/sci/ - Science & Math

space.

lack of appropriate technology and risk of transit

The crash of the market when you inject $20 trillion into it.

Costs associated with shuttling equipment, peoples and necessities of life would be prohibitive and risky.

Mining asteroids does seem to be the way our future is heading, though.

too many niggers and we dont practice eugenics

Snakes

>>3922161
Yeah, because European markets totally crashed with the beginning of colonialism/mercantilism in the 1500s.
>Oh wait, it did. durp. sarcasm fail.

Stupid people would rather spend money on keeping niggers in Africa alive.

>>3922161
Fuck the market. Abundance of all metals for inventions is the best possible thing for science.

>>3922147
>send group of people to mine it
>takes weeks/months to transport goods back (let alone if they make it back)
>fuck up
>miners left on the asteroid die of starvation once it goes to far from us and we can't send help

good plan,

attache thrusters to asteroid

crash it into the ocean

cheaper than mining..probably

>What are some problems that would make mining them difficult?

The fact that it would cost more than $20 trillion to mine.

space

>>3922264
What a crock of shit. Give me 18 billion and fifty Robert Zubrins.

>>3922262
>crash a few hundred million tons into the ocean at 20km/s

sounds like a good idea bro

>>3922280
It would cost at the least a trillion considering the weight a spaceship would need to lift. And that's only if we ever come up with the tech advancements necessary to make this practical and feasible.

>>3922290
But you just pulled that number completely out your ass.

fuel efficiency

>>3922282
take it apart piece by piece, drop them in desert somewhere

>>3922290
>>3922290
>>spaceship.....lifting in space
no, moron. You would have to change it's momentum, that's it. and it could be as cheap as blowing up a nuke.

>>3922299
Yes, this is a good idea.

>>3922299
>take it apart piece by piece
yeah, let me just whip out a few thousand nukes to help you do that, just need to make sure it's not to small or else it'll disintegrate in the air, but i also have to make sure it's not to big otherwise it'll be like nuking the earth hundreds of times repeatedly non-stop till all pieces are down.

>>3922308
If we are capable of sending people to the moon, I am certain we can calculate the size we need to cut up a rock so that it causes minimal damage.

>>3922308
a few thousand nukes? to take it apart? Come on, you're just trollin now

Most mining companies wouldn't touch it. If you mined those asteroids the bottom would fall out of the rare minerals market. Nobody in the business wants that.

>>3922317
word

>>3922319
>>3922317
You're right we'll just drill down and install 1 nuke like they do in the movies and that'll blow it into all the pieces

>>3922317
You, uh, don't really understand meteorites, do you?

>>3922321
Truth.

>>3922321
Except if you're the only business in space and manage to keep control of the minerals you mine, you could calculate a sizeable profit and use your rewards for larger prizes. Like whole colonies of your own progeny.

>>3922325
or use drilling robots, numnut

>>3922333
Have fun telling your colony goodluck while we you can't reach them for the few years + do to it going away from us

>>3922290
I really need to save what I type every time I suggest my plan for feasible, profitable asteroid mining. It goes like this:
- One rocket is fitted with about 50 compact, simple mining robots. Then about 6 bigger construction robots. And an unfoldable mass driver. Another rocket is fitted with a small portable LFTR and a plasma gasification unit, molds for simple, bulky robot and product parts (molds for wheel, chassis, mass drivers, and so on.) as well as about 150 or so circuit-boards for robots, as well as any lightweight components that are too intricate to create in orbit such as sensors, and some spare propellant. It sets off for some metal-rich asteroid.
- When it arrives, the LFTR is deployed, the construction robots set up the plasma gasification unit to connect to the LFTR, and mining robots go off to just pick away at rock. This rock is then carried back to the plasma gasification unit, where electricity from the LFTR is used to heat the temperature inside to about 14,000'C, which disassociates everything into its constituent elemental gases. These are then centrifuged and separated to be either in the collection tray to be launched as payload to Earth via mass driver, or to be poured in the molds for extra robot parts. Begin assembling more robots with the components you brought along. Any payloads you wish to send back to Earth get excess iron/nickel melted over it (as a makeshift heat shield) and some primitive thrusters to adjust approach into a designated impact site (Somewhere in a desert) where it can be collected and resold.
- If you want to mine the asteroid faster, just ship up another rocket with a thousand circuit-boards and sensors. It might be feasible to even launch small constructed LFTRs/PGUs and robots to other asteroids via mass drive to basically have a Von Neumann machine for mining the solar system.

