ProfessorPeregrine
You are not considering the part where we can’t use relevant testimony or documents to prove that what the President does is illegal in the first place. The President can just say whatever illegal things they did were official acts, and all the evidence that might prove otherwise is off-limits. It relies on other people in the administration to not follow the illegal order, but of course that is a weak protection and the President can fire them or do something illegal to them without consequence too.
Dhalgren by Samuel Delaney is exactly what you are looking for.
I’m not sure if it would be helpful for your project, but you might be interested in the concept of the grammar of graphics (https://towardsdatascience.com/a-comprehensive-guide-to-the-grammar-of-graphics-for-effective-visualization-of-multi-dimensional-1f92b4ed4149).
I use a version of this in R as implemented in ggplot2. What is nice about it is that you can use standard text descriptions to build an arbitrary graph.
I had this posted over my when I was at engineering college!
I think I’m saying that mining on asteroids will probably never be profitable or realistic (with a possible exception of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen CHON once people are living on orbit). Mining on other planets might require understanding different geology and maybe different refining technology. Anything mined on a planet will likely stay there. But there just won’t be any ores on asteroids because they never had a chance to differentiate into higher and lower concentrations of various useful metals.
Metallurgical engineer here. One thing I never see talked about on this topic is how astreoids don’t have nearly the mechanisms for concentrating matals into ores like planetary bodies do.
So while there may be a higher proportion of, say, iridium on an asteroid than the average of Earth, it is pretty homogenous. You would have to refine the whole thing to get a little bit of iridium. On Earth, it may be more rare on average, but Earth also concentrates metals into ores via heat, gravity and water action so that you can mine a small area to get what your want economically.
Metal meteoroids are mostly iron, which is cheap on Earth and of little use in space. Aluminum, which is useful in space, is one of the most common elements on Earth and even higher on the Moon, but it’s only economically mined in tropical soil that had ages of water erosion. Titanium, different process but similar story.
Given the economics of getting to where you want to mine, mining a non-concentrated rock, and then transporting it back to Earth’s for sale I just didn’t see any path for mining asteroids.
Once there’s is an established human presence in space, there might be a reason to mine organics (CHON) but that is not now and not what people think of when they tout asteroid mining.
