"It's still going to cost trillions to ship complex and gigantic mining machinery out to these asteroids to actually begin the extraction. It's going to cost trillions to design, build, test and assemble the ships and space stations to house the rotating human crews that will oversee these complex systems. That's the…

The press conference is worth watching, and there are various materials up now.

"Can supermassive black holes eat smaller, stellar mass black holes?"

It's to do with the way that a three body interaction allows one star from a binary system to be accreted by the black hole. The black hole will no more "consume" a star in orbit around it than our Sun will suddenly "consume" the Earth; if a star in the galactic core is in orbit around the central black hole, then in…

Several comments here say that this is obvious - black holes grow by eating mass, so what's the story?

That's a good Fortean Times article. Like it says, if Michael Parkinson is in it, it can't possibly be a drama....

Milkshaker puts it very well in a nearby comment! All the people in it were well-known, trusted presenters of BBC's factual television - interviewers like Parkinson, children's TV personalities like Sarah Green. People the audience knew and invited into their living rooms on a regular basis.

This study looks at returning a ~500 ton asteroid to lunar orbit, using ~12 tons xenon propellant for the return, and one Atlas launch.

Good find!

The orbits are predictable. And it's a question of delta V, so NEOs can be a lot easier to reach than the Moon.

NEAR

I'm willing to bet it's platinum group metals.

I'm waiting to hear the talk.

It would be interesting not to find the Higgs boson wouldn't it!

Yeah, I really hope there turns out to be some way of distinguishing between these very esoteric theories at accessible energy scales, or by observation.

Yes, that's true! Different low energy physics, anyway - the underlying physics is the same, but appears different according to which vacuum the region ends up in.

It's more that there are 10^500 possible string vacua - which is a stupendously large number, but still as far from infinity as 500.

I think common or garden string theory also has higher (>2) spin fields, corresponding to excited string modes. But they're massive. Whereas in Vasiliev theory they're massless.

The novel Timescape, by Gregory Benford, is one of the rare stories to address these points. When sending a tachyon message to the past, the researchers have to work out the correct point in the sky to target the required date.

Thanks very much! Interesting stuff. I'll look into it!