You can keep prices high only when you don't sell much. But if you don't sell much, you will never recover the capital expense of retrieving the asteroid.
By the time we need that much stuff we'll probably be ready to set up processing onsite in the asteroid belt instead of moving something so huge
What is this "need" that you speak of ? There's nothing in space that would be worth the insane expense of setting up an industry in the asteroid belt.
Suppose you sold your $10 quadrillion asteroid to De Beers, who would then slowly trickle it to the market. How much do you think they'll pay you for it ? That's how much it's worth.
Makes sense to me. I can see where someone would prefer to suffer 4 years of Trump and hope to change the DNC for the future, rather than support the status quo.
The energy required to melt 4 million square kilometers of ice depends on the thickness. Let's assume an average thickness of 2 meters, and 350 kilojoule to melt 1 liter of ice. That's 2800 exajoule total energy required.
Of course, there's no magnifying glass concentrating all that energy on the pole, but in the last 30 years, we've added 170000 exajoules of additional heat to the oceans. Just 1.6% of that additional energy is enough to melt 4 million square kilometers of ice.
And even if you are willing to be considerate and bike to work instead of taking the car, your colleague will just reap the benefits of the lower gas prices and drive even more.
Another problem with renewables (at least where I live) is home heating and cooking. Right now I have about 8kW electric power going into my house, but I have a 25 kW natural gas powered furnace, and another 8 kW natural gas powered stove. To replace everything by electric, I would need 40kW electric hookup, or about 5 times as much. There's no way the current grid can handle that, so basically all the streets in my city would have to be ripped up and upgraded. To make things worse, demand for heating goes up sharply in the winter, when available sun goes down sharply.
None of these things are impossible to solve, but it will be very time consuming and costly, and people will vote to move the expenses forward.
Solar is great, but there's no feasible short term plan to replace transportation fuels. Not only do you need a huge increase in solar generation, but you also need to replace the 1 billion motor vehicles in the world, part of which are heavy trucks for which no suitable electric replacement exists yet. Just add up how much lithium we need for the batteries, and compare that to total world production.
Frozen sea water has lower salinity than the water itself. Some of the salt is pushed out of the freezing water layer as it crystallizes. Also, the ice is partially made from snow collecting on it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm impressed that you knew the gender of the PI without looking.
couldn't we simply install a sort of catapult on the asteroid to send big chunk in a trajectory that'll eventually reach earth?
No, it would just sling around the Earth and stay in an elongated orbit. Or it would crash to the Earth's surface and be scattered as fine dust.
But.. but ... these are *elite* scientists.
It's even easier to collect it from the surface. After all, iron is the 4th most abundant element in the Earth's crust.
Let's see you build an apple pie and an iPhone from scratch using only the materials you find on the asteroid.
Dragging an industry to an asteroid isn't any cheaper, I'm afraid. Much cheaper to find the materials here on Earth and do the processing here.
Put a half dozen people in an old submarine, and drop it on the bottom of a lake without any fuel.
Spending 8 months in a dome in Hawaii is not "exactly" like life on Mars, is it ?
You can keep prices high only when you don't sell much. But if you don't sell much, you will never recover the capital expense of retrieving the asteroid.
By the time we need that much stuff we'll probably be ready to set up processing onsite in the asteroid belt instead of moving something so huge
What is this "need" that you speak of ? There's nothing in space that would be worth the insane expense of setting up an industry in the asteroid belt.
Dragging an asteroid into orbit isn't cheap either, and neither is converting the raw ore into final products.
It's not worth anything at the top of the gravity well either.
How much mass do you think we could mine from the moon, expressed in percentages of its current mass ?
If most of the cost of iron is in processing, it doesn't make sense to do it in space, where the cost will be orders of magnitude more.
Suppose you sold your $10 quadrillion asteroid to De Beers, who would then slowly trickle it to the market. How much do you think they'll pay you for it ? That's how much it's worth.
Or you could leave out the text-to-speech part, and just let the other person read it. Much faster, and you can grep it.
Makes sense to me. I can see where someone would prefer to suffer 4 years of Trump and hope to change the DNC for the future, rather than support the status quo.
Here's the actual temperature delta. There are huge areas with 20C anomalies: http://cci-reanalyzer.org/dail...
The energy required to melt 4 million square kilometers of ice depends on the thickness. Let's assume an average thickness of 2 meters, and 350 kilojoule to melt 1 liter of ice. That's 2800 exajoule total energy required. Of course, there's no magnifying glass concentrating all that energy on the pole, but in the last 30 years, we've added 170000 exajoules of additional heat to the oceans. Just 1.6% of that additional energy is enough to melt 4 million square kilometers of ice.
LOL. The link you referenced explicitly disproves the myth you claim.
Sure, but the idea is the same. We won't stop because of the CO2, but only because the profits are dropping too much.
And even if you are willing to be considerate and bike to work instead of taking the car, your colleague will just reap the benefits of the lower gas prices and drive even more.
Another problem with renewables (at least where I live) is home heating and cooking. Right now I have about 8kW electric power going into my house, but I have a 25 kW natural gas powered furnace, and another 8 kW natural gas powered stove. To replace everything by electric, I would need 40kW electric hookup, or about 5 times as much. There's no way the current grid can handle that, so basically all the streets in my city would have to be ripped up and upgraded. To make things worse, demand for heating goes up sharply in the winter, when available sun goes down sharply. None of these things are impossible to solve, but it will be very time consuming and costly, and people will vote to move the expenses forward.
Solar is great, but there's no feasible short term plan to replace transportation fuels. Not only do you need a huge increase in solar generation, but you also need to replace the 1 billion motor vehicles in the world, part of which are heavy trucks for which no suitable electric replacement exists yet. Just add up how much lithium we need for the batteries, and compare that to total world production.
Frozen sea water has lower salinity than the water itself. Some of the salt is pushed out of the freezing water layer as it crystallizes. Also, the ice is partially made from snow collecting on it.