility. Parent comment

Re:Calico, Google’s Anti-Aging Company, Announces New Resear... by lotsofmangos on Thursday September 04, 2014 @10:17AM (#8268352)
Why not just get off the planet? The resources available above our heads are vast.
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Re:Calico, Google’s Anti-Aging Company, Announces New Resear... by TeMPOraL on Thursday September 04, 2014 @10:20AM (#8268373)
Simple answer: think how to colonize desert or build underwater habitats first. It's infinitely easier, and yet still superhard. We'll have to do all of this eventually.

As for resources, we don't need to relocate to get to them, we can bring them down here. There are companies already working on it.

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Re:Calico, Google’s Anti-Aging Company, Announces New Resear... by lotsofmangos on Thursday September 04, 2014 @11:11AM (#8268688)
Floating cities around the doldrums could also be fun. However I do think that having a functioning economy off planet helps a lot if we want to tap resources in space. Getting up the gravity well is expensive, once you are up there you might as well hang around.
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Re:Calico, Google’s Anti-Aging Company, Announces New Resear... by astazangasta on Thursday September 04, 2014 @11:09AM (#8268674)
What resources? There's not much useful water out there, let alone breathable air, carbon, organic matter, living things, ecosystems. All of those crucial resources are here.

Besides, if we don't get things straight on this planet, we'll never be able to survive long enough to find another one.

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Re:Calico, Google’s Anti-Aging Company, Announces New Resear... by lotsofmangos on Thursday September 04, 2014 @11:22AM (#8268763)
What resources?

http://www.planetaryresources.com/asteroids/composition/

Besides, if we don't get things straight on this planet, we'll never be able to survive long enough to find another one.

Survival is an argument for getting a lot of people living off planet, not an argument for not doing so. We can try and create utopias as much as we like, but that is not going to help very much when we get hit by a big rock.

Also, personally I suspect that the real advance is not going to be in settling other planets, but building habitats out of asteroids.

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Re:Calico, Google’s Anti-Aging Company, Announces New Resear... by JoeAltmaier on Thursday September 04, 2014 @11:11AM (#8268687)
Depends where you go. Lots of all that in the right places. Saturn's rings and moons; water is on the moon and on Mars; we can make what we don't find if we have enough energy.
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