[meteorite-list] AD: METEORITE CLASSIFICATION SERVICE

From: Darren Garrison <cynapse_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri Jul 14 12:11:27 2006
Message-ID: <4befb215tm811f3nlmoqji5ehu8bu79i7k_at_4ax.com>

On Fri, 14 Jul 2006 03:45:12 -0700, you wrote:

>= > Anti-micro-collector? Maybe, but so am I to a degree.
>Why have a tray of tiny bits when one could focus their funds and purchase a
>single spectacular specimen? If something's worth doing, it should be done
>well...no brainer in my opinion. Micros fill a human urge to make a
>collection of something I guess, but it takes some of the fun - and all of
>the awe - out of collecting. I, for example, find it much more exciting to
>hold, say, a ten kilo iron, than a few tiny lunar micros, but maybe that's
>just me.
>

Wherther that is your intent or not, that position pretty much ends up saying
that only those with huge budgets should collect meteorites. If you can't
afford a large piece, you shouldn't buy one at all? And if only large,
expensive specimens were sold, the list of potential buyers would be much
smaller, the number of buys would be much smaller, and there would probably be
even fewer sellers than there are today-- and the meteorites that science is
getting now would probably still be sitting in the Sahara.

Taken as a whole world population, almost nobody cares about science. People
care about the technologies developed by science that can improve their standard
of living, but almost nobody cares about science just for the sake of learning
something. Of the small percentage of people who DO care about scientific
subjects, only a small subset of them care about asteroids. And only a small
subset of that small subset try to collect pieces of them. I'd guess that
roughly 99.99% of the world's population do not give a tinker's damn about the
birth of the solar system or about asteroids as long as one isn't about to hit
them on the head. So by fighting against meteorite collectors, meteorite
scientists would be antagonizing the small group of people who care anything
whatsoever about what they are doing. They should realize that almost all of
the population of the world as a whole and even of the most educated of
countries wouldn't notice or care if all meteorite scientists were fired from
their jobs tommorrow. So why concider the TINY number of people who do care
what they do to be enemies?
Received on Fri 14 Jul 2006 11:49:12 AM PDT