Slashdot Mirror
Asteroid Resources Could Make Science Fiction Dreams and Nightmares a Reality
MarkWhittington writes "With two private companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, proposing to set up asteroid mining, the prospect of accessing limitless wealth beyond the Earth has caused a bit of media speculation about what that could mean. The question arises, could asteroid resources be used to create the greatest dreams — and perhaps the worst nightmares — of science fiction?"
We tend to have a naive feeling that we understand the solar system, that it is really just like Earth, but with craters or whatever. It isn't, and we don't.
Something might happen... or not.
They completely left out the notion of a Dyson Sphere in this horribly written "article".
It's just minerals and metals. It'll be humans, not meteorites, creating anything from these resources. Stupid article, move along folks.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Now, I still think the idea of mining an asteroid is - well a long time off.
But, the reason for doing so would be that the incentive to mine an asteroid is insanely high - for instance, supplies on earth run low and the price is through the roof, many factors of what it is today.
Then you have the economic incentive to build a space ship and dig for that substance on another planet.
Much like deep sea drilling for oil. If oil is $5 a barrel, there isn't much incentive to build massive platforms to drill. At $100 a barrel, the incentive is there. Investment seeks the highest rates of returns.
If you found an asteroid that could provide every human 1000 pounds of platinum and could easily mine it - platinum isn't going to stick to $1000+ an oz, it would be insanely cheap.
Wealth based on what? Real estate, or other things that are both durable and widely used? Nope. Precious metals. But, what good is gold or platinum if everyone has a brick or two of it lying around? Some things will become more affordable (meaning the wealth of everyone will go up) because once-precious metals will find their way into products in ways that actually improve them, but overall not much will change even if we manage to start bringing home tons and tons of some metal that is only valued because it's rare.
Sure there are lots of resources just floating around out there.
Please explain a safe way to get them down here in any sort of quantity and usable form.
**footfall**
I seriously doubt even a solid gold asteroid would justify the costs to go into space, mine it, and return said gold to earth--even if it were a relatively close solid gold asteroid. And since we don't even have the technology to move an asteroid yet (just some "Well it's possible" bullshit speculation), there is no point in even considering that.
In short, anyone investing in these asteroid mining companies is basically either trying to grab some patents or just throwing their money into the equivalent of buying swampland in Florida. You'd probably be better off investing with Bernie Madoff.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Death Star here we come!
They completely left out the notion of a Dyson Sphere
I wonder if that's because the target audience might confuse it with a brand of vacuum cleaner.
Since when does a bloody Yahoo News item make it onto Slashdot. Holy crow.
And limitless resources does not equal limitless wealth. Getting refinery-type infrastructure out of Earth's gravity well would be prohibitive, to say the least.
... but I've duly made a mental note to never accept a mission to fix the communication gear on one of their mining ships after it suddenly stops all transmissions with Earth... I've already got enough "training" on that subject to know that things never turn out well.
Only heads won't explode quite like that from sudden decompression.
Someone returning so much of a valuable mineral or metal that it completely destabilizes the economy.
Someone using say a mass driver to return a large asteroid to Earth orbit, screwing up their calculations and either disrupting satellites or worse crashing it into the planet.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
My first thought is "if we can mine asteroids and bring the materials into close orbit, then the same tech can be applied to meteoritic bombardment."
Or, in other words, "clean" WMDs. No radiation, city-scaled to planet-wide destruction.
Giving the power that wiped out the dinosaurs to a few dozen people chosen on their ability to look good on a photo (or, worse, by who their parents were) does not strike me as reassuring.
Oh well, we survived that far. I suppose we can cohabit long enough to create outworld colonies, and this is a necessary step towards interstellar travel.
TFA manages to miss reality with almost every sentence, but somehow has just enough truth behind it to provoke useful conversation.
NO we are not going to mine asteroids with the intention of bringing resources back down here in significant quantities. Not anytime soon anyway.
ALTHOUGH if an asteroid really is worth 20trillion as stated in TFA (doubtful) then maybe it would be worth it.
