The March of Technology

[TheMightyEthan]

In middle school one of my friends and I planned to start an asteroid mining company as adults. Doesn't seem to be panning out.

[Yantelope V2]

"The key point is that their plan is not to simply mine precious metals and make millions or billions of dollars– though that’s a long-range goal. If that were the only goal, it would cost too much, be too difficult, and probably not be attainable."

 

“The investors aren’t making decisions based on a business plan or a return on investment,” he told me. “They’re basing their decisions on our vision.”

 

Sounds like quite a bit of daydreaming to me. Are there asteroids made of gold up there? I mean, how much of an asteroid is actually precious metal?

[deanb]

"The key point is that their plan is not to simply mine precious metals and make millions or billions of dollars– though that’s a long-range goal. If that were the only goal, it would cost too much, be too difficult, and probably not be attainable."

 

“The investors aren’t making decisions based on a business plan or a return on investment,” he told me. “They’re basing their decisions on our vision.”

 

Sounds like quite a bit of daydreaming to me. Are there asteroids made of gold up there? I mean, how much of an asteroid is actually precious metal?

 

A fair chunk. Where do you think precious metals come from?

 

Also this is obviously something with rather long-term goals. Which is nice to see, most things these days are made with such short-term goals in mind. If you're not making your money back in a few years what's the point? It's something that needs to be done, we don't have much on earth so we're gonna have to start exploiting the solar systems resources, may as well start now.

[Yantelope V2]

Really? From what I'm reading online the vast majority of asteroids are carbon mostly with some being silicate and a small % being metal in nature. Wouldn't you have to get a rather large amount of a quite rare material for this to make any sense?

 

Also, technology gets better so it's not always a good idea to just start now. We have resources we need now and when we need the resources from space there's a pretty good chance that technology will make it easier and cheaper to get those resources so it's actually probably wasteful to start now.

[fuchikoma]

What I see is a pretense for continued scientific space exploration and tech development. If someone wants to foot the bill for that... awesome!

[deanb]

Really? From what I'm reading online the vast majority of asteroids are carbon mostly with some being silicate and a small % being metal in nature. Wouldn't you have to get a rather large amount of a quite rare material for this to make any sense?

 

Also, technology gets better so it's not always a good idea to just start now. We have resources we need now and when we need the resources from space there's a pretty good chance that technology will make it easier and cheaper to get those resources so it's actually probably wasteful to start now.

Well yes the vast majority will be hydrogen and carbon based because that's what a lot of the universe is made of. There's more than there is on earth. So we can either wait for another meteorites with precious metals to slam into earth and mine it from there, a process that'd take many millions of years to get any noticeable increase, or go and get the asteroids/moon directly. There's more than a million decent sized asteroids in the Asteroid belt, so certainly worth going n digging through em, even if only 0.1% are precious metals that's still several thousand kilometre+ sized asteroids of platinum and such. Platinum is exceedingly rare yet also extremely useful for industrial qualities so it would be worth it to go grab some. Even ignoring precious metals it'd be worth it just for helium and it's isotopes(which earth also lacks yet is useful on an industrial scale).

 

As for it being worth it to start now, why hold off until we're suddenly "oh shit, we ran out"? (Especially since we probably wouldn't be able to work on the required tech once we run out of helium). The technology we have when we need to go strip mining in space would still be at current level if no one was to be investing in R&D beforehand. Damn trying to think of the wording: Basically technology for the mining of asteroids doesn't magically advance just because it's 10-20 years later, but because a bunch of billionaires (be it private of government) funded investment in the R&D of strip-mining space ships over the 10-20 years.

Charles Babbage worked a prototype computer in mid-19th century, but because it was considered to expensive to produce it was never finished. It took another century until computers cropped up again, now with a need caused by war, and they weren't much improved in that time span compared to what happened from Colossus to the modern smartphone in the span of 60 years. "Build it and they will come". If they just sit on their thumbs the tech won't magically appear so they need to do it, if they can do it now then that progresses things sooner.

[Yantelope V2]

Well, to put it another way it's like saying 300 years ago, we have some iron here and some iron in China, lets go ahead and go get that iron from China because we're going to have to get it eventually. Why not just use the iron we have here now and go get the iron from china later? If we had gotten that Iron from China before we had invented flight and tried to bring it back it would be quite more expensive than in today's modern age.

[deanb]

There's fuck tons of iron though, you'd have to try really really really really fucking hard to run out of iron. And before flight we had being shipping/caravanning precious metals around anyway for millennia. Your analogy stinks

 

Thing is if you wait until we've ran out of the Earths existing resources you hit two problems:

- You've now ran out the resources. So for the next few decades where you scramble about building your ships the earth will be totally lacking in platinum, helium, etc.

- You've now got to go back to the drawing board anyway because you need to learn how to make a space ship without using helium and platinum in the design, further setting back efforts.

 

But at least you have a bunch more scientists since with all their machines and fusion reactors n all that no longer working they can help you out.

 

We're already running out of these materials, and they're also not exactly easy to extract so it make sense to strike while the iron is hot. These people have the vision, the skills and the funding to do it. It's a pretty crummy attitude to just suggest sitting on our thumbs until it suddenly becomes a pressing urgent matter. Why wash the dishes now when you can just wait until the house is condemned?

