[meteorite-list] Pairing discussion/questions

From: Martin Altmann <altmann_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:41:52 +0100
Message-ID: <003101ca992e$b1297530$07b22959_at_name86d88d87e2>

Jason,

first of all, I do not justify anybody's action,
second, I can't discuss based upon hear-say and rumours, for that the time
of all of us, is too pity.
If you deal accusations, you have to deliver facts (the list rules require
that too).

>But you're merely downplaying the importance of information such as
>where they were found, etc, without even justifying it.

You have excessive strewnfield mapping for Libya, partially for Oman too.

The question of terrestrial weathering is one of the main occupation of the
Suisse-Omani team.
As you see, it can be done, totally independent from that what any private
dealer, hunter or collector is doing.
That it isn't done, you can't accuse the hunters of, as long as there is
worldwide only a single public financed expedition team doing that job
periodically in the desert (once per year, a very few people, for a very few
weeks).
Meteorite science is, like most forms of basic research, see astronomy, see
physics, see spaceflight - a public task.

>But Oman's hardly giong to send police over to reclaim rocks

Here the principle is decisive.
A crime will stay a crime, when law tells it is a crime, no matter whether
it is prosecuted or not.

In the recent years, we see the fatal development, that in so many countries
those people, who tapped these countries as new and most productive
meteorite resources, those people, who found so far almost all meteorites
there on their own risks and expenses and those people, who did the field
work, the official side was not willing to do, to pay or failed with their
efforts,
those people, who found and delivered all these stones, which triggered that
enormous boost in meteoritics and planetary science of the last 20 years,
and that at a small fraction of the cost, science had spent to come to
similar results respectively a society would have to spend -

we see, that these people now are more and more criminalized or pushed in a
gray area due to the introduction of restrictive meteorite laws.

The aftermath is disastrous.
If you had checked the catalogues of the public historic collections and the
universities, you would know, that 80 or 90% of all (non-antarctic)
meteorites stem directly or indirectly from private people.

That is the reason, why we have all in all no new finds in Australia,
that the find numbers totally broke down in Libya, that we don't have
meteorites in Egypt, that NWA is going to an end and that we will have 90%
or even less finds in Oman, if the laws there would be enforced.

With the recovery of new falls - btw. touching your contamination argument,
but also to seize the recommendation of the UNESCO meteorite working group,
where it was consensus already in the 1960ies, that it is of crucial
importance and that all shall be done, to recover the material as fast as
possible after it fell - there with the new falls you have the very same.
All in all not the scientists are recovering them or are going to search for
them, but the private people.

The current situation caused by those many new laws of the last 20-30 years
and especially in our decade is unbearable
and very harmful for the continuity of that branch of science.

>the place where a meteorite falls is irrelevant.

I never suggested that.

>Maybe there's 100kg more of NWA 2737 out there, but we'll never know
>because that information is now lost

Right. But righter, without hunters, dealers we wouldn't know at all, that
there is a NWA 2737 ;-?

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, is in German,
The sparrow in the hand is better than the dove on the roof.

...but how shall I say, it is to a certain degree a luxury problem,
if you'd concede to me a more general and perhaps more antiquated
perspective.


In 1981, when I acquired my first meteorite,
there were all in all - non-antarctic:

1765 recognized meteorite finds
And
 935 recognized observed falls.

>From Ur and Nogata on.


Now only 20 years later, we have, NEW and published, additionally and
non-antarctic, we have more:

More than
8000 new meteorite finds

And
151 observed falls


So. And the very very most of these finds and numbers were made by private
dealers, hunters, collectors. That you have to recognize (as well as those
have to register, who want to kick off the private sector).

1765 finds 3000 years before,
8000 finds in 20 years.

Among this 8000 you find a lot of very well documented ones.
You find among them more excellent documented finds, than all the meteorites
in history together were documented before.

There.

That's what I call a performance.

>But you're merely downplaying the importance of information such as

Innuendo.

I say, we aren't living in a perfect world of elves and dwarves,
I say - now you know the figures - that it is incredibly ridiculous to
bemoan lacking find data of a part of these finds,
because the number, the weights, the diversity, the low costs of these finds

outweigh hundredfold the incomplete data.

Strewnfield mapping, weathering studies - are interesting aspects.