YES, asteroid resources could and probably will be used to build spacecraft and maybe habitats but
NO, NASA are not working on warp drive and interstellar travel is not just around the corner.
NO, nobody is going to build a moon-sized planet-killing Death Star. That's fucking stupid in more ways that I care to enumerate but
YES, once asteroid-moving becomes established tech in the realm of private companies / individuals then the chances of somebody accidentally or deliberately dropping a big rock on a city goes up. That is something to be concerned about.
TFA fail.
This is not a news story. I come to /. for information an halfway intelligent discussion and after reading that article I had fewer brain cells than when I started. samzenpus shame on you...
"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions."
Asteroid miners to clash with android Thatcher
UNIONISED asteroid miners will battle a robotic version of Mrs Thatcher in the 22nd century, it has been claimed.
Professor Henry Brubaker said: “As entrepreneurs explore the possibilities of space rock mining, they are simultaneously aware that one day the IUM – Intergalactic Union of Mineworkers – may become a problem.
“Mrs Thatcher’s brain will be removed from her body and cryogenically frozen until the technology exists to slot it into an android body, like a witchier version of the thing from Metropolis but with massive steel hair.
“Then she will be blasted into space to battle the socialist cyborg leader Scarg-1LL.”
Isn't all of this useless without a good energy source? Rockets and mining operations don't run on wishful thinking.
NASA's Near Earth Object Program's website, quoting the 1990s-era book "Mining the Sky," suggests that there is in the asteroid belt alone enough wealth to provide everyone on Earth $100 billion.
Except that, you know, if gold were as abundent as steel it would also be $0.06/pound scrap value so that's not actually true. So you go bring back a bunch of iridium, it's not worth thousands of dollars per pound anymore either. One asteroid alone could hold enough of a rare material to up the worlwide supply by 10x or 100x or who knows. That would single handedly crash the market before the company could even get a chance to sell it. So then they'd have to be a big, evil monopoly and artificially slow down the flow of supply like oil or Nintnedo Wiis so the price stays high and everyone hates that.
The economics (or lack thereof) of putting stuff into orbit are well known.
What about the cost of bringing large amounts of cheap, heavy material back DOWN the gravity well?
I have a feeling that it won't be economical enough to do for something like thousands (or millions) of tons of pig iron.
You would need 2,333 $30,000,000,000,000 asteroids to afford an $850,000,000,000,000,000 Death Star.
Christ. Think once in awhile people! >:-(
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Don't bother to RTFA. I did it for you. Complete waste of time. Some no-name blogger, who just rambles on for a few paragraphs about making trillions of dollars from asteroid mining, to get hits on his ads. He's had other equally useless articles linked here.
So guess who invested in one of the major companies. Microsoft and Google high ranking billionaire personnelle, James Cameron, and Ross Perot Jr. That's quite the mix, lol. All they need is a rapper and Bonno and they've basically got the justice league of weird billionaires investing in crazy stuff.
And for god's sake, if you do it, patch that hole!
I always wondered if there are alloys that could be made in microgravity that simply are not feasable to produce on earth due to the weight and density differences of the source metals.
Maybe that should be the first focus, what materials can be made in space that cannot be made on Earth, which asteroid supplies the most of said materials.
How about letting dumbass bloggers and media say whatever they need to in order to get VC's and other money repositories sniffing around. Let the money get interested and let the tech get developed. Think about all the goodies that came out of the Space Race, back when the US actually had a fuck to give about research and exploration, even if it was only to beat those goddamn Ruskies.
I don't even need to RTFA. I've been following this concept for 30 years before these companies finally decided to talk about it. The Trillions of dollars of materials are not worth Trillions of dollars on Earth... this is their value in orbit based on present day LEO launch values, which run upwards of $1K/lb.
While it is possible that there may someday be a market on the Earth from some space produced material... I'll lay odds that it will be in the form of some manufactured good/material produced in Zero G, and impossible to make on Earth. It will not be raw materials.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
This is so clearly not about getting richer, at least not in the short term and not via asteroid mining.
Somebody out there has some sort of a vision and money to invest in it, and this is their first step.
