CompuServe Messages

I think Lanny might've jumped on the deeper intellectual, procedural aspects of Bill's question… I re-read his original message several times, tried to find "the" question, thought he might have already answered it himself by jumping to the open-ended "answer" of thinking that "all we need to do is figure out how to extract them", etc. yet Bill said he was already writing a book about the subject. If we really want to help Bill and enlighten ourselves, we might have to dig deeper and declare his first question invalid. What's so special about the top fifty feet? Is that were oil comes from? No. Is that where most mineral deposits come from? No. Is that where people of the future will be digging? Probably not. Even if a nifty fusion torch and elemental mass spectrographic extraction system were to be developed tomorrow, I'd think you'd get a higher yield from "mining" a garbage dump than from filtering seawater.