>>3922336
yeah, perfect idea. Lets equip them with knives while we're at it i bet that'll cut right through the core of a asteroid

>>3922338
Honestly, that's what the second or third Mars expedition will be and I don't think it would be that hard to find people who would be willing to go.

>>3922262
Hey let's recreate the events that lead to the extinction a good chunk of the species on earth a couple million years ago. Only, this time, do it for fun !

Space dementia

>>3922338
>>implying my progeny would need the leeches on earth in order to adapt and survive in another galaxy.
go troll elsewhere

>>3922348
>Implying they would survive on their own on some asteroid for over a year + without contact from Earth

>>3922343
Going the first time is exciting and new and fun, everyone wants to do it. If they survive that lets see what they would say if you asked them to go for a second time

hal

[X] Crash it into the moon

[X] mine the moon

[X] Crash it into the moon

[X] mine the moon

what if we crash the asteroid into the deepest parts of the ocean so that the only problem that will be created is a massive rouge wave.

No like we need to care about the fish that live there anyway .

It's a fucking asteroid.

>>3922369
How big is the thing we're mining? Because crashing a large enough object into the moon seems like a recipe for disaster worse than KT

Pick asteroids that drift near Lagrange points. Small impulses can steer them into orbit around Earth. Mine the asteroid while it's in orbit.

They're already planning this technology, btw. It's the Chinese, no fooling.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27112/

I like the way >>3922369 thinks.

What about crashing it into the moon?

We know how far the moon is, we've made trips there and back before. It would justify building structures on the moon maybe create jobs or something... (pulling at straws here)

>>3922390
Why would we need to crash it into the Moon? If we were going to move it, why not move it to Earth orbit or to a Lagrange Point? Why drop it into a gravity well and then spend more energy picking up the pieces and firing them back out of the well?

>smack asteroid into the moon
>moonfall produces insane amount of ejecta in orbit around the moon and earth
>can never go back to moon because of a single company's half-baked mining planning

i like the way you guys think.

>What are some problems that would make mining them difficult?

we aren't even close to running short of most metal ores here on Earth.

we don't mine them because companies would saturate the market cutting into their profits.

why go into space to not mine when we can not mine right here?

>>3922386
>have large asteroids orbit the earth like the moon

Enjoy fucking up the orbit of the earth compared to the sun

>>3922413
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeP6CpUnfc0

>>3922425

>>3922425

The largest asteroid (okay it's actually a Dwarf Planet now but still) in the entire asteroid field, which is NOWHERE close to being a near Earth asteroid is Ceres, and the mass of Ceres is about 1% of the moon's.

Gravity is null here.

>>3922418
Establishing space-based industry is easier if you have a ready source of materials already in space. If we're going into space already, we might as well mine there, so we can build the things we need in space -in space- instead of launching them from Earth.

I don't think we should mine asteroids and send the ores to Earth, unless we are actually critically short of ores. Rather, we should use asteroids to help us establish space-based industry. Are we ready to do that? Maybe not.

>>3922413
more like have fun knocking out a bunch of satellites and pissing off everyone else.


Although if we could produce a ring of debris around the earth like on Saturn i wouldn't mind the view of that.

>I don't think we should mine asteroids and send the ores to Earth, unless we are actually critically short of ores.
Rare Earth metals are called Rare Earth metals for a reason. During the formation of the Earth while it was still molten, most of those sunk down to the bottom. It's only because of future asteroid impacts that we're not treating gold as some museum artifact.

>>3922441
>not building thousand of autonomous sentient robots to colonize the outer solar system

alas, not for a few more years here. human-equiv AI's now!

>>3922448
A question of degree. Secondary debris would add up quick I bet.

And that would be one hell of a view. Also, the cooling effect might not be so great.

>>3922460
but then again, who the fuck needs gold

>>3922460
Can these metals not be obtained by sea-floor mining?

>>3922460
So then we should dig deeper all the way to the bottom

>>3922466
Imagine if gold was more plentiful than copper, the sheer amount of shit that could be done with it.

>>3922469
>>3922470
>mfw no earth /sci/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth

read.

>>3922466
Who needs one of the most inert solids...

>>3922476
A better comparison would be silver and copper, since silver is a superior conductor.

>>3922441
makes sense to me. good points.

>>3922484
Why don't we just go mine another planet instead? That way we can at least start up solar colonization

>>3922506
No gravity wells are superior for construction of space habitats and massive, high-powered nuclear saltwater rockets.

>>3922506
Because Mars is really far away, Jupiter and it's moons are even further, and the planets inside of Earth are not fun places to live.

Well, neither are Mars or any of the outer planets, but better than Venus and Mercury. Being cold is better than being cooked.

