/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.5545307]

Sup /sci/

Currently starting a Physics report on Asteroid Mining.

What do you faggots think of this?

Does /sci/ have an opinion? of course it fucking does, its /sci/

[Anonymous No.5545316]

[cheap mass probes needed]

[Anonymous No.5545317]

>you faggots
OP please you don't have to be so mean. :'(

i cri evertim

[Anonymous No.5545324]

Asteroid mining is the future. So long as we all don't fail as a civilization before we get close enough.

[Anonymous No.5545327]

>>5545324
You can pretty much say that about anything.

Fucking magic is the future so long as we don't fail as a civilization before we invent magic.

[Anonymous No.5545328]

>>5545316
In fact PR is doing just that!

>>5545317
I'm sorry man, please don't cry

>>5545324
Well, we already designing prospecting kit at relatively low costs.

[Anonymous No.5545332]

>>5545327
Unicorns are the future so long as we don't fail as a civilization before we invent magic.

[Anonymous No.5545335]

>>5545307
OP, how would you manage the accumulation of materials from out of the Kuiper belt, as a process that ultimately ends up back on Earth?

I imagine timing will be an issue, since everything is orbiting and making things difficult. Would we start by sending a legion of probes and unmanned machines that would make a start on cataloging and mapping the resources. In the duration, sending up next tier space refineries or just lug the fuckers back to Earth?

[Anonymous No.5545338]

/sci/ is about facts, not opinions. Fuck off cancer.

[Anonymous No.5545341]

>>5545316
Resources needed to acquire asteroid mining.
Asteroid mining needed to acquire resources.

[Anonymous No.5545339]

>>5545327
Nukes are pretty magical to me.

[Anonymous No.5545345]

>>5545341
Do you wonder if we didn't manufacture so much junk, that we'd have ample resources to mine asteroids?

[Anonymous No.5545349]

>>5545345
Hell we'd do pretty well just by recycling more. We throw out a shit ton of copper and rare-earths.

[Anonymous No.5545355]

>>5545332
Cancer is the future so long as we don't fail as a civilization before we invent more cancer.

[Anonymous No.5545356]

>>5545335
well here in lies a problem.

First off, I agree about the timing, a lot of asteroids pass fairly close to earth so we would have to intercept them with several prospecting probes to establish viablity of mining, what it contains, etc.

What we do then is completely up to your goal.
If its needed for earth then I don't see any other option than to send the fucker down.

However if its delivering resources to the ISS such as water then they would have to deliver it right there. I don't think we will be processing in space for a while yet.

[Anonymous No.5545358]

>>5545339
Well good news then, Harry, you're a wizard. Just step this way and we'll give you a special blast of magical power.

[Anonymous No.5545362]

Don't see it happening in the next 30 years or so considering capabilities beyond earth orbit are VERY limited at the moment, Japans little thing which went to an asteroid fucked up so many times its a miracle it came back, and then only with a few bits of dust basically.

Its getting a bit boring now every other week it seems another person or company says "YEAH WE'RE GOING TO MARS WITHIN 20 YEARS" or "YEAH WE GOING TO ASTEROIDS BY 5 YEARS". Always talk, never anything done.

[Anonymous No.5545367]

>>5545349
Makes me choke when they talk about recycling 'not being good for the environment'
Essentially boils down to 'We spend more power to recycle than we do to make another plastic bag'
Which is fine and all. But misses the point that we need less waste floating around and you don't avoid that by just making more.

[Anonymous No.5545371]

>>5545345
I still don't think we don't have enough resources to support asteroid minecraft.

[Anonymous No.5545374]

>>5545362
I see where you are coming from, and are probably correct. However I will cont to hold hope that it will happen in the near future.
By the way have a look at
>http://www.planetaryresources.com/

[Anonymous No.5545380]

>>5545362
Yep. Nothing but talk. There's no impetus to get up into space that would blow away every other triviality down here on Earth. I bet people would yawn when Aliens are discovered

These guys on the other hand make up for their lack of state-funding with actual enthusiasm: http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/

[Anonymous No.5545382]

>>5545374
Everything about that website makes me hate them.

[Anonymous No.5545385]

Go Space Economy!
Enter the Space Pirates,
Enter the Military,
Enter Colonization,
Enter the Matrix.

[Anonymous No.5545391]

>>5545385
but...but space..

[Anonymous No.5545393]

>>5545374
No chance of it happening in the near future. We'd need so much more time to develop things. We currently have no idea how feasible this is, because nothing has really been tried yet.

[Anonymous No.5545394]

>>5545385
Curiosity has obviously never been to High School.

Makes me wonder though what will happen when we spread out around our solar system to the point where we even begin to cramp up again. I don't see any feasable methods of buggering off to the next star-system apart from a one-way ticket to dying en-route so your ungrateful great-grandson can enjoy a desperate life at Alpha Centurai.