But if these finds wouldn't have been made, what should a scientist measure
in his microprobe?
The idea of a meteorite? The dream of a sample of another planet?
- that works at best perhaps in Australia.

Jason. Take spaceflight. What are all these missions to the terrestrial
planets, to asteroids, to comets made for? To measure those celestial
bodies. All the rovers and space probes. Remote sensoring, robotic analyses
in situ on the surface..
Here coincide the questions of meteoritics and spaceflight/planetology.
You can do more intensive studies with a sample from a celestial body in
terrestrial labs, than with the limited possibilities of a small robot out
there. See, what is always the final goal of a mission series?
The sample-return-mission. Luna, Apollo, Genesis, Hayabusa... the plans for
a sample-return-mission to Mars are known.
These analyses and the samples themselves are so important, that mankind is
spending billions each year to get them.
It is so crucial, that we get the very meteorites in our labs, complementary
to our space programs. They represent samples from celestial bodies, where
we simply have no access to else. How many different parent bodies do we
find sampled in our meteorites? 150? How many asteroid samples have we
received from spaceflight so far?
Zero.
How many Martian samples, picked up on Mars and brought to Earth by our
technical means do we have to study? Not a single one.
And the lunar meteorites, several of them represent material from depths,
from times, from regions the astronauts and the Luna-probes had no access
to.

That is in my eyes really somewhat more important, that meteorites deliver
us that information - than the secondary information, what happened to them
in the short time, they spent on Earth.

Can you understand that?

Sometimes it seems to me, that the newer generation is so spoiled from the
material, the hunters and dealers delivered them,
that they aren't aware anymore, how happy they should be about the big
Bonanza.
They are taking almost all for granted!
If those guys in Sahara and Oman aren't going to search the stones,
then we simply will have no meteorites anymore.
Then it will be like it was all the centuries before the desert rush,
or like nowadays in Australia.
One doesn't need especial intellectual abilities to get that.

You want better field work?
So send the expeditions out, to do it. Nobody is detaining science from
doing that, you simply blame the wrong people.

What do we have currently going on for expeditions in the deserts?
Suisse-Omani-team 3-6 weeks a year, 4-6 people or so - I'm to lazy to look
for.
Wasn't there recently also a trip in Saudi Arabia?
Else? I'm not aware of any other official expedition in Oman else, nor in
whole Sahara, nor in the US-deserts.
When was the last expedition in Australia? In the mid-90ies?

So what do you want?
All in all almost nobody want to do that work,
why the nomads in Sahara should do it instead?
Why the meteoritic pizza-boys in Oman?

Science costs.
Give them half the salary, social insurances ect. and a quarter of the
travel costs and the costs of equipment any member of an official meteorite
desert expedition gets paid,
and they will do it for you with greatest pleasure (and most probably, if I
look at the stats, more successfully).

With the price levels we have these years for desert meteorites, they simply
can't do it
and with the withdrawal of the institutional collections from their historic
and public responsibility, they can't do it neither.
Here in Europe most of the first addresses of meteoritics got in the last 10
years their purchase budgets shortened to a level lower than any local
village museum and additionally aren't allowed to swap anymore, hence anyway
only still growing and diversifying with the deposit masses, the lousy
dealers are giving them - well and over there at you,
there the problem is, that many of the large institutes refuse to buy desert
finds, because they felt for the - yes, I think, one can call it so - for
the lies of some of the protectionists, that NWA-meteorites would be
illegal, which - see the results of the Casablanca workshop - is untrue.

If the institutions would buy like they bought the 200 years before,
it would be no question, that also the Sahara finds could be better and
fully documented.

Science costs. I'm sorry.

If the find documentation is of such an importance, we have to equip and to
pay the hunters (or their meteorites) better.
That would be quite an effort, but would cost less than Antarctica, not to
mention planetary spaceflight.

That is the answer on your question:
>2) Is there any reason not to take the time to do it right?


>It's not all about speed. You don't seem to understand that a
>scientist could spend a lifetime working

Course I know - and everybody in the meteorite biz has sometimes troubles
with especially inert examples of such scientists,
Thanks God there are many, many others...

But what the scientist side often doesn't understand, is, that the side,
which is delivering them their objects of research, has to work completely
different than they are used to work.

