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...

You certainly did! Atta boy!

I think you're being too gentle with the environmentalist wackos. It's not that they believe that the Earth is the center of the universe. It's that they don't seem to believe the rest of the universe exists.

Dunno why he used cubic angstroms; any other unit would do for a ratio.

Those may have been numbers that he knew off the top of his head, for some perverse reason.

I would have used furlongs, myself.

I'm all for cubits. After all, the size of the universe has got to be some meaningful quantity of cubits, if God had anything to do with it. Ok, I'm kidding already. Oh, and my calculator barfs for anything over 1e99 of anything, so checking his math with the cubic angstroms bit didn't work well.