[Anonymous No.5545399]

>>5545393
Didn't James Cameron do a TED talk about how they could park a probe with some effective mass and tow a big, burly 'roid home?

[Anonymous No.5545406]

>>5545399
oooooooh rly?
interdesting

[Anonymous No.5545409]

Ring World

[Anonymous No.5545422]

>>5545399
And then what?
How much testing would need to be done to make sure we don't destroy our planet doing this? Many, many years this would take.

[Anonymous No.5545424]

>>5545409
Now that, is a long way off

[Anonymous No.5545428]

The new West... SPACE!!!

[Anonymous No.5545429]

>>5545422
Destroying our planet via asteroid mining.. wut?

[Anonymous No.5545439]

>>5545422
>>5545429

You're right, I'm just as uncomfortable of the thought of James Cameron towing asteroids into Earth orbit.
Ignoring every half-baked terrorist plot you can think of. What's stopping somebody just sticking a shitload of thrusters on it and using it as the ultimate world-ending deterrent we can make?

[Anonymous No.5545449]

>>5545439
Okay yeah I do see your point.
I guess those issues will have to be adressed in the near future. My guess is that there will be a shit ton of laws governing it.

I don't see an terrorist groups having the tec or the money to be able to pull somthing like this of either.

[Anonymous No.5545451]

>>5545428

Red Dead Recombobulation...

[Anonymous No.5545459]

>>5545449
I just mean the guys who own the tech in the first place.
We did nothing put push NASA around, cut their funding and bullied all their employees in their youth. Now they've just towed an asteroid to Earth. There's implications we cannot ignore.
That said, maybe we do need an object crashing into us before humanity gets it's shit together.

[Anonymous No.5545466]

nah guys, u just gradually slow it down having a long way to go and u can essentially put it in orbit to be more economically mined or used as a shield from another foreign space obj.

we can even put our spores on them and hurdle them out into space to colonize future star systems

[Anonymous No.5545474]

>>5545466

[Anonymous No.5545483]

the new asteroid satellite's location above eathmust be regulated as it's effects on tides, other than that we get to enjoy a new moon and nights will be brighter, which may increase global warming, but ideally we can grow cops in a central location year round if needed to sustain our growing populations.

[Anonymous No.5545485]

>>5545459
I don't think NASA will be throwing any asteroids into earth at all. You seem to think that there are a lot of people who only want to see the earths destruction in NASA?

In any case it will be private companies that do all the mining etc

[Anonymous No.5545491]

SpaceCop, Coast to Coast.

[Anonymous No.5545490]

>>5545483
Hence why we won't be doing that for a while. No one is stupid enough to fuck with the tides just uet

[Anonymous No.5545524]

I can't think of any metal for which it would be more profitable to explode a rocket into space and back, rather than digging deeper.

Maybe in 200 years when we have a space elevator.

[Anonymous No.5545526]

Any sort of asteroid mining from now, until we develop conventional sub-light travel, is all going to have be done remotely.
We'd have build and maintain an entire manufacturing and launch infrastructure for the remote mining equipment, ranging anywhere from probes to haulers, while conducting this entire affair with a legion of human-controllers.

The cool thing is, the most boring part of EVE may in fact become a real job in the future.

[Anonymous No.5545529]

>>5545483
>ideally we can grow cops in a central location year round if needed
What you're describing is known as the tropics. It does not require that make artificial moons.

[Anonymous No.5545530]

>>5545524
You can only dig so far. Also plate tectonics is just shit we don't know about and is potentially catastrophic if we fuck with it.

Also space elevators sound cool, but we don't have the super-material required to keep the cable running. Also, one of those things breaking, crashing or collapsing is going to be pretty spectacular and dangerous.

[Anonymous No.5545537]

>>5545524 Refer to this >>5545530 very well said sir

Also regarding your point on Metals, there are far more of the good stuff up out htere than down here. Platinum for example

[Anonymous No.5545539]

>>5545537
yeah, but rocket fuel is expensive.

[Anonymous No.5545542]

>>5545537
>You can only dig so far.
That's why i said 200 years. Until then there is enough supply and Space technology is sufficiently expensive that it's not profitable mine stuff from space. And we NEED something like a space elevator to make commercial use of our surroundings, shooting up rockets is incredibly expensive.

[Anonymous No.5545551]

>>5545530
but muh carbon nanotubes

[Anonymous No.5545554]

>>5545539
>>5545542

Referring to : >>5545526

What if we just used loads of weather balloons as a stage 1, followed by a stage 2 propulsion out of Earths gravity, then the final stage which is all solar power etc.

[Anonymous No.5545556]

>>5545542
>>5545539
Thats why we don't use rockets, but rather drones. Drones can be launched into space by hitching a ride on a satilite launch, nice n cheap.

And from then on I guess the Prospectors only need to have solar.

The actual miners etc would have to be powered via conventional methods. after all Water could also be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen to form rocket engine propellant from the asteroids them selves.

