/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9943374
When Bezos stops comparing his tiny dick with Elon's and finally starts doing something useful.

>>9943562
Bezos is too late.
Latest SX launch proved Block 5 rocket is ready for fast turnaround.
Whatever he does, SpaceX will undercut it.
Yes, we space now.

>>9943374
Why would space rocks, on average, be any richer in resources than Earth rocks?

>>9943594
Space is bigger than earth.

>>9943594
>Why would space rocks, on average, be any richer in resources than Earth rocks?
Do you know that most of the platinum on Earth is actually from past asteroid impacts?

>>9943594
mining and processing pollutes a lot
asteroids have a much greater density of minerals than earth
asteroid metals used in space would be dramatically cheaper than earth metals used in space

>>9943594
Hey man, you havent read about the trillion dollar asteroid? Pick that one up and your whole company/project will pay itself a thousand times
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nkj-aSwL2BA

>>9943570
Do you think SX will have lunar tourism? Share some predictions, I think before the 2100 there will be at least one permanently settled hotel/lab center on the moon, kinda like the ones in Antarctica

>>9943374
Why go to space to mine asteroids?

Simply send a robot to attach rockets to the asteroid and rocket it back to Earth.

A single asteroid 6 miles wide could supply all the resources humans need when it touches down in the ocean.

if we do it will be sort lived. we are about to get hit hard by the rapid degradation of the biosphere and its climate and will be struggling between feeding ourselves and geopolitics.
Capitalism destroyed any chance at non dystopian cyberpunk, in the future investors wont really have any motivation from the market to sink capital into space mining, that is if we are unfortunate enough to still have investors and capital.

>>9943594
Most are not. M type asteroids do have high concentrations of metal. These are about 8% of all asteroids. It seems like a planet tried and failed to form between Mars and Jupiter (torn apart by Jupiter). This proto planet got big enough to melt and stratify itself by material density. So its core started to collect iron and nickle. When it broke apart the iron-nickle core fragmented into some of the asteroids we see today and these have a much high concentration of metal than the crust of Earth.

>>9943732
>let's start rocket-propelling asteroids to collide with the Earth
>on PURPOSE!
genius.

>>9943608
Did you know that every element on Earth is actually from past asteroid impacts?

>>9943810
Unlikely. As heavy elements sink into the interior the lighter elements like Silicon would float to the top.

>>9943732
cause only the precious metals and rare earths are valuable enough to bring home
the iron, water, and other generic elements are far more valuable for use in space itself

>>9943374
Possibly longer than we'd think, the company Planetary Resources has recently been experience a funding setback:
https://spacenews.com/planetary-resources-revising-plans-after-funding-setback/
It's going to take a while. Right now we don't understand asteroids very well, nor do we understand granular mechanics very well. We don't understand the surface environment all that well, nor do we understand the interior all that well. For all we know they could be big plaster and chicken wire structures that explode into a cloud of confetti as soon as we drill into them. Which is of course ridiculous, but there are some hypotheses out there that some asteroid might be able to maintain a molten interior. There are very important things that can make or break mining that we just don't know. A simple one is whether asteroids actually have the resources we want. Quite possibly the most important resource in the near term we could mine is water, we just don't know which asteroids have it, what form it's in, and whether its practical to extract. Another is the properties of the dirt. The properties of asteroid dirt(regolith) are very important for mining and all we've studied is literally just a couple of them.

That brings us to another problem we don't understand the behavior of dirt all that well. we don't understand granular materials as well as we understand fluid dynamics. As such, machines that process granular materials are not very reliable. In addition, granular mechanics does not have nice scaling laws, meaning that the only way to physically test things is at scale. Both of these things make space mining a pretty risky proposition. We can send an expensive machine to an asteroid, but we can't be sure it will work, even if it works, it might break down sooner than we think.

>>9944045
So we don't understand asteroids all that well. Really the only way to fix that is with more missions to asteroids. Mission planning and transit times are long. Not to mention, private companies probably aren't going to be doing science on asteroids because it's just so damn risky. So there aren't going to be very many asteroid missions. Luckily there are two missions already in transit to asteroids, Hayabusa2 and Osiris-REx. NASA even has a mission planned to Psyche in 2022(arrives 2026) and another to the Jupiter trojans in 2021. We're going to need more missions to characterize the environment and test mining. I'm skeptical that we'll see any missions to test mining before 2027. Now some enabling technologies for asteroid mining include cheaper space launch and better robots, more emphasis on robots. People are too expensive to send up, and teleoperation is difficult with large time lags, so we really need robots with some capacity for autonomous manipulation. Autonomous manipulation makes doing complex mining tasks possible through teleoperation. We tell the robot to grab a wrench and tighten a bolt, rather than sending a command to move the arm, waiting for video to come back, then finding out we moved the arm too much and that the wrench is in a different position.