>>3922515
What's the name of the rocket the US designed that was supposed to be charged at sea using an aircraft carriers nuclear reactor for the electrolysis? That shit looked tight.

>>3922147
That it'll cost more than 20$ trillion to do?

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/332099/title/Rare_earth_elements_plentiful_in_ocean_sedim
ents

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm

>>3922530
>and the planets inside of Earth are not fun places to live.
...Wha?
>Well, neither are Mars
BLASPHEMER

20 trillion in the current market....
you introduce that, and even the most valuable shit will become cheap as fuck....

which would mean asteroid mining would cause a huge depression on earth's economy

>>3922549
So it's not worth 20 trillion then, is it?

>soviets launch robots onto other planets like venus
>America lagging behind to busy discussing budget

GET WITH THE GAME AMERICA

>>3922546
what planet is that?

>>3922556
Its value changes with the economic climate. If demand for the elements in the asteroid increased but the supply remained constant, obviously, the value of the asteroid would go up. If all of the metals in the asteroid were just dumped on the market all at once, the price would crash.

>>3922549
>which would mean asteroid mining would cause a huge depression on earth's economy
That's really showing Earth's economy sucks, rather than lots of cheap building materials suck. Aluminium used to be exorbitantly expensive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#History
>Before the Hall-Héroult process was developed in the late 1880s, aluminium was exceedingly difficult to extract from its various ores. This made pure aluminium more valuable than gold.[46] Bars of aluminium were exhibited at the Exposition Universelle of 1855.[47] Napoleon III, Emperor of France, is reputed to have given a banquet where the most honoured guests were given aluminium utensils, while the others made do with gold.[48][49]

>Aluminium was selected as the material to be used for the 100 ounce (2.8 kg) capstone of the Washington Monument in 1884, a time when one ounce (30 grams) cost the daily wage of a common worker on the project;[50] The capstone, which was set in place on December 6, 1884, in an elaborate dedication ceremony, was the largest single piece of aluminium cast at the time, when aluminium was as expensive as silver.[51]

Imagine all the things we wouldn't have if Aluminium was some rare element that was abundant in asteroids. Now imagine like 30 elements which we have little of, but use in much of modern electronics.

who cares about the economy if we have unlimited resources

>>3922567
A terraformed Mars, obviously.

>>3922583
rich people.

who happen to run things.

>>3922572
You don't understand.

It's value changes itself. It doesn't matter what the climate is.

If everyone has a million dollars, then the million dolalrs is worthless. See: Zimbabwe.

This is why economics is not a science, because they fall into this trap just as easily as any idiot who writes and article on it.

Poor chillun.

>>3922567
Mars, circa 2123.

>>3922577
>imagine all the magic wands we can wave to avoid ever doing anything productive in the pursuit of our delusions.

>>3922589
hurr
rich people dont matter when you have unlimited everything

the whole point of this should be to end scarcity and NOT about profiting

>>3922590
The value of the materials the asteroid contains changes the value of the asteroid itself. That's what I said.

>>3922594
Thanks for that eloquently written and well thought out rebuttal.

venus
>93 bar
>minimum of -220 C, maximum of 420 C
>93 BAR

>>3922591
Fucking beautiful. Where are the deimos and phobos space elevators though?

We don't exactly have a shortage of metals on Earth.

It's cheaper to dig deeper than into space.

>>3922596
son, you don't understand how the economy behind diamonds works do you....

if an asteroid mining company is financed by intelligent people, it will make those financiers rich, and will NOT end scarcity.

>>3922625
At least until is starts getting hot again...

then you release the pressure on a magma and it fucks your shit up.

>>3922628
I think most sane people who aren't women realize that DeBeers is one of the most evil organizations on the Earth though.

>>3922607
>minimum of -220'C
What the fuck? I think you might have that temperature confused with Mercury.

Also, if you wish to get rid of that blanket of crushing pressure, build an orbital sunshade in the shape of a cylinder around Venus. freeze it out, then pelt with comets. Increase transparency of sunshield to warm it to around 15'C and the water should begin creating carbonaceous rocks, locking away much of the atmosphere. If its calculated there's still too much CO2, send replicating automatons onto the surface while the CO2 is frozen out and launch packages of dry ice via mass driver toward terraforming projects on Mars/Luna/Mercury.

>>3922631

The deepest mining as of present is some 4 km down. The crust is, what? 50km?

Asteroid mining is just not worthwhile at this point. We have plenty as it is.

>>3922619
It's a picture of an entire planet. You think a 8 meter wide lonsdaleite thread cable is going to show up on it?

