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Strategies & Market Trends : Asia Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark Adams who wrote (5816)	8/24/1998 8:38:00 AM
From: Zeev Hed	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9980

Mark if you can show me (or some VC) that Terra Forming and Space colonies are endeavors bearing a fair ROI, these will be developed as well, but at this time these activities are not, IMHO, profit generating activities. What you are proposing is exactly what got Japan and Asia into trouble, some government body decided what "economic activity" is critical for the national "good" (or pride) and assets were thus diverted to these activities, in lieu of letting market forces decide which are the good economic returns activities. Why just terraforming and space colonies? It may be cheaper to engage in "deep sea" colonization, or an activity like "water less intensive agriculture", or "transmutation of abundant elements to important rare elements", or for that matter, how about "cold fusion" and "ambient superconductivity" and I could add to that another 20 activities that no VC will support at this time but "might" have a much greater payout in bettering the "human condition". The problem with each of these activities is that it is difficult to demonstrate a fair return on investment (namely positive cash flow competing with other activities). The beauty with the capitalistic system is that "champions" or call them individualists, "dreamers" or whatever, are willing to commit time energy and resources to such activities and persuade other investors that such would be profitable ventures. These activities are not dictated by few government bureaucrats but a multitudes of individuals, many of which fail in carrying out their dreams and bring down with them their investors. However, these failures are well distributed in time and place so as not to have an national economic impact. All that said, it does not means that governments do not have a responsibility to fund some pioneering work in such new fields, but that should be in the form of seed R&D type funding not a major national commitment. Zeev