They are under the pressure of permanent success, if they want to make a
living from their work. Look, such a hunter has to pick up, and to find at
all, a thousand meteorite pieces in the field, until once, lets say an
R-chondrite is among them, wherefrom in the end, after deducting all his
expenses, costs, taxes, will remain less, than the above mentioned scientist
has in a single month. For a stone, which costs a million++, if found and
extracted from Antarctica and is hundred times more rare than the fattest
brilliant in the crown jewels of England.

We simply have a structural crises in that system.
The public side has all in all revoked the symbiosis with the private
sector, which worked perfectly for almost two centuries
and that at a point of time, where the private sector brought almost per
year as many new finds, as before was found in a whole century, and where
the costs dropped to a minute fracture of all the centuries before.
Parallely also - without Antarctica - the "official" efforts to recover
meteorites were reduced almost to zero.

Unintelligibly that happened, when parallely planetology boomed and
planetary spaceflight had a renaissance.

That is research policy - the hunters and dealers have no influence on that
and can't be blamed for that. They made an immense advance performance,
now it's highest time, that the other side has to do its homework.

Well and some of the scientists react on that situation very irrationally.
See all those new restrictive meteorite laws.
Attempts, which lead to the opposite of that, what was originally intended.

And relatively new is, that some of the meteoricists have now the attitude,
that to pay for their objects of research would be an obscenity.

A totally singular attitude in the whole world of science and universities.

You can ask any scientist from any other science branch - there is not a
single one among them, who could understand that.

Especially not, as the sums necessary are relatively marginal compared to
the funds spend in neighbouring disciplines.
And especially not, if one shows them, that all in all the other way, to
generate those research objects, cost a multiple or in some cases failed.

Look, only for understanding.
We're making here fun about Bevan.
Australia. They wanted to protect their meteorites.
Well, they protected them so strongly, that no meteorites at all were found
anymore, compared to the hundred years before.

(Hehe, Reminds me to an antivirus-program I once installed, which was
advertised, to be the best in the world. And it worked perfect. The
firewalls were so good, that the internet access didn't work anymore. Of
course so I wouldn't catch any virus, the disadvantage was, that I couldn't
work anymore.
Well, unfortunately I'm no Australian meteoricist, cause then, I would
comfortably sitting for years staring on the screen, where nothing is going
on, wouldn't have to work, and would be paid for that...)

2-3 expedition were carried out, they were so expensive, that one could have
simply bought more interesting material or hundred times more meteorites as
resulted from these expeditions. Or a multiple of fully and perfectly
documented Australian meteorites, if one only would have allowed the private
professional hunters search there.

Still not our cup of tea - because I said, science costs. It's o.k.
But now they have the laws, that nobody is willing anymore to find a
meteorite for them and on the other hand, they either don't have the funds
or for whatever reason, they do no own expeditions.

For me and you and for many scientists, this would be a fully inacceptable
situation.

Solutions exist so many.
Either they care for getting funds, to make own expeditions.
Or they liberalize the laws of ownership, cultural blablabla,
And then meteorites will be found again like all the decades before, most
probably more, as in any other desert country too.

Or simplest and cheapest. If I would be a Bevan, I simply would hire a
Sadilenko, an Afanasjev or a Clary or a Haberer (to distribute the names
over the globe)

and then it would take less than 2 years until Australia would have its
first Martian or second lunaite and hundredweights of new OCs.
I bed a chest of champagne.


Yah, sinecure, benefice, ego....
...sorry, completely out of interest,

meteorite hunters and dealers are interested in results!


Best!
Martin


 


-----Urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Jason Utas [mailto:meteoritekid at gmail.com]
Gesendet: Dienstag, 19. Januar 2010 08:43
An: Martin Altmann; Meteorite-list
Betreff: Re: [meteorite-list] Pairing discussion/questions

Martin,
Sometimes I just can't believe the ways you'll skew things to justify
dealers' actions.

> Tell me examples for misrepresented coordinates from Oman!

I've just had some off-list conversations with *several* prominent
list-members, all of whom agreed that while not all Omani coordinates
are false (and most are probably real), some teams are supplying false
data.
That is generally accepted fact.

> Man, from the beginning on the Russians and the Germans in Oman
meticulously
> documented their finds. With coordinates, with in situ photos, with
> describing the properties of the surrounding ground.. some of them were
> examined and trained geologists from one of the most reputable meteorite
> institutes of the World.

