Christie's Set To Auction Space Rocks For Out Of This World Prices (networkworld.com) 49
coondoggie quotes a report from Networkworld: It's not everyday you could have the opportunity to buy a piece of space -- but Christie's London auction house will on April 20 offer about 80 meteorite pieces and a bunch of space-rock paraphernalia to go along with them. The collection -- consisting of a variety of space rocks from private and public collections -- is expected to sell for over a million dollars at the auction. The Valera Meteorite may be the most famous rock in the collection as it is purported to have killed a cow.
step right up ladies and gentlemen (Score:1)
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A cow? Boring. Show us one that killed a human.
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No... a god!
This says more about the buyers than the rocks. (Score:4, Insightful)
The value (as with most things) lies not in the rocks but in the attitude of the buyers. The rocks are deemed as special because they came from another place and have a documented history (killed a cow). But that is the perception of a buyer with a very Earth-centric view. In fact, Earth is a big rock in space and every clod on it's surface is a "space rock".
Once we become a space-faring civilization, this rarity value attached to non-Earth rocks will seem very quaint. Since almost all the matter in the universe is "non-Earth", it will be Earth rocks that will have the value of the rare.
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Are you the same, angry AC that posts every time someone talks about inhabiting other planets or are there actually more than one of you?
I know this is flamebait, but it's like a broken record.
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It seems pretty arrogant to assume you know all about the future. The main limit boils down to energy, and there are certainly energy technologies awaiting an engineering solution. I'd be surprised if we ended up with a permanent base on Mars in my lifetime, but not shocked to my core. I would be shocked if a larger colony ended up there, but in 1000 or 10,000 years? The only thing that would shock me about that is living to see it.
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Any rational look at reality will show that space is a dead end. There will NOT be this glorious ascension of "we" into the heavens. OK? Sinking in yet?
That conclusion seems a little bit ridiculous. Humanity is, what, about 200,000 years old? It took us about that long to develop the ability of controlled powered heavier-than-air flight, in 1903. Then in the 40s we figured out how to split the atom. And by the 1960s we had landed manned space craft on the moon. So it took us ~200,000 years until we figured out and had the ability to build an airplane, and then less than 70 years after doing that we were standing on the moon, and by now we have sent sp
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So what? The reason we aren't routinely sending manned missions outside of Earth orbit only has to do with politics, not technology. We are technically capable of doing things that there is little political will to fund. Maybe once China starts getting itself established on the moon then the US will decide to take a more active role again in the name of "pride" or some shit, when it should really be done now for its own sake.
All of this is to say that over the next 1,000 years nearly anything is possible
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What a strange way of thinking of it ... so we have a Venn diagram, and then it's Earth and non-Earth. That's a little too simplistic.
In your scenario, we'll have Earth, Mars, Venus, Alpha Centauri, Vulcan, Ceti Alpha V, and what have you. But they'll all be boring because they're "not Earth".
They may not be universally valuable, but like people collect souvenirs, they'll have some sentimental a
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Is this how desperate content sites have become?
TWEET!
Re:step right up ladies and gentlemen (Score:5, Funny)
I hadn't realised that "killing a cow" was such a value-booster. I spy a business opportunity here.
Buy up items which could conceivably be used to kill a cow: shovels, pickaxes, trampolines (that one needs a bit of creativity) and so on. Use them to kill cows, then re-sell at a profit.
What could possibly go wrong?
I have a space rock to auction (Score:3, Funny)
I have a space rock for sale. It's a lot larger than the average they have on auction, so bid accordingly.
Specs:
- mean radius: 6,371.0 km (3,958.8 mi)
- mass: 5.97237x10^24 kg (1.31668x10^25 lb)
- mean density: 5.514 g/cm^3 (0.1992 lb/cu in)
It orbits somewhere around the star called Sol. Buyer collects.
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You'll have to ask Christo for a price quote.
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The pound or pound-mass (abbreviations: lb, lbm, lbm, [1]) is a unit of mass
Try again.
Who knows? Not me. (Score:1)
Can we meet face to face ?
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The million-dollar meteorite (Score:1)
Frankly, for that kind of cash I'll purport to have killed a cow too.
Re:The million-dollar meteorite (Score:4, Funny)
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For a bar mitzvah you need to butcher a cow, not seduce it. The meteorite wins hands-down over George Clooney here.
You want a rock that killed a cow? (Score:4, Insightful)
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1) A rock that hasn't had all that yucky life stuff on it for the last 3 billion years.
OR
2) Long odds that it'll crack open and reveal it's a space egg, so you can be the first human to be eaten by alien life.
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Showing off how rich they are.
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Earthly rocks are from the same stars (Score:2)
If killing cows matter that much... (Score:2)
Buy cheap meteorite, find cow, kill cow with meteorite (tricky but doable), you now have a $2M meteorite.
Who said the cow had to be killed by the fall.
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Oh, I can't resist:
Meteorites are for cows ... You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOO! MOOOO! Moo cows MOOOO! Cow say... OUCH!
And The Cow ... (Score:2)
is going for how much?
Dumbest investment ever. (Score:2)