>>3922634
but still, any corporation with a semi competent accountant will realize that if they mine an asteroid they effectively make their product worthless.

therefore, in order for a company like that to even turn profits, they would HAVE to become a debeers-like company

>>3922634
In any case, comparing someone exploiting asteroid minerals to the way diamonds are exploited is a non-starter.

The diamond market is probably the most artificial market in existence. The scarcity in the market is due entirely to the manipulation of a few companies, despite the ease of actually finding diamonds.

If a company were to prospect and mine rare minerals on an asteroid, their monopoly would come from the fact that they were the only ones doing it and the only ones capable of doing it.

>>3922647
I suppose not. How about the twinkle of the cable falling to planet?

>ksr

the astronomical amount of capital required to extract it?

>>3922648
Or y'know, you could first trickle the metals onto the market, recuperating your costs and then some, and then usher in an age of material scarcity by dumping as much fucking metal on the market as possible. Use your fortune to buy up the companies that go under, and begin your reign as benevolent CEO who wants to help humanity succeed and reach it's highest potential. So basically, Elon Musk.

>>3922648
Or they could, you know, branch out into the industries that use the materials they are mining, thus becoming their own suppliers.

>>3922648
this is stupid to even think about
nobody is going to bring an asteroid to earth

to only way this is realistic is if we already have a bunch of colonies on other planets with trillions of people to actually fill the demand

>>3922669
The thing is, most business are profit based and vertical integration of associated business isn't a de facto increase in profits.

>>3922668
this is stupid to even think about
nobody is going to fly ever.

to only way this is realistic is if we already have a bunch of big eagles strapped to people to actually lift off

By the time we have technology to mine them those metals will be worthless

Holy fuck /sci/ you are DUMB AS FUCKING SHIT

>>3922660
id rather become stupid fucking rich and buy mars, than usher an age of stay-on-earth unscarcity

>>3922694
Yeah, but you're a prick.

>>3922602
You really think I should think out a proper rebuttal to someone who just yammers non stop for hours?

You have a bit high of an ego on your shenanigans.

>>3922708
And you masturbate to space fantasies while ignoring reality

Then there's the whole space manufacturing thing. You have nigh unlimited resources with which to work, low cost for moving them from place to place, and an enormous amount of energy available (solar power) in orbit.

With those things all set up, you could build like crazy. Construction of spacecraft, stations, installations, manufactured goods, etc would take off.

>>3922708
yeah, and your a dumb hippie

>>3922739
It doesn't help your point if you fail at elementary school English.

>>3922743
i guess it doesn't, even though it wasn't part of my point at all...

but alas, you are free to disregard my reasoning with you, all because of a grammatical error

If I were a philanthropist and wanted to dump huge amounts of raw materials to the market, I would do so on Moon and Mars rather than on Earth to inspire colonization.

>>3922738
I don't see how you have low cost moving anything anywhere, regardless of gravity or no.

You're just waving wands and ignoring any deviations from your magic plans.

>>3922769
Space is currently not very profitable. Only shit like Virgin Galactic and the other companies rushing for suborbital flights have been drawing massive financial interest. This means that only rich space enthusiasts will first jump on asteroid mining, and space enthusiasts tend to be pretty world-centric people.

>>3922743
It doesn't help your point if your only response is to point out how lazy someone else's typing is.

>>3922780

...There's already huge amount of raw materials on the Moon and Mars. The reason we're not going there is because there's a huge amount of raw materials on Earth as well. Perhaps more than the two put together.

>>3922785
Eeh, there's plenty of energy around. It may take time to move things (once outside of Earth's orbit), but so long as there's argon, you can do it with an ion drive. It may take time, but that's okay.

Also this thread has become the pic.

More expensive cargo transporter than a spaceship?

>>3922795
man, you just got magic wands everywhere. Where exactly is all this argon coming from?

I haven't read the thread yet but If I see someone mention government as a solution, I swear to Feynman I will call you out for shit tier brain dead nigger.

I have come to the realization that "market failures" exist because people are currently inadequate of assessing the situation/problem and cannot make a profit. A country, perhaps any one person, who can reach a profound goal while staying out of debt and is inquisitive and clever enough to solve "market failures" without government help, deserves all the money they can produce out of their profitable endeavor.

I hope that one day, technology will be affordable enough to allow mining of space minerals and rare metals.

>>3922161

You're a fucking idiot and you have no idea what you are talking about, at all

>>3922859
Hitler was pretty inquisitive, and had a pretty good run at solving market failures.

The problems? Prices will drop and it will only be worth a 100th.

>>3923024
GOOD.

>>3922859
The funny part is that the left side is filled with more shit than the right.

>>3922903
>>3923106

shit tier brain dead nigger