Yeah, they did good work, which isn't to say that everyone is doing
the same thing today.

> Yah I remember, in the very early times, they didn't made public the
> coordinates of their planetaries. But only for a very short period.
> And in consequence hunters from many countries, including the only
official
> team there, found so many more stones of their early finds, in the
> strewnfields they had recovered and disclosed to everyone.

Right. They did that. People don't nowadays. If you haven't learned
that from chatting with dealers, I don't know what to tell you. You
should probably get out more.

> Make your homework, check the Dhofar and SaU numbers, the lunars and the
> Martians, who all found some and when.

Yeah, I know. Many of them are correct. Some aren't. You seem to
think that I'm saying that every Oman coordinate is a lie, and, to be
frank, I know that's far from the truth, and have said as much to
others in private emails.

> I don't allow you to discredit the incredibly important work, these true
> pioneers did for me, for science, for you and for all of us.

What they did is great, but there are a number of dealers going there
now who in some cases lie or withhold coordinates, especially for rare
finds.
I know this is true; it's a fact. Ask around.

> The only case I remember is the new Dhofar-Moon - there the finders seem
to
> be simply afraid to give more information, because of the Suisse-Omani
> terror of the recent years.

Maaaybe. But Oman's hardly giong to send police over to reclaim rocks
(as though the US would allow such a thing), and the coordinates that
I've seen that are known to be incorrect still place the finds within
the country.
So, no.

> What is a meteorite worth, for science, when it has no find data.
>
> Go and ask, what USA, what China, what Japan is spending all in all
> including costs for infrastructure and personnel to find meteorites in
> Antarctica. We are speaking of hundreds of millions of dollars.
> For meteorites, all having lost their fall data, because they were
> transported by ice movement.
> Seems, that they do have a certain value.

Yes, but for different reasons. Those finds tell us much more for a
number of reasons - namely that they've been kept in a fairly arid
environment, and have generally suffered little organic contamination.

And you have to see the real flaw in your argument - you're saying
that meteorites are important scientifically regardless of where they
fall. I agree with that.

But you're merely downplaying the importance of information such as
where they were found, etc, without even justifying it.
Just because they're important for what they contain doesn't mean that
their fall location and distribution isn't important as well -
especially for finding more of the rare stones, even *if,* as you seem
to suggest, the place where a meteorite falls is irrelevant.

> Every Moroccan a GPS...
> Make again your homework. How many tons were found in total in Oman, in
how
> many man-hours? 6 tons in 10 years, naturally most of them weathered
> ordinary chondrites (where you would pull a face, if you should pay even
> only 200$ a kilo, classified, well understood).

I'm not even sure at what you're getting at here. You seem to be
saying that find locations are irrelevant, it's common material, it
sells for too little money, and thus taking coordinates wouldn't be
worth it.

I disagree.

We have a hell of a lot of those apparently revolting meteorites boxed
away, waiting for a day when a lab might be more interested in working
on them. But you're getting sidetracked. This has nothing to do with
whether or not finds should be GPS'ed, etc. All you've told me is
that a one kilogram stone could buy a decent GPS unit.

> Make your homework. How many different meteorites do we have from
Antarctica
> after a third of a century hunting and spending billions of USD?
> 7000.
> And - naturally - most of them ordinary chondrites.

Your point?

> Alone with NWA we are in less than 9 years at number 6000.

So what you're saying is that it would take three times as long for
the meteorites to be recovered with adequate find data.
Ok, so:
1) It's possible.
2) Is there any reason not to take the time to do it right? This
would allow for the recording of thousands of strewnfields, which are
instead lost forever.

> And, do your homework, what do you find in the Bulletins?
> Incredibly disproportionately highly more scientifically interesting stuff
> than weathered OCs.
> The bulk in Sahara are like everywhere else on Earth the weathered OCs.
> Those aren't classified, because no scientist wants to work on such
material
> and no institute nor collector wants to have them.

Well, there are two more flaws in your reasoning here. Firstly, while
they may not be as interesting scientifically, strewnfield data could
still be gathered - if anything, I think this makes your point even
less valid. What they lack in pertinent chemical and structural data
doesn't change the fact that we could get additional information about
meteorite fall rates, and the density of finds in arid environments,
never mind actually understanding the pairing, which, with ordinary
chondrites, is now information that is simply lost forever.

