On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 07:33:50AM +0200, Knapp wrote:
> Agreed but they did say they were working on finding other ways. I
> think the hydrogen would not be that hard to come by but the
> platinum might be.  Thing is there might also be other ways that we
> humans have not yet found.

I think the interesting thing is that of all the organisms in Earth's
evolutionary history, only a few seem to use more than microscopic
amounts of Earth's minerals, and even then only a very limited
variety.

That's one reason why I don't fear a "grey goo" scenario where
self-replicating nanomachines eat everything: most stuff is just too
damn useless to be worth the difficulty of processing it.

- Tim