Instantman informs us that my latest column is up at Tech Central Station. The author’s always the last to know…

For those interested, I get medieval on the sustainable developers’ asses.

[12 PM Update]

Reader Chris Savage picks a nit, and math checks my ass:

A little poetic license here:

“The reality is that the notion of anything off planet representing a resource is anathema to them. For one thing, it would imply essentially unlimited resources for the foreseeable future, since the amount of energy and useful material in space vastly exceeds that on the single tiny planet on which we evolved, which in turn represents such an infinitesimal fraction of the universe that this column would run way over page limit were I simply to write the number of zeros required after the decimal point, and before the one, to express it. ”

Let’s assume that the universe is a sphere 20 billion light-years across.

Then, assuming my math is right, the volume of the universe is roughly 10^110 cubic angstroms.

If we assume that the Earth’s resources are proportional to its volume, that turns out to be roughly 10^60 cubic angstroms.

It follows that Earth’s share of the resources of the entire universe is no less than about 1/10^50, or, roughly:

0.00000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000001,

or:

0.00000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000001%

Now, your basic point is valid: if we could effectively access the resources available off-planet, we’d have gobs more resources. But it doesn’t take *that* many zeros to express either how big the universe is, or how small our piece of it is.

Check my math, but I could be off by a factor of, say, 10^60 and only add one line to your article… [g]>

Well, Chris, you just don’t know how vicious Tech Central editor Nick Schultz is for authors who go over word count.

Actually, I don’t either, but I don’t want to find out…