Oh, and if no one wanted them, they'd be free. Good luck finding them
for under ~$100/kg, even for the "ugliest" stones.

> In the Bulletins you see from Sahara only the tip of the iceberg, the best
> of the best.

First-off, that's just not true. The majority of NWA's are still
ordinary chondrites. Yes there's a far disproportional number of
rarer meteorites, but OC's are still prevalent.

And again, this is irrelevant. Great, there are many rare meteorites.
 You're still losing practically all of the find data for each stone.
Maybe there's 100kg more of NWA 2737 out there, but we'll never know
because that information is now lost and the nomads who found it
weren't told it was a meteorite until years later.

> The people of Maghreb have to pick up just as well as any other hunters
> elsewhere too their hundred true meteorites until they hold a for you
boring
> eucrite in their hand.

And I've found over a hundred meteorites here in California and have
documented every single chondrite meticulously - and we've turned up a
few achondrites in the mix.
Thanks to the way we do things, we might be able to find more of them.
 Of course, what you're saying is that it would be better for us to
simply pick them up and keep moving, finding more, because science
would benefit less. Hell, we should probably just leave all of the
worthless chondrites we find on the ground because they're useless
shit.

That seems to be what you're getting at.

> Do you really think, that there only 10 or 20 clowns are stumbling through
> half a continent to collect meteorites and that would be NWA? Man - you
have
> not the slightest idea what for dimensions of time, distances and work it
> needs, that you get that rare stuff from Morocco delivered on your desk
for
> a pocket money.

And you seem to have no conception of the amount of scientific data
that is now LOST and will NEVER be retrieved.
Thanks to you, me, and all of the other people involved in this business.
You can try to justify it by saying that it would take longer to do it
well, but honestly...thirty more years in the desert wouldn't change
most meteorites much. It's a moot point.

> And they have no coordinates. Bravo.
> Any institute here, any scientist there, who is willing to pay 250.000$ a
> gram for a lunar? Anyone out there, who likes to pay 1500$ instead of 30$
> for an Acapulcoite? Anyone from ANSMET there - man, in that few years, we
> two found so many CKs and Rs like the Antarctic teams would need more than
a
> decade to find, and for all of them together we asked a price, just
> sufficient to pay the flight for one or two single scientists to
Antarctica
> and back.
> The flights only.

You're just saying the same thing again and again...and again. Yes, I
know that the meteorites found still have scientific value.
No one's debating that.
Well, you are.
But that's not my point. My point is that a vast amount of data *is*
being lost, and you've yet to say ANYTHING that contradicts that
statement.


> Yah strewnfields, weathering, science.. - do it, instead of complaining.

I do. Here. In California. We've found over a hundred and fifty
meteorites on a single lakebed that was "searched out," representing
at least six or seven distinct falls (and I'm talking about an area
that's less than a square mile).
We found an Acapulcoite on another lakebed where we were told by
seasoned hunters that there wasn't much left to find.
And we've found a few sites of our own to hunt, and have been going at
them just as thoroughly.

But...this is a cop out. You're not affirming whether or not what is
being done is right or wrong. You're just asking me what I'm doing to
make it better.

And there's really nothing I can do. I have school, work, and a life
here, and I'm sorry, but I can't leave it.
Even if I could, I'm one hunter. That's a pretty damn big desert.
I'd be leaving my life here to provide science with a mere drop of
information in an otherwise empty desert. The way business is being
conducted simply means that regardless of whether or not teams went to
hunt there, undocumented meteorites would still stream out of NWA in
numbers likely comparable to what they've been in past years.

But that doesn't mean that we as a community haven't simply erased a
vast amount of scientific knowledge that we *could* have preserved.

I'm not saying that buying NWA meteorites is wrong or that they're
worthless. I'm just saying that we as a collecting, dealing
community, have helped to contribute to a vast gap in scientific
knowledge that we could have preserved had we gone about things in the
correct way.

And there's really nothing you can say to argue with that.

> Where are the official teams in Sahara? I know of not a single official
> expedition there. Where are they? There are enough meteorites left there
to
> be discovered and to do all kind of field work on them.

