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Imagine the wealth a company could amass if it succeeded in terraforming mars. Rare metals, sale of land etc. This is one of those markets where you have rathe
by flexie 10y ago
Imagine the wealth a company could amass if it succeeded in terraforming mars. Rare metals, sale of land etc.
This is one of those markets where you have rather high barriers to entry.
- misterS 10y ago> rather high barriers to entry. About 55 million kilometers/34 million miles high at least.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago(nitpick) In space, you count barriers to entry in km/s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v
- tangue 10y agoEach time I'm hearing about minerals (like in asteroid mining) I'm wondering how do you deal with atmosphere re-entry ? Meteorites made of metal are melting so what's the plan here ? And which country will be ok to receive a ton of unguided metal on its territory ?
- gambiting 10y agoThere's literally 0 chance that mining anything on Mars and bringing it back to Earth would be profitable. Obviously mining is still going to be important to build things on Mars, but sending any metals over, no matter how rare, is just crazy.
- singuerinc 10y agoYou are thinking what we can do right now. Probably the same thought had the Europeans 500 years ago.
- gambiting 10y agoThe energy cost of transporting mass over distance isn't going to change no matter what technology we invent.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- perilunar 10y agoMaybe not Mars, but asteroids definitely. Platinum is $33k per kg. Bringing back a tonne would net you $33 million.
- CoryG89 10y agoI think the point is that while it may be worth $33 million, it would take much, much more than that to get it safely back to Earth. Also, the price of platinum is currently driven by the knowledge that it's naturally scarce and the likelihood of a large amount of "new" platinum coming on the market is low. If this ever changes (we somehow figure out how to profitably bring back a tonne of platinum), then the price would likely crash, as the amount out there in space is essentially infinite.
- gambiting 10y agoIf you bring back a tonne it would make the value plummet. And $33 million is still more than your average space mission, and this wouldn't be an average space mission.
- andyjohnson0 10y agoCoat the metal in an ablative shield made of Martian rock (handwaving over how this is done), fire it to earth using a mass-driver, guide it in with an on-board chemical rocket engine, and drop it into the Pacific for recovery (more handwaving). Of course, this also has other uses [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
- tsaprailis 10y agoI think the whole idea of space/asteroid mining is to use them eventually in space based manufacturing. The biggest cost of space exploration is actually raising a spaceship into outer space. If you just build it up there it's very fuel efficient to transport between space and to other stations/planets.
- tangue 10y agoOk in an Ender's game future, but asteroid startups are talking about ten years...
- andyjohnson0 10y agoI'm really not sure I want companies to have the capability to re-format entire planets. That sounds like entirely too much power for any organisation to have, if only given its potential for weaponisation. And land sale? The Outer Space Treaty [1] prohibits governments from claiming ownership of planets, so where would the authority to sell land on Mars come from? Do we really want companies to own planets? Weyland-Yutani (Mars) Inc. anyone? Edit: We're not even close to getting a grip on the social and legal problems of having access to habitable, off-earth environments. I suspect that the potential for conflict is huge. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
- khoury 10y agoDoes the concept of "owning" even exist outside of earth? Interesting times.
- JBReefer 10y agoSo far as we know, no concepts exist outside Earth
- CoryG89 10y agoAsk the flag they planted on the moon.
- khoury 10y agoWell, to us, it means something of course. But to others, who knows? It's kinda naïv (and a bit cute) of us to just assume we can go ahead and start "owning" things in the universe now. But hey, maybe that's how it works out there too. We'll see :)
- 3pt14159 10y agoThe Outer Space Treaty was written with the party states knowing that it was a medium term measure. Capitalism will come to The Moon, Mars, and Venus. It will start with people just building wherever there is available land, like we did on the frontier, then once a couple thousand or a couple hundred thousand people are in outer space a new treaty will be formed around the political realities of the day.
- afarrell 10y agoIt wouldn't be able to hold onto all of that wealth really. Even the East India companies couldn't really succeed at acting as nation states.
- Jugurtha 10y agoA high barrier to enter and a high barrier to escape, too. Velocity wise.
- bryanlarsen 10y agoAmassing great wealth implies that metals and barren lands on Earth are currently rare & expensive. They're not. Metals: choose an elemental metal you think is rare. Look up it's Wikipedia entry, and look at its availability. It will be expressed in terms of a percentage of the earth's crust, something like 0.01%. Multiply that by 2.6*10^22 kg and realize that we're not going to run out of it any time soon, nor is it rare. It may be expensive to mine, but compared to the cost of transporting on rockets? Cheap. Land: you can buy prime farmland in Saskatchewan, Canada for USD500 per acre.
- JBReefer 10y agoAnd the weather is much nicer, even in Saskatchewan! You get all the air you can breath! Honestly though - isn't Venus more likely to take well to terraforming
- ccozan 10y agoVenus - like Mars too, is missing an essential element for terraforming: water. On both planets this is long lost, and the constituent elements, espcially hydrogen, is gone from the surface. Unless there is a way to massively mine the rocks for the hydrogen and oxigen, there is no other way to terraform a planet like Mars or Venus. I am afraid that would put the terraforming efforts like hundreds of years ahead.
- andyjohnson0 10y agoMars has plenty of water: "More than five million cubic kilometres of ice have been identified at or near the surface of modern Mars, enough to cover the whole planet to a depth of 35 meters (115 ft). Even more ice is likely to be locked away in the deep subsurface." [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_on_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_on_Mars
- mattashii 10y agoThe problem with Venus is that the atmospheric pressure at surface level is about 92 times that of earth, the surface temperature is 735 K, and the atmosphere contains 96.5% carbon dioxide, while also containing significant amounts of sulfur dioxide. This is even more toxic than the Martian atmosphere. If you want to terraform Venus to a (human livable) state you'd probably need to give it a solar shade to cool the planet to decent temperatures, shrub the 4.6 10^17 tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and remove those 7.210^13 tonnes of sulfur dioxide. edit Also, please note that Venus has a 117 earth day solar day, while the Martian solar day is only 24h 37m. Sources: wikipedia, google, calculator
- dagw 10y agoHave you ever flown over northern Canada or northern Russia? Empty land is ridiculously plentiful on earth.
- titzer 10y agoThis is kind of exploitative attitude is why we're in the situation we're in with Earth.