[Anonymous No.5545560]

>>5545551
They're pretty slick. But a real bitch to make, especially for a cable stretching for kilometers.

But it's one of them falling down that puts the heebies up me. I never considered it until I saw a thread once with a guy that showed visual graphs of the cable snapping and earths gravity doing the rest.

[Anonymous No.5545561]

>>5545554
*Weather balloons being re-usable to some degree.

[Anonymous No.5545563]

>>5545560
oh my... :/

[Anonymous No.5545571]

>>5545539
Not really. The main cost is transporting it into space.

Anyway, there are several strategies for bringing stuff from asteroid to somewhere we can use them, and

One is to steer them to a desolate spot on Earth and just pick the valuable stuff out of the crater. Another is to steer it into Earth's atmosphere and use aerobraking to move it into Earth orbit.

Very little delta-V is needed to accomplish these.

Others are based on in situ resource utilization. You can mine the asteroid where it is, and just bring back the valuable stuff (potentially suitable for precious metals). You can also use the asteroid itself for reaction mass, using either nuclear or solar power to heat and vaporize or otherwise accelerate material from the asteroid in the opposite direction you want the thing to go.

A successful asteroid mining operation would most likely involve some combination of restructuring the asteroid, using it for reaction mass, and aerobraking. You basically have to turn it into a crude sort of space ship if you want to bring it in at reasonable cost.

[Anonymous No.5545568]

>>5545563
To elaborate completely, the nanotube production is a cinch. The real problem is large scale production of the stuff, which we just don't have. I believe some university out in the UK has the highest fraction of nanotube production in the world (but I hope I'm wrong) and they only make enough to just run tests on.

[Anonymous No.5545569]

>>5545317

[Anonymous No.5545576]

>>5545554
>What if we just used loads of weather balloons
How much weather balloons do you think we would need to lift several tons of metal into the higher atmosphere? Also they don't really fly that high. Also we would need a shitton of helium / hydrogen. Helium is already a scarcity, and almost unrecoverable after it's in the atmosphere (given that we can't send something up again to recover the balloons). Hydrogen requiers lots of energy to produce.

Overall a bad idea.
>>5545556
Satelite launches probably are to irregular for commerical mining. Also you would still use rockets to lift them into orbit.
Speaking of orbit, satelites only go there, so unless your asteroid is cought in orbit you'd need a much stronger engine to get further out.

[Anonymous No.5545578]

>>5545576
Point taken. It kills me that Helium is used as a fucking party prop.

[Anonymous No.5545593]

>>5545576
>Speaking of orbit, satelites only go there, so unless your asteroid is cought in orbit you'd need a much stronger engine to get further out.
Low Earth orbit is "halfway to anywhere" in terms of delta-V, and you don't need nearly as much propellant because you can use high-Isp, low-thrust systems like ion drives.

[Anonymous No.5545606]

>>5545578
Eh... it's not THAT hard to get more of.

Our current main helium supply was something we stumbled on by accident, while looking for oil and natural gas. If we go looking specifically for helium gas deposits, we'll probably find them.

Even if we didn't, it's not THAT hard to extract it from air, the way we do with neon. The air in the average house contains enough helium to fill a party balloon.

[Anonymous No.5545856]

>>5545606
Ah, well the more you know.

[Anonymous No.5545903]

>>5545439

What if we just towed it into the moon? Then there's no worry of fucking shit up on Earth and the astroid will be in a fixed location that is close to home.

[Anonymous No.5545930]

>>5545903
Lunar orbit would be really difficult. You couldn't use aerobraking, and you wouldn't be able to take much advantage of Earth's gravity. A circular LEO orbit would be very difficult, but Earth capture in general is relatively easy.

If you just want to smack it into the moon, there's not much point, since the moon's already had umpty-billion asteroids smack into it. Anything you want from an asteroid is already on the moon.

[Anonymous No.5545934]

Wouldn't it be easier to mine the moon?

Send one large rechargeable remote controlled probe to the moon, with a 3-d printer, a basic facility for refining soil and two robotic arms and a solar cell or even a radio-isotope generator.

the lunar soil contains very high concentrations of titanium which means there is ample building material simply laying around. The probe will be able to begin building at least a basic infrastructure; composed largely of solar sterling generators (the complex doping and fine manufaturing processes required for solar cells are probably difficult to achieve with limited resources in space.) power transmission cables, centrifuges for refining minerlas from soil and furnaces for melting it down; most of this can be easily made from titanium.

Next is simply sending semi-regular shipments of parts that cannot currently be manufactured on the moon itself; in order to build more probes, drilling machines, electronics and eventually to build a medium sized railgun or similiar device (getting off the moon is easier then getting off of Earth) and disposable re-entry vehicles containing refined materials. As time goes on the infrastructure increases allowing for higher efficiency and lower costs.