Yeah, it's cheaper to rely on Moroccan labor to recover the stones for you.
I know.
It sucks.
It's economically not worthwhile to go and find them on your own when
you can buy them for $100/kg in Morocco while sipping tea in someone's
house.
And scientists are more content to study the rocks themselves, you
know that. With the vast influx of material coming in from NWA,
they've got enough on their plates already.
Which isn't to say that it wouldn't have been better for find
information to be received, but that's the price of convenience.
Those folks have Antarctica, and we have the NWA to plunder. They
spend their time hunting at the South Pole, and we take from NWA.

> Yah, they do have no coordinates.
> But for that, science and you get the stuff at a minute fraction of the
> costs of all the 200 years before and at a fraction of a fraction of a
> fraction if all these stones had to be found financed by public money with
> official expeditions. And you get such a broad choice, stones where 10, 15
> years nobody could even imagine, that they would exist at all.

It's not all about speed. You don't seem to understand that a
scientist could spend a lifetime working on a thin section of
Semarkona, analyzing individual grains and thus shedding light on the
early solar system. There's more material, NWA excluded, than all of
today's scientists could possibly exhaust in their lifetimes.
It would have been better if every stone were documented, etc. The
meteorites aren't going anywhere. And while we have, do, and will
continue to learn from these nameless stones, some of the knowledge we
could have gained is lost.

> Man, Jason, remember EUROMET?
> Check it out, they had annual expenses for personnel only, without that
> anyone even had set a foot over the doorstep of his bureau, of 8.5
millions
> ECU. ?ECU was the currency unit before EURO was introduced.
> Take additional inflation,
> They spent hence 20 millions of USD PER YEAR only for personnel, without
> devices, without equipment, without any expedition yet.
> Yaaabbayabbayabba - yes, they did also research, well understood.

BS. I did my own research.

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:jhQ3IDMLruEJ:www.mna.it/english/Publica
tions/TAP/TA_pdfs/Volume_01/TA_01_01_229_Mellini.pdf+euromet+meteorite&cd=1&
hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari

Yeah, it costs that much -- but that's the combined cost of running 50
laboratories and paying 220 scientists. That says NOTHING about how
much it costs to find a meteorite. Moot point.

> But what can you buy for 20 millions? Jason, there do not exist enough
> lunaites on Earth, that you could spend 20 millions!
> If you buy all Eucrites, all Howardites, all Diogenites found ever over
the
> whole planet and from all times (without of course the horribly expensive
> Antarctic finds) - you still will have left over a lot of that sum.
> Make a Bessey deal like in former times. 25$/kg for unclassified W3 OCs.
> But then you would have to give Dean a hint, wherefrom Dean should take
800
> tons of OCs, if the Catalogue lists only 700 tons of meteorites in history
> and on Earth and less than 40 tons are stones and the rest irons.

As said, moot point. You're looking at the cost of running
experiments, and, well, every expense of 220 scientists working in
state of the art laboratories. The physics lab I'm looking at working
in here has a budget of several million dollars, and it all goes into
materials and studies/testing. Either you don't understand how costly
it really is to study meteorites, you don't know how much it costs for
a flight to Morocco or Australia, or you're just spewing complete crap
in the hope that enough of it sticks to make me look wrong. I think I
know which of those is the truth.

> And - EUROMET was going in Sahara, yippieh, and they came back with
> absolutely empty hands. Wrong hunting area? I doubt. It was the
> Kem-Kem-region - exactly that region, where a little later the first
> hundredweights of meteorites were found by locals, marking the beginning
of
> NWA.

Ok, here are a few more problems with your reasoning.
1) Irrelevant. If they were in the right place and didn't find
anything, well, if you've ever hunted for meteorites, you would know
that you can spend a week in the right place finding nothing, and find
ten stones the next day.
2) What's to say they were in the right place.
3) You're looking at a bunch of scientists. It took us a while to
find our first meteorite as well.
4) *If* they were in the right place, hundreds of kilograms of
meteorites had already been removed.
That would probably make remaining pieces much harder to find,
especially since they would have had no way to know if they were in
the right place or not because, guess what -- no coordinates.

> And you dare to complain about missing coordinates and you are maundering
> about shabby tricks of greedy hunters and dealers.

Hey, I'm just as guilty. Just pointing out that things could have
been run better from a scientific point of view, and not a single word
you've yet said has contradicted that notion in any way.

