House Speak John Boehner this morning said he will develop a Plan B, which will include tax hikes on million-dollar earners but will not cut entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, according to The Wall Street Journal.
So just to mine, we have to develop (a) technologies to mine orders of magnitude more quickly than currently exists (b) with autonomous robots that (c) are capable of self-replication from scratch, that is, by smelting metals and fabricating the other materials necessary from the raw materials of Mercury.