Btw, what a waste of space that "article" is.
My question is why are they focusing on M-Type instead of C-Type asteroids?
Sure metal is a useful building material, but the world's energy demand is far outstripping the supply.
Bringing back a couple of carbonaceous asteroids would very likely satisfy most of our global energy requirements for the foreseeable future.
Why not just change the asteroid's trajectory and send it straight down to Earth? It'd be easier to get the materials on Earth and the impact would likely spread it out and make it easier to gather. What could go wrong?
"The article suggests that the first real-life model of the starship Enterprise might cost somewhere in the range of $1 trillion, an immense amount now, but pocket change in a world where asteroid mining is taking place and the solar system is being economically developed and settled."
$1 trillions is "an immense amount now"? Tell that to Obama. We could own 5 Enterprises already with the new debt he's created. What's another trillion more if it means we can fly to other solar systems?
... I'll have to dig up my old copy of GDW's Triplanetary to help with navigation. Gimme a military Corsair and I'll overload an extra hex to my vector and mine those asteroids before anyone.
No.
the prospect of accessing limitless wealth beyond the Earth has caused a bit of media speculation
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The space mining buzzing is increasing lately. "Everyone on Earth would be a billionaire if we use the resources in the asteroid belt" claims R. Branson.
Well Richard, are you going to tell me that if we assimilate the resources the result won't be a handful of gazzilionares that will order planets at Magratea and the rest of us would slave it "Blade runner style". You wanna tell me that magically, incredibly our socioeconomic system will disappear overnight? Provided that by definition the people who can change the system are the greatest benefactors of it, so why will they want to change it?
A billion dollars will be pocket change? How much of it will "trickle down" to my "middle class, ever decreasing buying power because of financial frauds by greedy people" pocket, Richard? It does not matter at all how much resources we can lay our hands on. We will grow, expand, waste them even more recklessly as we do now and eventually finish them off....while all the evils of the socioeconomic system will be with us all the time. Don't fool yourself Richard. Don't try to fool me too!!
But you know, Richard, actually your lie is the way to go from purely egoistic, survival point of view. If we want to make it to the Star Trek era [in one piece] we have to change and I don't mean Obama's change here. I mean paradigm change. I mean the simplest idea of all time - limited growth in an practically infinite Universe. Everyone has their human needs fulfilled. That's just the starting point.
All the above is why I stopped being excited about technology news whatsoever. We made an engine that uses half the fuel? Well, we will just buy twice as many engines because they will be cheaper and besides the whole fraking world including politics, business and religion (but not art and science mind you) constantly, relentlessly screams "more people, more money, only infinite growth is possible, if we stop wasting ever more the economy will collapse, the world would burn and we will be back to the caves, we need more growth, more children or our pensions will be gone, we need more believers in the true faith, we need more, more, more, more, more.....).
Our civilization has no redundancy, no back-up, no long-term planning at all. It is the sloppiest piece of engineering of all time.....no decent geek would ever dream of putting his/her signature on such a piece of crap! And we all live by it, die by it, are run by it! It's horrifying that we first waste the most accessible and the least replaceable resources. That is the way of our system; nothing in it that contradicts this behavior survives. We are re-active not pro-active. Our leaders never lead, they follow, adapt and mimicry.
I will finish this rant by respectfully altering the last sentence from Richard Feinman's "addendum" to the NASA report about the Challenger disaster:
"For a successful civilization reality must take precedence over politics, business and religion *, for Nature cannot be fooled"
* politics, business and religion all operate without any regard of reality [they are all ideologies] and are therefore in the form they are, highly dangerous for the survival of Homo Sapiens
The space mining buzzing is increasing lately. "Everyone on Earth would be a billionaire if we use the resources in the asteroid belt" claims R. Branson.
Well Richard, are you going to tell me that if we assimilate the resources the result won't be a handful of gazzilionares that will order planets at Magratea and the rest of us would slave it "Blade runner style". You wanna tell me that magically, incredibly our socioeconomic system will disappear overnight? Provided that by definition the people who can change the system are the greatest benefactors of it, so why will they want to change it?