> Welcome, spend some GPS-devices. I suggest you pay the first 1000 units.

It doesn't make sense for any single person to foot the cost, and you
know it. Ideally, five or ten years ago, some of the few dealers
dealing with Moroccans at the time could have sold or traded locals
GPS units for meteorites, and in turn, agreed to pay them a more for
stones with coordinates in the future.

But, as has been said, that's just not in dealers' interests.

> Gosh, you have really no idea. Please, 3/4 or more of all those persons,
> you'd call a dealer are doing it for fun and never sat a foot into Sahara,
> they buy their stones on shows or from photos.

Maybe. I know that two of the folks who contacted me off-list have
been to Oman, but that's another red herring. You don't need to go to
NWA to understand that it doesn't take that much work or money to
collect adequate find data, at least on top of the amount of time and
money it takes to find a meteorite in the first place. You take the
GPS and hit "mark waypoint" and take a piece of tape with a number
written on it and stick it to the stone. Not hard.
It would take a few hundred GPS units, though - at a cost of probably
$50k or so.
- A drop in the bucket when you look at the net worth of the
meteorites that have come out of NWA in the past decade.

> Wherefrom the heck shall they know, how much paired material is around?
> Especially if it takes often up to 2 years until a number is published in
> the Bulletin? Man, take a look to the numbers, sometimes it takes many
> years, until an additional stone surfaces. Don't you even know famous NWA
> 011 - there are now pairings close to the 5000er numbers. Yeeeeeears
> inbetween. Or NWA 722 up to Anoual and even later!!

Ok. It would take a few years. The data would still be there and not
lost. Yes. True.
And I think that would be better than no data at all.
You're really not much of a scientist, are you?

> And do me a favour and show me the multimillionaires, who made their
fortune
> with meteorites, no matter if they used shady tricks or not to betray you.
> I know only one, unfortunately a fictitious one: William Barriere from the
> Anti-dealer propaganda comic strips from Canada.

Never heard of him, but...again, you're just taking everything I said
to the absolute extreme.
No one made millions of dollars overnight, but many dealers exploited
the system to obtain hundreds of kilograms of undocumented stones
(myself included), picked out the rare material, and sold it to make a
profit.
If documentation were actually going on, and stones were coming out of
NWA, at, say, 1/10 the rate they did (there's no reason for such a
substantial decrease in rates, but let's suppose....), either prices
would have been ten times what they were or dealers would have made
less money.

That's simple math, and I really hope you understand this, because I
don't know how much more clear I can make it.

> Don't take my harshness too personally, had some bad days,
> But I think I can say, we all are soooo sick and tired from that hunter-
and
> dealer-bashing.

It's not hunter-dealer bashing. It's saying you, and I, and everyone
else screwed up from a scientific point of view.
And that's true. We lost information because we wanted results fast.
That's bad science.

> Man, they make the dirty work,
> that work, nobody else is willing to do or able to do, neither the public
> willing nor able to pay. Blood, sweat and tears. And they are horribly
> underpaid, seen the performance they deliver day by day and the prices
> having been paid the 200 years before the NWA-rush.

Well I'm glad to hear that you sympathize with them and are now
offering to pay them $1/g for every find they make - more for rare
material. Pay them well, Martin. They deserve it.

> The stats and the history prooves that all more than clearly.
> Get scientific, Jason.

All stats and history say is that we could have retrieved the data
that has now been lost if we'd stopped simply buying as meteorites as
possible for as low a price as possible in the hopes of finding rare
ones in the mix and selling those for a profit.

> They do it for science, they do it for the collectors, they do it for you
> and they do it for their enthusiasm, because they are crazy minds.

The Moroccans? They're not doing it for the science, they're doing it
for the money. And the collectors (myself included) are the people
with a bit of that to trade for a rock, so I guess they're out there
for me, too, yeah. But while a few of them may be interested in the
science of it,that's just a tad romantic. You might as well say that
Chinese coal-miners are down there in the mines because they want to
make sure that Los Angeles gets its power. And while that's
indirectly true, you're taking things a bit far.
Don't get me wrong - I know of several Moroccan dealers who are very
into the science of it, at least as much as the average list-member,
and maybe more. But...hell, many, if not most hunters in Europe and
the US aren't really hunting for the science of it either. Sure they
hope to find a rare stone, but it's not because they want to further
our knowledge of the solar system. They want to make money, and
generally, be recognized for their achievement. You know that's true.

