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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?"
Something might happen... or not.
They completely left out the notion of a Dyson Sphere in this horribly written "article".
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.
Get them down where? Why would you not leave them in orbit, build stuff there?
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
Find an ice asteroid.
Mine ice, separate into oxygen and hydrogen using solar.
Sell to space-faring nations as water, air and fuel.
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.
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.
Given that the vast majority of those naive people will never ever have any impact on space activities, I really don't see the point of the observation. Instead, you should be asking what people who actually plan to do anything in space have as their understanding of space.
Their basis is the laws of physics, which so far have shown to work just the same on Earth as in space. And they've done a lot of remarkable stuff in space that requires more than a ignorant human's understanding of space in order to perform.
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.
One of the major concerns that isn't mentioned is what happens to earth-bound mining companies and their markets when these trillions of dollars of minerals arrive?
Yep; Heinlein's Future History already covered this; DeBeers and their lobbying efforts made it illegal to import moon diamonds. The same will happen to gold and platinum from asteroids. Banned for public health reasons because of all the solar radiation that's contaminating them.
"We"?
Why must morons project their own ignorance to everyone? It's like an opposite Dunning-Kruger effect - they find something hard to comprehend, so they assume it is equally hard for everyone, and attribute any expression of knowledge or enthusiasm as naivete.
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
DeBeers developed some tests to distinguish between "genuine" carbon based diamonds and "fake" synthetic diamonds through the use of analysis of impurities.
They said they could. They haven't proven it. They have "requested" that serial numbers be laser etched on the diamonds and that certain dopants be used deliberately, but chemistry is chemistry, and a synthetic diamond, sans dopant, is just as much a diamond as one dug out of the ground. Same spectral lines. I call bullshit until DeBeers does a peer reviewed paper (they haven't).
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BMO