A billion dollars will be pocket change? How much of it will "trickle down" to my "middle class, ever decreasing buying power because of financial frauds by greedy people" pocket, Richard? It does not matter at all how much resources we can lay our hands on. We will grow, expand, waste them even more recklessly as we do now and eventually finish them off....while all the evils of the socioeconomic system will be with us all the time. Don't fool yourself Richard. Don't try to fool me too!!
But you know, Richard, actually your lie is the way to go from purely egoistic, survival point of view. If we want to make it to the Star Trek era [in one piece] we have to change and I don't mean Obama's change here. I mean paradigm change. I mean the simplest idea of all time - limited growth in an practically infinite Universe. Everyone has their human needs fulfilled. That's just the starting point.
All the above is why I stopped being excited about technology news whatsoever. We made an engine that uses half the fuel? Well, we will just buy twice as many engines because they will be cheaper and besides the whole fraking world including politics, business and religion (but not art and science mind you) constantly, relentlessly screams "more people, more money, only infinite growth is possible, if we stop wasting ever more the economy will collapse, the world would burn and we will be back to the caves, we need more growth, more children or our pensions will be gone, we need more believers in the true faith, we need more, more, more, more, more.....).
Our civilization has no redundancy, no back-up, no long-term planning at all. It is the sloppiest piece of engineering of all time.....no decent geek would ever dream of putting his/her signature on such a piece of crap! And we all live by it, die by it, are run by it! It's horrifying that we first waste the most accessible and the least replaceable resources. That is the way of our system; nothing in it that contradicts this behavior survives. We are re-active not pro-active. Our leaders never lead, they follow, adapt and mimicry.
I will finish this rant by respectfully altering the last sentence from Richard Feinman's "addendum" to the NASA report about the Challenger disaster:
"For a successful civilization reality must take precedence over politics, business and religion *, for Nature cannot be fooled"
* politics, business and religion all operate without any regard of reality [they are all ideologies] and are therefore in the form they are, highly dangerous for the
P.S> I could not post first time for some reason. If the post still appears double, I apologize
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. :-)
It is so sad. It is no wonder we can't get anywhere and this thread has been a great example why. For every we can do it comment there are 10-20 we can't comments. On what is supposed to be a tech mecca, too.
Minerals like gold which have useful, functional purposes might finally drop to reasonable levels so we can use them more in industry rather than governments, corporations and individuals hoarding them for monetary value.
My worst sci-fi nightmare is opening a space portal to hell that causes my eyes to burst and my intestines to slowly creep out of my mouth. Usually mining for resources doesn't cause that.
Are metals found on asteroids likely to be bound up as oxides? Or in reduced (pure metallic) form?
If in the former case; well, it's simply a matter of focusing sunlight on it through a reflector, to melt it down in an anerobic environment. . . (gee, where would one find an anerobic environment in space - I wonder?) The only problem to worry about is dealing with the outgassing.
In the latter case - - then yay! no refining! But then, we'll probably have issues finding enough oxygen to survive in space long-term.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
no long-term planning either. Call it bottom-up design, self-organize, whatever, the fact is that how Nature does things and it works.
If another engine (CH4/LOX f.e.) gets a piggyback on an ion drive to a suitable frozen asteroid just beyond the snow line, fuel can then be made in situ for it. That should provide orders of magnitude more specific thrust to get to lunar orbit or an L5 postion. A solar sail type technology would provide the shade so it does not boil off while approaching. A gas station in our sky. Just my 2 drachmas.
As I understand it, 'Veins' of material don't occur naturally in an asteroid.
On Earth at least (with the exception of Iron), veins are created because hot water/steam under great pressure dissolves minerals, then as it goes up through the crust, the various metals precipitate out as the water becomes less superheated - the veins result because the exact temperature at which Silver starts being deposited along the fissure is different from Gold, Nickel, or Lead etcetera.
Iron on the other hand precipitated out of the oceans during the oxygen catastrophe when oxygen bound with iron and fell to the seafloor.
Neither of these processes is going to happen on an asteroid?
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media