> They delivered the bulk of all meteorites on Earth, the very recent years
in
> volumes and in a diversity, nobody could have imagined even only 10 years
> before,

Still more from Antarctica. Give it a year or so and you'll be right,
but that's not true as of right now.
I guess you might be right if you take into account common chondrites
sitting in boxes and bins that will likely never get classified, but
those are lost to science, so I don't see how you could reasonably
include them in your estimate.

> and they drove the prices underground seen the last 200 years, making
> meteorites available to each and every scientist and collector, and to
> everybody of good will, saving the public and science millions, millions
and
> millions of funds, which are urgently needed elsewhere in meteoritic
> research.

Which isn't to say that the same things wouldn't have happened if they
hadn't been taking coordinates, and the process had taken maybe ten,
twenty, fifty, or a hundred more years. It's not like the meteorites
would disappear - but the find information is *gone.*

> And therefore we all are more than fed up with this perseverative
> reproaches, which really ignorant people like so much to heap on the
> dealers, the hunters, the collectors.

I'm included in that lot, don't worry. I know my place.
But, as a scientist, I'm pointing out that we acted hastily and in so
doing, lost a hell of a lot of valuable information.
And that's true. And I've said it ten bloody times.
This is getting frustrating.

> When will they do their homework, when will they get mature...
> We're writing the year 2010.
> Yaha, Ward, Nininger, Zeitschel... yes, they were disregarded as wretches
> too. Haven't we learned since?

Well, I don't know. Ward and Nininger carefully noted where each of
their finds were made. Zeitschel, I don't know...but we're all really
to blame for perpetuating this continued loss of scientific
information.

> Jason, check it out, where would we be today without the private sector,
> which you blame, to act so unscientifically.
> What for and how many meteorites would we have in the institutes and
museums
> at all without them?

Fewer, but again. The meteorites wouldn't disappear, and they're a
limited resource. There's a finite amount of information there, and
we lost a substantial portion of it. Yes, fewer meteorites would be
available to science, but what I'm saying os that even if it took 100
more years, in the end, we would have more information. We've
destroyed a large part of it, and we can't get it back. Yep, saying
it again. Go figure.

> How many publications we would have without them?
> How many billions more would we have had to spend to get the same
material?
> What for meteorites at all would be there.

Probably just as many. It's not like we would have run out of things
to study in known meteorites, and over time, we would have more
information to add to what we have today. It would simply take
longer.

You don't seem to understand that there aren't an unlimited number of
meteorites in the world, and that when data is lost, it's lost for
good.

When you understand that, you will be able to comprehend what I'm saying.
Until then, there's really nothing I can say to you regarding this
issue that will make any sense.

> What would we do know without them about the solar system, about planetary
> bodies and their formation. About the origin of the sun, the age and the
> composition of the Earth. About the formation of planets around other
stars.
> About the possibility of life in space
> and finally about ourselves?

Maybe a little bit less, but in time we would *undoubtedly* come to
know more, because we wold ultimately have more meteorites to work
with and better distribution information, which might tell us other
things.
If we had taken longer to recover the meteorites, yes, we would have
fewer of them now, but...they're not going anywhere.

Whether I go to a lakebed to hunt tomorrow or ten years from now, that
meteorite will still be there. But if I go tomorrow and pick it up
without taking coordinates, in ten years, I won't know where to go to
find more, and no one will know where it was found. That's what I'm
saying.
And we could have done better as a community to keep that loss of
information from happening many thousands of times over. And you, and
I, and everyone else, didn't. That's all I'm saying. I'm not
pointing my finger at anyone - or at least if I am, it's pointed at
me, too. And I know my reasoning is pretty sound, and that you're
entire tirade was misdirect, misinformed, and generally misleading.
So...I'm content with leaving things here.


> Think well, Jason,
> and then be happy and grateful,
> that there are still persons willing to do that job.

I'd ask the same of you in the future. And perhaps you, as a dealer,
will pay those hard workers the money they deserve for the specimens
they bring you, since you're apparently underpaying them at the
moment.

Jason


>
Received on Tue 19 Jan 2010 12:41:52 PM PST