After a while you could also build a habitat for humans in space; which would also make a very good replacement or supplement to the ISS, due to roughly similiar conditions for experiments, but since you can build most of what you need in-situ there's signifcantly less penalty in terms of weight.

[Anonymous No.5545939]

>>5545903
Makes sense I guess. It'll be near the moon-base that'll doubtlessly be made. Plus that moon has always been something that could be likened as a shield to the earth.

[Anonymous No.5545950]

>>5545934

Also you could build an ENORMOUS telescope on the moon relatively easily when your past a certain point due to the low gravity and easily available high-strength building materials, plus there is no pesky atmosphere to interfere with things so need for active mirrors, and very little in the way of distortion.

http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2007/05/liquid_telescope

[Anonymous No.5545951]

I read that Nasa can track asteroids but could never destroy them in any circumstances, is this true?

[Anonymous No.5545986]

>>5545951 >I read that Nasa can track asteroids but could never destroy them in any circumstances, is this true?

"Destroying" an asteroid by blowing it up is something you don't want to do. One solid rock is a lot easily to control that hundreds of different pieces.

They could destroy it by breaking it up into measured pieces and launching them into the atmosphere

So I would say it's not that they can't but won't and/or don't need to. (Ignoring budget constraints)

[Anonymous No.5546064]

>>5545951
There was a documentary on the BBC recently that covered asteroids.
Breaking things down, the rather big, apocalyptic sized bastards are the ones we're able to reliably detect. The smaller, comparatively less deadly ones are really hard to find, usually until it's too late. Some time in 2008, one such small 'roid crash landed somewhere in the nubian desert: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Earth-bound+asteroid+scientists+saw+coming.-a0199553062
According to the documentary, it was first tracked less than 16 hours away from Earth.
Nothing important got wrecked, but were these things to fall on a city, there'd be very little left.
The scary thing is, we don't know when they'll turn up half the time.

[Anonymous No.5546130]

>>5545606

Couldn't you also make Helium? You know those Farnsworth fusion reactors they use as neutron sources. They're not good for power production of course, since they take way more power to run than you get out of them, but wouldn't they also produce helium as waste?

[Anonymous No.5546178]

>>5546130
If it's not suitable for power production, it's CERTAINLY not suitable for producing common stable isotopes. You get a tremendous amount of energy for every gram of helium produced.

However, we do get quite a bit of our helium-3 from nuclear power plants and weapons production facilities. Tritium, produced when lithium or deuterium is irradiated with neutrons, decays into helium-3. All of the tritium made for nuclear weapons that don't get used eventually turns into helium-3.

Helium-4 is produced much more abundantly from nuclear reactions. Anything that alpha decays is spitting out helium nuclei, and many fission products have a whole chain of alpha decays before they become long-lived or stable isotopes.

Of course, it's alpha decay within the Earth that produces virtually all naturally-occurring helium we currently have access to. That's why there's helium in some natural gas deposits, and why there's helium in the air. Helium in the atmosphere tends to escape into space, but it's always being replenished by thorium and uranium decay in the crust and ocean.

[Anonymous No.5546200]

>>5546178

Isn't helium supposedly actually quite rare?

IIRC the US is basically selling their main supplies much lower then the market cost.

If the price jumps in the future it might make sense to mine it from offworld sources.

[Anonymous No.5546209]

>>5546178

That's not so bad then. It may end up costing a ton, but we'll always have Helium.

[Anonymous No.5546220]

>>5546200
>Isn't helium supposedly actually quite rare?
Not in the universe, and on Earth it's mostly just hard to hang on to, since it escapes from the atmosphere into space.

>IIRC the US is basically selling their main supplies much lower then the market cost.
Raising the price would be likely to spur exploration for new helium wells and development of new technology for separating helium from less concentrated natural gas sources, ultimately resulting in less profit from existing helium sources.

The market for helium is pretty small. There's only so much you can do with the stuff, which is pretty much all being done. It's incredibly abundant in the universe, being constantly produced in large quantities within the Earth, and it's a waste product of just about any nuclear reaction we might use for power.

Whatever temporary profit you can make by selling helium at reasonable prices, you should while you can. The people managing the US helium supply aren't dumb.

[Anonymous No.5546274]

>>5545537

Platinum is only valuable because of it's rarity (and a few other properties, but mainly rarity) when we have an easy supply to it in space one day the price will drop to close to that of what it takes to mine it from space and bring it back ot orbit, weirdly it will probably still be cheaper to mine on Earth, which means Earth mines would outcompete space based ones, but as soon as they go out of business, platinum is rare enough to make it cheaper to mine in space.

Anyway have a way out of this catch-22?

[Anonymous No.5546294]

>>5545539

Which is why we bring back more then we put up, it starts becoming more economical the more you can bring back down for the amount you put into space (disregarding cheaper launch methods)

let's say it takes $11,000 per kg to get the equipment you want into space.

