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Message: <blockquote data-quote="s/LaSH" data-source="post: 850812" data-attributes="member: 6929">Things are rarely as clear-cut as they appear... here in New Zealand, the government-owned power generation and transmission facilities were split up and sold off years ago, and now prices suck and everything's a confusing mess and the government is desparately trying to get things back in order. Don't ask me more, the limit of my interest in the matter was the comment "Well, the centralised structure may work in practice, but it doesn't work in theory."Right, that's out of me system. I've been wondering about the availability of plastics in a hypothetical human-expansive future; if we expand our population base (into space or wherever), eventually we'll run out of oil deposits on Earth to make plastics with, and (correct me if I'm wrong) but isn't Earth the only planet with oil? A process like this makes 'slush' asteroids just as awesomely profitable as megaton gold asteroids, because you can turn them into plastics just by shipping a reactor onto them then 'dropping' the produce back to a viable market.Suddenly, carbon compounds become an awesomely valuable resource. That's my prediction for the next hundred years, anyway - carbon's so versatile an atom, I bet we'll be using nothing but carbon compounds in a hundred years (down on a molecular level).Heck, maybe humans will have an excuse not to pillage Antarctica!</blockquote>