I'm glad that not everybody is a pessimistic do nothing.
I had not been aware of this astrofuel - and I need to do more research on the subject, but if true, it would have a boosting effect on the American economy and be disastrous for the middle East. Their only export would become essentially almost valueless. Wow, as secretly gleeful as I might feel over oil barons being shaken to their foundations, it is the common man of the Middle East I feel sorry for. The oil Sheikhs already have their money locked away, its the poverty stricken masses unable to feed themselves I don't know what to do with. The whole MIddle East is a house of cards resting on one ace - the oil supply. When its gone... wow... bad news for democracy. Democracy rests on three foundations: Bread, Circuses, and Opportunity, of which anyone can pick two at a time.
Take away the bread, and if you can't afford the circuses, and if there is no opportunity, what you have is a desert.
While much is made of American dependence on foreign oil, what most people don't realize is that the countries selling us the oil are just as dependent on us buying the oil. If we are pulling down fuel from the moon at the ridiculously low cost of 7 bucks a barrel - my god, what would happen? Would it be inflation? Or recession? Both? To my knowledge, a sudden massive shift in a culture's primary energy source has never occurred before in human history. Even coal had centuries to develop, and oil had decades - to suddenly switch to this astrofuel would be... a paradigm unlike anything I can think of. I mean, we are talking Darwin, but in a compressed time span of a decade or less.
Sorry if I'm raving, I just can't think straight about this. The consequences would be enormous, the implications unpredictable. It'd be nice if there were no more rolling blackouts, of course.
CZAR