Now let's say your mining titanium; it's market value is more determined by it's properties (as opposed to it's rarity) then other relatively expensive metals, so the price will remain relatively stable with the increased supply.

titanium costs $27.50 / kg, so in that case to break even you need to bring back approximately 400 times the mass of what you put up.

Therefore in order to turn the most profit it makes a lot of sense to build the permanent infrastructure in space to refine the materials and send them back cheaply, as opposed to simply dragging back a chunk of rock with some shiny stuff in it.

[Anonymous No.5546309]

>>5546274
The organization which mined the platinum from the asteroid will have a large enough supply such that they will be able to dictate what price they want and basically corner the market, at least for the first couple asteroids that are mined. Therefore the company will keep prices high and dole out the platinum little by little.

[Anonymous No.5546327]

>>5546294
>Now let's say your mining titanium; it's market value is more determined by it's properties (as opposed to it's rarity) then other relatively expensive metals, so the price will remain relatively stable with the increased supply.
Hah! Ridiculous.

Anyway, titanium is abundant in the Earth's crust. There's no sense in going into space for it.

Titanium's expensive because it's an absolute bitch to turn the oxide into the metallic form, not because the oxide is hard to come by. Anyway, it's not all that great, it mostly just has a cool name.

[Anonymous No.5546332]

>>5545483

It would have to be much bigger then anything we have any chance of moving for it's effect to be noticeable on the planet.

[Anonymous No.5546336]

>>5546327

Eh, fair enough, just an example though.

[Anonymous No.5546706]

>>5545394
http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/
Your comment stopped me, had to post this.
I'll continue reading now.

[Anonymous No.5547445]

>>5545934
RIP Gnuspace

[Anonymous No.5547455]

>>5545394
1500
>I don't see any feasible methods of buggering off to the next continent apart from a one-way ticket to dying en-route so your ungrateful great-grandson can enjoy a desperate life in Beverly Hills.
2013
>I don't see any feasible methods of buggering off to the next solid body apart from a one-way ticket to dying en-route so your ungrateful great-grandson can enjoy a desperate life on Europa.
2100
>I don't see any feasible methods of buggering off to the next star-system apart from a one-way ticket to dying en-route so your ungrateful great-grandson can enjoy a desperate life at Alpha Centauri.

[Anonymous No.5547459]

>>5546706
>http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/
You want to send a probe to another solar system that is uninteresting why?

[Anonymous No.5547479]

>>5547455
Your plan sounds interesting.

Why not spend around trillion USD in the next few years on:

Moon base and industrial exploitation with construction of the lunar outreach space port.

Detonate an H one within the crust of Mars and volcanically jump start it for temperature increase. If that does not work, mine the shit out of it and explore it for life and solar system history anyway.

Get to Europa and find life there (because there is), create human habitat.

Tell me this would not be more money than the military budget in 2012.(going to rise too because of China hacking I'm calling it)

[Anonymous No.5547480]

>>5547459
>that is uninteresting why?
I don't know why you find it uninteresting. Maybe space just isn't your thing.

[Anonymous No.5547487]

>>5547479
>trillion USD
>Moon base and industrial exploitation with construction of the lunar outreach space port.
>Detonate an H one within the crust of Mars and volcanically jump start it for temperature increase. If that does not work, mine the shit out of it and explore it for life and solar system history anyway.
>Get to Europa and find life there (because there is), create human habitat.
you will be lucky if a trillion dollars will buy you any of that

[Anonymous No.5547496]

>>5547479
Tone down the hyperbole.
Part of my point was exactly that none of it will happen overnight.
Like the previous ones, the next step will take many generations to complete and technologies we can't even imagine yet.

[Anonymous No.5547501]

>>5547445
What ever happened to that? I haven't seen anything for days.

[Anonymous No.5547547]

What about the economics of this?

We haven't even colonized antarctica yet, like space it offers opportunities for scientific research which in turn has economic value but it does not offer any raw materials, energy or labor.

[Anonymous No.5547560]

>>5547547
>space offers no raw materials, energy or labor
+1 for the last part, -9 for the others.

Also, there are some simple and a lot of more complex reasons not to 'colonize' the antarctic.

[Anonymous No.5547634]

>>5545466
>put our spores on them

you mean a little game of soggy asteroid?

[Anonymous No.5547720]

>>5545554

because altitude isnt the issue

velocity is.

a weather baloon might lift you high enough, but you wont be anywhere near escape velocity, and you'll need almost the same amount of energy to reach orbit velocity

there is no real advantage in using a baloon to get up high before using rockets

[Anonymous No.5547725]

>>5545568

maybe instead of using normal production methods, they could genetically engineer some microbe to grow massive strings of carbon atoms.

i doubt that microbes can make nanotubes or graphene, but there is no chemical reason why they shouldnt be able to string together huge carbon chains. plants do it when they turn CO2 and H2O into sugars

[Anonymous No.5547736]

>>5545568
It's not the bulk production of CNTs that's the problem, it's producing them in bulk LENGTH.

http://www.cheaptubes.com/carbon-nanotubes-prices.htm
http://www.hielscher.com/ultrasonics/nano_03.htm?gclid=CIbCt6L1xLUCFdB3cAodIxwA7Q
http://www.mknano.com/?gclid=CLHm8aL1xLUCFfCXcAodK1cAIA

You can also order CNT tape, CNT cellophane, CNT powder and so on.
But it's all in the millimeter range AT BEST.

