Keith’s note: On 8 June 2012 I got an email update from Planetary Resources. This portion got my attention:
“Here’s a quick summary of the highlights:
. Over 70 Million US television viewers
. 5 Billion Unique Monthly visitors with front page headlines on Huffington Post, Drudge Report, Twitter, CNN.com, Yahoo, Washington Post …”
Hmm. “5 Billion Unique Monthly visitors”. That’s more traffic than Google gets and represents more than half of the population on Earth. Wow.

Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member 🖖🏻

15 replies on “Planetary Resources Reaches More Than Half of Humanity”

  1. Five billion is indeed an amazing number of “unique” internet viewers, considering that as of December 2011, there were estimated to be only 2.27 billion humans using the internet in the world. http://www.internetworldsta…

  2. LOL.  It would cost them more money to serve those “5 billion unique visitors” than it would to actually build their first satellite. The marketing folks need an analytics refresher course.

  3. You gotta love that Diamandis. The man does nothing small. Anyone who hasn’t seen his “TED” talk should check it out-  One is reminded of the Unbridled Optimism of the folks that tamed the west in the 19th century. 

    You (maybe) can get to 5 billion by somehow counting every post, trackback, pingback, comment, headline, tweet, facebookie thing, etc. 

    Oh, and thanks to NASAWATCH, (and our few comments) it’s 5 billion and four.

    1. Maybe their counter went into an endless do-loop and the number has long since grown from 5 billion to 5 quintillion and rising fast.

  4. The five billion unique viewers simply includes the projected number of internet viewers from alien civilizations, those that have or will intercept Earth internet transmissions, from other planetary systems and galaxies.   The Planetary Resources guys don’t limit their analysis to Earth species, they think intergalactically!  

    1.  Ahem.  Vulcan Ambassador Chuck speaking.  This part of the galaxy alone has over one trillion sentient beings accessing the Galactic Internet.  Five billion of us looking at your planet’s beginning efforts at joining us at joining us is rather small.

  6. I just went to Google news, and searched for “planetary resources” (in quotes).  Not even “Meh”.

    I laud the intent, but I don’t get the claim.  (Who’s signed on the email?)

  7. Maybe they meant “million” instead of “billion”? A typo would be somewhat more understandable (and excusable) than miscounting by two or three orders of magnitude. But either way, it’s a goofy number.

  8. If they could do arithmetic, they wouldn’t think they could make money mining asteroids.

  9. Unique monthly visitors doesn’t mean people but IP addresses. Still 5B would still be to high .. must have been a typo for millions.

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