>>9943374
https://space.mines.edu/

>>9943726
If I'm not mistaken, they're still gonna launch 2 tourists around the moon.
It's just been postponed because NASA qualification is a bitch.

>>9943374
>we space miners
What do you mean by "we", Peasant?

>>9943760
>cyperpunk
anon i...

>>9944065
I’m gonna try and get in that program one way or another. Plain vanilla MechE isn’t doing it for me.

t. mines student

>>9943374
https://qntm.org/asteroids

>>9944518
Hey now, I'm not a cybergoth or anything, I just don't know what else to call these lame futurist space-capital fantasies these soiboys are so into

>>9944574
just call them what it is anon
lame fantasies inspired by shitty hollywood movies

Space is entertainment.

>>9944732
So is science. Abstract thought and curiosity are not needed to survive as organisms.

>>9944580

And they laugh at "Space Force".

The joke is that we're not exploiting these resources already.

>>9944760
They laugh because they're conditioned to hate absolutely everything Trump ever says or does
the fact that they've been whining for decades that space should get the budget of the military, and now he's giving them specifically that, with a goal budget equal to the air force is completely overlooked by them
Trump did thing, therefore thing is bad

>>9943374
>space miners
either the economics are so colossally distorting that they'd collapse any earth-based system or they're too minor to justify the immense difficulty and galactic cost prohibition of mining an asteroid. it'll never happen.

>>9944763
>knows absolutely nothing about a subject
>posts anyway
>ends it with a NEVER EVER NEVER EVER
maximum /sci/

With our current technology? Never.
It will take quite a few physics breakthroughs to change that.

>>9944918
HAHAHAHAHAH, he thinks we need new physics for space mining! We could probably do space mining with all the physics we developed up to 1950. Space mining is an engineering problem not a physics one.

>>9944763
You buffoon, de beers and otber msjor diamond cartels are sitting on top of billions of diamonds, they avoid flooding the market so that they keep making high profits. The same goes for space, you dont flood earyhs platinum market, u work within it to make any price reduction mild. If you increased supply of platinum by say, 10%, you wouldnt crash prices, just lower them a bit and lossibly drive more people to use platinum.

never, space mining would bring actual post scarcity utopia and the capitalists will never allow that

>>9944980
There's no such thing as post scarcity.

>>9945009
>there's no such thing as post scarcity
there is once you find an asteroid that has enough iron to last ten thousand years at current levels of consumption and development

space mining would quite literally cause capitalism to collapse in on itself as a viable economic system for it to work you'd need some kind of benevolent absolute monarchy or communist government

>>9945030
>there is once you find an asteroid that has enough iron to last ten thousand years at current levels of consumption and development
Not if we increase our consumption ten thousand fold.

>>9945030
>space mining would quite literally cause capitalism to collapse in on itself as a viable economic system for it to work you'd need some kind of benevolent absolute monarchy or communist government
Maybe Earthbound-capitalism, but not space commerce. Why so bitter anon? Say we get the trillion tons of iron, we would just find a way to spend it and thats it. The market will probably hurt a little but the base price would still float, I would honestly predict a spike up in tech and transportation (i.e. all those African countries would profit, probably accelerating their cities' infrastructure a thousand fold) Dont imply that some private company will funnel every margin of profit out of that metallic sucker

>>9945036
This

>>9944918
>

>>9944045
>>9944061
>>9944065
>>9944565
Thanks for the info

>>9943802
Hey, Buenos Aires was an inside job, kill them all!

>>9945030
>Implying that the mining company wouldn't hoard iron maintaining artificial scarcity
This is only true if astroids were commons, they're aren't any commons left in the industrialized world, the capitalists made sure of that early on.
They might be "commons" in the sense that the ocean or Antarctica are "commons", which aren't really commons but are collectively owned and governed by nation states and exploitable to the pleasure of international business to the point that geopolitics allows.
You wish capitalism would be that easy to destroy, by that logic European colonialism of the new world would have ended capitalism and resulted in post scarcity. But it didn't, because property, investment and state sovernity were still around, same goes for space.
Anyways investors won't have reason to sink money into space after 2050(ecological and economic catastrophes) and don't really have any reason to do so now.