We'd need a system to reliably produce CNTs in the meter, or preferably kilometer range to make good use of them.

[Anonymous No.5547741]

>>5546294

the moon is tidally locked, so theoretically you could build a coilgun into the lunar surface that will always be aimed perfectly at the spot for re-entry, so that periodically, mined materials could be launched almost for free, at a specific landing site which is far away from inhabited areas

heat shields can be made from lunar regolith

basically, you could return materials from the moon for as little as 5-10 dollars per tonne, once the infastructure has been paid for (which would cost tens of billions of dollars, possibly hundreds of billions)

[Anonymous No.5547847]

>>5545474
>Nigger humour
>>>/b/

[Anonymous No.5549155]

>>5547501
apparently the guy is trying to make solar panels with small machines at his house or something, he had a thread about it yesterday but it didn't go very far. He is ordering supplies though.

[Anonymous No.5549236]

>>5547480
Don't sweat it, if it does not have a planet with the same temperature and resources than earth such as oxygen ppm in the atmosphere, water, then I am only interested in the Sunar System.
You do know that the temperature on the "earth-like" planet in the Proxima Centaurai system is extremely high right? And that no amount of adding any atmosphere will help the temperature get any closer to reasonable temperatures right?

The future of space is traveling androids that have AI as good as the human brain. That way, it is much easier for example to land on a planet where it is 100 degrees C everywhere.
But that still requires extremely advanced space ships.
Real talk: Elon Musk is only trying to settle Mars in 10-20 years and he is the best space agency(>implying one man can be his own space agency) right now, above NASA because of the private spirit of his enterprise. This means nothing crazy will happen in space in our lifetimes.

The world is doing pretty good and is pretty safe except for the occasional disaster or terrorism. A lot of people are suffering and hungry but that will never change so it is probably not worth focusing on. However like everyone says always, an insertion of massive funding would, I estimate, present a 75% chance of developing an interstellar drive, AI (which would be just as fucking important considering what I said above), a new use for "dark" matter/energy or the manipulation of the Higgs fieldto human advantage.
tbc>>>

[Anonymous No.5549260]

>this thread

>people have doubts about the fiscal feasibility of asteroid mining

>people doubt that a space elevator can be built

>people are finally starting to see through the science fiction delusions

It's about fucking time. Christ, it was getting to the point that this should have been /scifi/

[Anonymous No.5549267]

>>5547736

you also need the bulk CNT's to have three times the tensile strength that the best nano-ones have ever had.

and be easy to replace while maintaining the load. good luck engineering that one.

Oh, and some way of discharging the static electricity without killing the occupants or anyone standing within a mile of the base. It is essentially a wire moving through an electric field, after all.

[Anonymous No.5549270]

>>5546327

My point still stands though, that you need to bring back a certain ratio of material.

[Anonymous No.5549279]

>>5547479

Mars is completely non-volcanic it's core is pretty much solidified.

[Anonymous No.5549276]

>>5547560

Space offers no raw materials, energy, or labor that breaks even fiscally within the lifetime of the investor.

Better?

>Also, there are some simple and a lot of more complex reasons not to 'colonize' the antarctic.

yeah, nobody wants to live in a cramped death trap. Hey that explains why only deadbeat loners and deluded people can't wait to sign up for space.

[Anonymous No.5549281]

>>5549236
continued^^
While all these things would be great, humanity is still unbalanced (and I am basing my argument on the american system right now because it might be the worse system for resource utilization in the world). In fact we are seeing the growth of a welfare military system that highjacks the human spirit into thinking physical achievement is important for human civilization.
Physical endeavors such as deploying a huge army somewhere with all the machinery that accompanies it always, represent some of the most wasteful enterprises in the history of mankind.
Is the removal of that element, key to human evolution /sci/?
I have, since my high school days, gone at least 15 years without a real fight (physical, not just arguing which I love doing) and I am doing great so far.
Is this it /sci/?

[Anonymous No.5549289]

>>5547479

>no military

>no R&D from the military

you kids jerk off to the list of the things nasa R&D has made, but completely ignore everything the military has done? 100% of the budget does not go into logistics for people overseas.

Also, talk about staggering selfishness. What, only you people in the first world can have peace and space and a happy future? The rest of the world just has to pull itself up by it's own bootstraps while the west jacks up the price of gas for the rest of the world by shooting rockets full of myopic loners into space?

