/sci/ - Science & Math

It's like "We can't mine the oceans, sediment plumes would disturb the wildlife"

"How exactly"

"Well you know it would make the water cloudy and sea life would avoid it"

"Why is that bad"

"It's inconvenient for the sea creatures"

"Not having rare earth metals is inconvenient for me."

"But it disrupts the ecosystem"

"Does it kill anything?"

"No, but-"

"Then we're doing it. Cheap rare earths, lithium, manganese, etc. means cheaper electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines etc. which means hugely decreased demand for oil which means fewer rigs which means lower odds of another BP style spill. You should be all for this."

"But it disturbs the-"

"Shhh"

"But the ecosyste-"

"Sssshhhhhhhhh"

>>4604571
>What about sea floor mining?

We'e already doing that.

http://www.nautilusminerals.com/s/Home.asp
http://www.neptuneminerals.com/

As for OP:

>1. The asteroid belt makes up less than 1/4th of the mass of our moon.

So what? We'e still talking about a shitload of ore at much higher grade.

>2. The price of any ore will always be cheaper mined here on Earth.

That's why resources mined in space will be used in space.

>3. Bringing tons of a precious metal or rare mineral suddenly into the market will make the value of that metal plummet. Supply and demand economics. Not to mention we have many investors hoarding these materials illegally anyway. Ever wonder why copper has been so expensive lately? Private companies are stockpiling it.

Same goes for diamonds. That's why they throttle the supply. No reason they couldn't do this with space based resources, although it won't be on Earth.

>4. Re-entry. Notice how every shuttle that is blasted off in space weighs significantly less when it re-enters? That's because it's difficult and dangerous to bring anything back, much less tons and tons and tons of metal.

So you shape your ingots into re-entry discs/slugs shaped roughly like an apollo capsule and you put an ablative coating on one side.

What we have here is a failure not of the technology, but of your creativity.

>>4593989
>they always say "rare earths aren't actually rare, China just mines most of them because we'd rather let them do it"

They are however very spread out in the crust and only concentrated together on the ocean floor, hence recent programs to mine those deposits. The higher concentration/grade of those deposits makes the extra effort of retrieving them from the deep sea economical.

http://www.nautilusminerals.com/s/Home.asp
http://www.neptuneminerals.com/

>>4476865
>We've had pretty decent ocean mining technology for a while, but there are only a few things worth digging out, and we're already exploiting most of those as much as makes sense.

Permits for mining deep sea ore deposits were only just issued to Nautilus Minerals and the various other companies pursuing subsea mining are still waiting on theirs. As an industry, it is still in it's infancy.

http://www.nautilusminerals.com/s/Media-NewsReleases.asp?ReportID=437932

>>4450202

Are you under the mistaken apprehension that I am the asteroid mining guy? I'm not. I'm for deep sea mining, which has already begun. Pic related.

>>4416389
> Space offers something that oceans do not, ie another basket for our eggs.

Ocean offers something space does not, near term return on investment and access to the wealth necessary for meaningful expansion into space.

>Space won't be colonized to get rid of people on Earth. It will be colonized as humans exploit the mineral wealth of the solar system and beyond.

Trillions in precious metals and hundreds of billions in rare earths have already been located on the ocean floor, and mining is just now beginning. Why would we go to asteroids for metals that are plentiful and more easily reached on the ocean floor?

>>4219232

They are extracting precious metals there, not oil.

Right now most of the robot crawlers used employ a sort of underwater bucket wheel excavator (Made famous on the internet by photos of that towering, tank treaded excavation machine)

The problem with this is that it creates enormous, lingering sediment plumes. The deposits are exposed and separate, they could easily be mined more precisely without polluting methods, but we have no robots capable of doing that yet.