[fuchikoma]

Basically it sounds to me like the investors generally aren't counting on any mining-related returns for this - and realistically, the project will probably fail before they reach that stage anyway (because long expensive projects are ill-fated...) However, so many useful modern technologies came out of the NASA space program - uniquely ambitious plans like that require novel, original ideas and world-class R&D to pull off. It could still be hugely worthwhile to set a plan like this in motion. It's also entirely possible these investors could see some returns on patents generated and similar things. They could come up with some kind of high efficiency thrusters, low-power CPUs, lightweight super materials, more efficient means to mine ores on Earth, and so on.

[Yantelope V2]

There's fuck tons of iron though, you'd have to try really really really really fucking hard to run out of iron. And before flight we had being shipping/caravanning precious metals around anyway for millennia. Your analogy stinks

 

Unless this is just a joke you have a knack for completely missing the point.

[deanb]

There's fuck tons of iron though, you'd have to try really really really really fucking hard to run out of iron. And before flight we had being shipping/caravanning precious metals around anyway for millennia. Your analogy stinks

Unless this is just a joke you have a knack for completely missing the point.

I guess I must have missed the point in suggesting running out of the worlds most abundant metal as an analogy with earths rarest metal, while also suggesting sending it about by plane as being cheaper than transporting it by boat, a technology that has been around for millennia. I maybe didn't miss the point so much as your comment didn't really have one.

[TheMightyEthan]

The point was that you don't go far away to get it when you have a local source, regardless of what "it" is.

[Thursday Next]

If that was the case, then America wouldn't be getting all its oil from the middle east.

 

If the moon is more plentiful and easier to mine, then it may well be worth the trip. Getting set up is the issue, once you're there you can tear shit up and no one can write to their local council to stop you.

 

For a more gamey analogy, when playing an RTS you sometimes need to stretch your resources pretty thin in order to set up mines on all available (sometimes pretty distant) mineral deposits. It means "wasting" a lot of resources on things you don't need like relay points to get resources back to your base, but the upshot is that you can more quickly develop the stuff you do need.

[Luftwaffles]

If that was the case, then America wouldn't be getting all its oil from the middle east.

 

Actually, America gets most of our oil from Canada and Mexico. We do get a lot from the Middle East, but most comes from right over either border.

[Thursday Next]

Point being there is a lot within US borders that it doesn't use.

[TheMightyEthan]

Fine, how about "you don't go far away to get something when there's a more easily accessible local source"?

[Thursday Next]

As I understand it the US would rather use up everyone else's oil first. Then refuse to let anyone have their own later.

 

If the ease of mining post set up is beneficial enough and resources plentiful enough, it might be worth the (admittedly huge) initial effort.

[TheMightyEthan]

According to Wikipedia we produce about 7 million barrels of oil each day and import another 12 million, for total consumption of 19 million barrels per day (that's fucking mind boggling... though I just checked and a single supertanker can carry 2 million barrels, so that's not all that many tankers, not even counting pipelines). The oil that we aren't working is because at current prices it's not economically viable to work it, not because we want to hoard it (though we do have the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but that only holds 36 days' worth of oil, not exactly a long term fallback).

 

*Edit* - Just saw in that same article I linked that maximum draw from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is 4.4 million barrels a day, so it can only replace about 1/3 of our daily imports. Though it does mean that even though it only has 36 days' worth of our total consumption, it would actually take 158 days to completely drain it. Still not a long term solution, it's intended more as a supplement for temporary supply disruptions.

Edited April 25, 2012 by TheMightyEthan

[deanb]

See I reckon if those asteroids had oil on them no one would have any objections to going off n throwing a few billion into going n mining them. (Though equivalent weight helium and platinum n that lot are probably worth more)

 

 

The point was that you don't go far away to get it when you have a local source, regardless of what "it" is.

Thing is, as I've mentioned several times already, these are some of the rarest elements on the planet. Yes we have a local source, for now, but we won't have it for long. Kinda like that strategic reserve you mentioned. Yeah it's there, but there's not a chance in hell you'll want to have to rely on it full term. But in space they're relatively abundant, floating around on handy lumps of rock that you can mine without any complaints. Going "well we've got it now, so why worry?", "Why do today what you can put off til tomorrow?" n all that is just short-term thinking.

[TheMightyEthan]

Sorry, I was just trying to help clarify what Yant's point was, I myself am all in favor of any kind of space development.

[MasterDex]

Sorry, I was just trying to help clarify what Yant's point was, I myself am all in favor of any kind of space development.

 

Me too! So long as it doesn't involve colonies and gundanium - that never works out.

 

On a more serious note, I'm right behind Dean. Waiting until we're really squeezed for the resources before making the leap to space mining wouldn't be a very good idea. Even if the project was able to acquire unfettered supplies of any rare materials they needed, there'd be such tight time constraints to make it possible that the chances of actually achieving a viable space mining program would be slim at best.

[deanb]

http://www.txchnologist.com/2012/implanted-user-interfaces-ive-got-you-under-my-skin

 

sub-dermal implants. Not sure I'd do it tbh.

[deanb]

The "changing track" things is kinda neat, though the "training kids to eat food" is a bit..weird(also I swear that's water). In other news: I didn't know Disney had R&D of this type.

[deanb]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67H1eZBHiDQ

So this was invented while trying to make a lining for oil pipelines and as anti-ice coating.

[fuchikoma]

Huzzah!

I hope it doesn't cause cancer, birth defects, hormonal disruption, implosion, gravitational irregularity, singing off key, or AOL diskettes.