> The treaty with Portugal comes after India accepted its two main conditions that the extradited person would not face either a death sentence or life imprisonment beyond 25 years.
This product must have sounded like a good idea to some clueless but slightly rich tech charlatans.
Looking at the product page, a mediocre genius like me can tell:
The intro video tells zilch about the product. Tries to sell some grandiose vision about hands. As if they have evolutioned hands for snakes. That's a sore sign that there's not much to the product.
"A creativity station. A fully functioning PC. Whatever you want to call it, Sprout can do it. " I want to call it the spaceship voyager on a mission to the planet of the MBAs.
"Blending the physical and digital worlds that you live in, Sprout unleashes your creativity like never before." if by that you mean it makes you want to rant creatively, sure.
It can be done by robot, it several new abilities, it acts as a staging post for deep space missions, it lets NASA examine an asteroid close up and repeatedly, and it can be mined, again demonstrating abilities needed for deep space missions and for long-term possibilities for resource acquisition and management.
I think the second reason you listed to be much more compelling than the first. It could be argued that the space race was about ensuring that the US had missile superiority over the USSR, but I'd wager a significant number of the aeronautical engineers and astronauts involved were much more interested in going to the moon because it was there.
... and heck, it gives us a reason to go back to the Moon ... or at least, send more probes, etc, there, which themselves might help give more reason to go back to the Moon.
This is Step A, where Step Z is one of "save the planet from a world-killing asteroid" or "everyone gets a solid gold toilet" (or "a few people get solid gold toilets larger than the existing moon")
The earth doesn't have an unlimited supply of resources. Asteroids are literally loaded with minerals. At some point we are going to deplete the earth and will have to start looking to the skies to get what we need.
The Earth has far more minerals than the asteroid belt combined (its total mass is ~4% that of the Moon[1]). They're just buried under a lot of less interesting minerals. And there's some heat and pressure involved.
I'm not convinced that asteroid mining would be more productive than, say, tapping into rift zones, but it's an interesting problem. Might be useful to solve.
What are you on about? Limitless energy is rained down on us by the sun, and matter itself is conserved at the elemental level (barring nuclear processes, which are minimal on our planet). What do you suppose we are running out of?
Easily accessible resources. Yes, in principle everything can be converted into everything else if we pour enough electricity into particle accelerators, but in practice we have nowhere near enough power or time for that. Not until you get the nanotech working, at least.
So until we'll be able in practice to make everything out of electricity, dust and the power of will, we need various resources for our survival and growth.
I'm sorry you're having trouble. Do you have version info available? I just tested it on Windows 7, Firefox 28 and it worked. I started building this in Firefox, though now I mostly use Chrome (IDK, Firefox has felt like a beast lately, and I get antsy with browsers).
Sometimes, not all of the javascript files load in the right order and an error occurs because of a dependency. I'm fixing it right now, but maybe reloading the page will help with your issue.
Abu Salem was actually extradited from Portugal to India before this treaty existed