What a great humanity we're working towards; "Fuck you i got mine"

[Anonymous No.5549302]

>>5549281
>In fact we are seeing the growth of a welfare military system that highjacks the human spirit into thinking physical achievement is important for human civilization.

> In fact we are seeing the growth of a welfare military system that highjacks the human spirit into thinking physical achievement is important for human civilization.

As opposed to whatever you believe which is obviously objectively correct.

>Physical endeavors such as deploying a huge army somewhere with all the machinery that accompanies it always, represent some of the most wasteful enterprises in the history of mankind.

So nobody should have stopped hitler? Or do you not believe there are scenarios that can only be answered by force?

>I have, since my high school days, gone at least 15 years without a real fight (physical, not just arguing which I love doing) and I am doing great so far.
Is this it /sci/?

I genuinely do not know where you got your preconceived notions of human nature. Exactly how rich and white and first world are you? It's not hard to avoid fights when you don't go out doors or to bad neighborhoods where some people have the misfortune of being raised. You must think kids want to join gangs, that people want to be homeless.

Get a clue.

[Anonymous No.5549303]

>>5549289
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/02/darpa-budget-death-ray/

3 billion dollars a year of the military goes into cool research? Quantitatively irrelevant.
Drones, wow, such nice research.
>you kids jerk off
lel you just made yourself sound like one

You will not do drugs.
You will go home and rethink your life.

[Anonymous No.5549319]

>>5549303

>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA#Projects

>some drones? lolwhocares

Yeah, they invented one of the major precursors to the internet. They've made prosthetic limbs for all people, have many projects for completely autonomous vehicles, legged machines that we'll eventually get. Shit they're making a goddamned power loader from aliens. They're developing the anti-missile laser systems that we could easily adopt for anti-asteroid defense. To say they're useless is just asinine.

Stop being so immature. Don't just parrot what the internet tells you. Make your own opinion.

[Anonymous No.5549324]

>>5549279
I thought it was, my bad. So remove terraforming Mars from the space program goals then.

[Anonymous No.5549330]

>>5549324

Who is going to spend the several billion dollars to send a thermal bore craft to europa to look for life? Red Lobster? They're the only one with anything to gain from it.

Just because it happened in science fiction, doesn't mean it'll actually happen.

[Anonymous No.5549337]

>>5549319
I am also --developing-- the ion drive.
Oh but sorry I can't cite anything because --it does not exist-- yet.

This was sarcasm for demanding citations on all technologies you mentioned.
It got weird as soon as you said prosthetic limbs, which you are trying to give credit of to Darpa, how low of you.

[Anonymous No.5549350]

>>5549337
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA#Projects

they funded Dean Kamen's Luke Arm you ignorant little snot. All of the things i cited were in the link i supplied. What a fucking shock.

How about you demonstrate some intelligence and actually investigate your accusations?

[Anonymous No.5549351]

>>5549330
Arianespace is doing it. Any more questions?
Oh, here:
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/JUICE_is_Europe_s_next_large_science_mission

[Anonymous No.5549356]

>>5549351

I see no lander or tunneling probe mentioned. This is just an orbiter like galileo.

Good ol ESA. Doing what was already done 30 years ago.

[Anonymous No.5549363]

>>5549350
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA#Projects
I don't have time to scan thew all the unfinished projects of Darpa. But I know that arm you seem to love to death, is too expensive for regular people. Thus it is not a "technology". It is a "luxury".
Satellite TV, weather, communications that was made possible thanks to space investment are "technologies".

[Anonymous No.5549374]

>>5549363
So if things are too expensive for "regular" people they cannot be classified as "technology"?

[Anonymous No.5549378]

>>5549363

>I don't have time to scan thew all the unfinished projects of Darpa.

>i don't have time to investigate my claims

You should work for fox news. Are you this intent to demonstrate that humans do not argue to be right, but only argue to win?

Show me a fully dextrous artificial arm that someone could afford without insurance. What the fuck are you talking about they can't afford it?

Satellite TV isn't a luxury? Holy fuck how spoiled are you?

>communications and weather satellites

Launched on USAF Titan and Atlas launch vehicles. You know, developed by the military.

But keep being hip and edgy and anti-establishment. I bet all the girls at school dig it.

[Anonymous No.5549381]

>>5549374
obviously, if you cannot buy it, it does not exist.
if it does not exist for the 99%, it does not exist at all..

[Anonymous No.5549389]

>>5549363

So then everything in your life is a luxury?

Or is your statement "regular people" among the most ignorant things ever said on 4chan?

[Anonymous No.5549395]

>>5549378
are you corporate or army?

anyway, if you really are interested in space (and therefore belong in this thread), I feel sad for the fact that you might be one of these people who believe that funding is the only answer to any technological problem and therefore we must suck the penis of the rich in order to do science.
FUCK THAT!

[Anonymous No.5549399]

>>5549395

Neither. Pizza Delivery saving up for another go at school. Go ahead and ad hominem.

