Sam Viknyansky

This calls into question not only the risks and benefits of asteroid mining (resources used to reach asteroid, costs, etc), but also future prospects beyond asteroids. Isaac Aasimov wrote a short story about a team of Martian space miners who brought a resource more precious than water to their planet; water. They reached a comet, broke it apart, and prepared to take it back. Using thrusters and clamps, they "rode" the captured chunks of comet back. While this seems outlandish, who had a claim to said comet? When we mine here one Earth, we do so under local, national, and international regulations. In space, there is no government, so we would need a set of guidelines and limitations as to who can mine what, in what quantitiy, etc. Capitalism and entrepreneurship are well and good, but if the need for water becomes great in the age of colonization, who gets to say whose comet/asteroid that is? While we can engineer the means of getting the resources, we shouldn't forget about sustainability of our planet, our solar system, and our future generations.

The base tenent of chemistry and science is "Structure fits function", as you explained. Different amino acids have different functional groups in the "R" portion, which allow various interactions among nearby and faraway amino acids in the polypeptide chain. For example, insoluble hydrophobic amino acids will attract one another and seek the inner portion of an aqueous protein, while soluble hydrophilic ones will face the exterior. One special case is that of the amino acid cysteine: which has an "SH" group that can form strong "disulfide bridges", securing a rigid protein structure. Nature knew that disulfide bonds are very strong, so when amino acids were first forming molecules and this combination worked, she stuck with it.