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> What would our houses and cars look like if there was a limitless supply of aluminum? There IS a limitless supply of aluminum. The top kilometer of crust al
by tjic 17y ago
> What would our houses and cars look like if there was a limitless supply of aluminum?
There IS a limitless supply of aluminum. The top kilometer of crust all over the earth is stunningly rich in aluminum. It's just that PROCESSING it takes energy.
...just like processing an asteroid.
Dirt, though, has the added advantage of already being HERE.
- noonespecial 17y agoThere's "plenty" of titanium here too, most of its just in the form of titanium dioxide which happens to be very hard to turn back into the good stuff. (But its fantastic for making paint..) As I recall, the allure with metals in asteroids that they are "hunks of cut up planets". Instead of digging and processing, you just scrape the good stuff off the surface and (being in deep space and all) its not oxidized or otherwise contaminated like it is when found on earth. You build your kickass starship out of it right then and there or encapsulate it in some heat shielding and drop it in the nearest ocean for retrieval. A great many people who bought a bunch of gold as a hedge against inflation might be disappointed though...
- prewett 17y agoI suspect the metals are oxidized on the asteroids, too. If aluminum takes so much energy to liberate from the oxygen, it must really like to combine with oxygen. I'd guess there was a fair amount of oxygen floating around with the aluminum before it clumped together into asteroids, even if there isn't now.
- noonespecial 17y agoAsteroidal resources are unique and diverse. In general, they are different from the dirt beneath our feet and the ores that we mine from our planet's crust. Likewise, they are much different than the Moon, Mars, and other planets' crusts. Asteroids are much more metal-rich, like the core of the Earth, Moon, Mars and any other planet, and unlike their crusts. The asteroids are normally not as enriched in oxides, silicates, and the other lighterweight elements that floated up to dominate a planetary crust. Many asteroids are like a mixture of a planetary metal core plus a crust plus the mantle in between. Some are entirely like a core or a mantle or a crust, having come from a large parent body which was broken up. In most asteroids, free metal is abundant in the mix, and often dominant. This free metal can be used without any further industrial processing. http://www.permanent.com/a-overvw.htm http://www.permanent.com/a-overvw.htm
- pmjordan 17y agoI don't have a good explanation why (lack of pressure, maybe?) but this doesn't seem to be the case. For example, I've seen the 60-ton Hoba meteorite in Namibia, and although the surface has corroded and oxidised, its bulk is definitely solid metal (mostly iron, some nickel). It would still take some processing to separate the compounds, but nowhere near as much as ores. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoba_meteorite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoba_meteorite
- Confusion 17y agoIt's just that PROCESSING it takes energy. Which is exactly why we need fusion power and not the hydro, wind and solar power the shortsighted environmentalists keep pushing. Those will never produce the vast additional amounts of energy needed to make the next step in our general wellbeing. With cheap limitless energy, you can produce all the water you want, bind all the CO2 you want, produce all the O3 you want, recycle everything you want and even use fission to produce whatever materials you want.
- olefoo 17y agoSolar power is fusion power. And if you're dealing with an asteroid you can capture it and use it with no transmission loss.
- jff 17y agoSolar power is you sitting 200 feet away from a bonfire. Fusion reactor power is placing a space heater directly in front of you. If you were cold, which would you prefer?
- bjelkeman-again 17y agoWell, if the space heater is ready "in fifty years or so" and the bonfire is right here, right now, then I think I'll take the bonfire. ;)
- olefoo 17y agoA mirror is orders of magnitude cheaper than any fusion containment system you care to name, also orders of magnitude less mass. Seriously, do the math, for the applications we're talking about (asteroid mining), given that the solar constant at earths orbit is roughly 1400 Watts/m^2 a relatively modest set of mirrors could be used to heat metal up to working temperature.
- lutorm 17y agoAnd what makes you think fusion will actually turn out to be that cheap? People said the same thing about fission, but it's turned out to be quite expensive, and the technology is likely to be very complex. If you calculate how large area of photovoltaics you can build for the price of developing and building a fusion reactor (not that anyone has any idea what this cost will be), I suspect you'd get a lot of it.