> I feel sad for the fact that you might be one of these people who believe that funding is the only answer to any technological problem and therefore we must suck the penis of the rich in order to do science.
FUCK THAT!

Wait, are you saying it should be possible to make a particle accelerator on your own dime in your garage? That there are any significant discoveries left to be made with rudimentary tools? Where do you think everything comes from? Doc brown in his shop?

I do not know what confusion of ideas could provoke such a perception of the world.

[Anonymous No.5549401]

>>5549389
>Implying I am not typing this from a shitty part of Bangladesh on a rasberry pie.

[Anonymous No.5549412]

>>5549401

>you support gay marriage? you must be a faggot

Your father would be proud.

[Anonymous No.5549419]

>>5549399
>pizza delivery guy
>4chan /sci/

pick one
>browsing forums that are too complicated for you while not studying
but really man, if you weren't able to get into the educational system on the first go you should really consider saving your money for retirement already, you just won't be able to come back, trust me, I have but barely and I have a good brain and a foreigner primary education.

[Anonymous No.5549424]

>>5549419

>vitriolic ad hominem ad absurdum

And you consider yourself my better? Because i did not have everything handed to me or anyone to guide me?

You really are spoiled.

[Anonymous No.5549436]

>>5549424
I spent thousands of hours writing science down on paper for nothing but grades. I paid back my debt to humanity from being born in a stable country without (hic) deserving it.

"You lucky were born in Western stronghold you should learn about economics"
Anarchy here, FUCK THAT.

[Anonymous No.5549446]

>>5549389
What's wrong with this picture?
Two built teenagers are going adventuring on a water pipe. Plenty of food abound such as large birds to be taken with hand-made weaponry.
Infrastructure looks magnificent.

>tfw all trash under pipe was created by hypocritical poster of the photograph over the 2012

[Anonymous No.5549451]

>>5549399
>Wait, are you saying it should be possible to make a particle accelerator on your own dime in your garage?
People do that all the time. And it's getting much more feasible to achieve high energies with new accelerator technology.

Money helps sometimes, but having money also encourages you to solve problems by throwing money at them, and can even put you in such an odd state of mind that, having decided to throw money at an inelegant approach and then discovered that it costs more than you have, you decide that the only thing for it is to whine that you haven't got enough money, rather than look seriously for more cost-effective alternatives.

Look at Langley vs. the Wright Brothers. He took a "big science" approach with government funding, they made do with their own modest resources. He blew through all his money, produced no results, and whined that he wasn't given enough money to do the job. They, with far less money to spend, made the world's first powered, steerable, heavier-than-air aircraft.

[Anonymous No.5550341]

i think we should be mining the fuck out of asteroids and other objects, we just need to get money to get the first probe going, and once it is sucsessful the material we get can already fund next voyages etc etc we are finally into space.
space industries far outweigh giving food to niggers and reperations to jews, we should think logically where we put our dosh

[Anonymous No.5550662]

>>5549155
Must have missed that. They should really update the wiki or something. I'd gladly contribute to this project. 1 guy tinkering alone is not what this is supposed to be.

[Anonymous No.5550829]

>>5550662
trying to transform this:
http://www.orbitec.com/store/simulant.html
into this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell
at the moment.
You are free to help in any way.

nofame

[Anonymous No.5550864]

>We haven't even colonized antarctica yet

What? Yes we have. There's a shitload of manned bases there, the US one has 250 people.

[Anonymous No.5550873]

>>5550864
Not self-sufficient by a long shot.

[Anonymous No.5550883]

>5550864
Not self-sufficient by a long shot.

[Anonymous No.5550911]

economic geologist here:

maybe its possible (technically) but i assume we won't be abled to pay for it within the next couple of decades.

the point ist that we have enough of everything on earth. its getting more and more difficult to mine it but its still cheaper than this asteroid-towing-to-the-earth thing.

[Anonymous No.5551258]

>>5550911
Which is entirely missing the point of off-world resource base.

[Anonymous No.5551269]

>>5550873
so? most of the worlds countries aren't self-sufficient but rely on various imports in a complex interweaving connection of global commerce.

[Anonymous No.5551295]

>>5550864
Bases and colonies are different. People don't go to Antarctica to live there and raise families. (though they could, far more easily than in space, due to air and seafood)

There actually would be a lot of reasons to do stuff in Antarctica. The big problems with that are environmental and political, rather than technical.

[Anonymous No.5551365]

>>5551269
Most of the world's countries wouldn't be deserted ghost-nations a few months after supply routes got cut.

Foreign markets aren't actually necessary for survival.

This of course exempts shitholes and toy-countries like north korea, vatican, nauru etc.

[Anonymous No.5553610]

sorry i don't get it. what point am i missing??

[Anonymous No.5553612]

>>5551258
>??
sorry i don't get it. what point am i missing?