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Most asteroids are worthless chunks or carbon, another significant portion are sort of dirty balls of sand and rock. The smallest portion are composed of any me

Most asteroids are worthless chunks or carbon, another significant portion are sort of dirty balls of sand and rock. The smallest portion are composed of any metals. Metallic asteroids are mostly iron and nickel and unlikely to be loaded up with precious metals. Any that would be interesting for mining would be in the asteroid belt which requires significant amounts of energy to reach in a reasonable time frame. You also don't seem to be aware, Ceres does not currently have a space gas station on the surface. If you intend to refuel and resupply there such a thing would need to be build...for hundreds of billions of dollars because it's super difficult and none of the technology to do it currently exists. So that would need to be invented, developed, built, and put into space. Also raw ore amounts don't mean anything without refining capacity. There's roughly zero of it currently anywhere off the surface of the Earth. Again, in-space ore refining is something that exists pretty much only as concept drawings and some PhD thesis. So that would need to be invented, developed, built, and put into space. Even if we could reliably get people out to the asteroid belt and keep them alive, the volume of the belt is absolutely enormous. Worthwhile asteroids are vast distances apart and far away from any larger asteroids you might want to use as bases. It would require enormous expenditure of resources to get some mining equipment to a worthwhile asteroid, mine it, and get that raw ore somewhere it could be processed. The lack of gravity and atmosphere makes space mining far far more difficult than mining on Earth. If you kick up dust on Earth it blows away in the wind or settles quickly. Kick up dust on an asteroid and it goes into orbit around it and takes potentially centuries to settle. Asteroid dust also has no weathering so it would be extremely harsh on all the equipment. That all just makes the venture more difficult and more expensive. Then you've got some iron and nickel, something the Earth literally has tons of. Even if you manage to find the Comstock Lode asteroid you'll spend billions to mine precious metals which will cease to be precious thus lose their monetary value. The differences between crossing the Sahara to find gold and looking for it in an asteroid are when you cross the Sahara there's air at the destination. You don't have to make the crossing in a tin can containing your own personal universe. At any point along the journey you can take a deep breath. If you tear your shirt you don't suffocate and die. If you trip and fall you don't float away unable to be recovered. If you drop something important it lands on the ground rather than float away never to be seen again. A solar flare isn't likely to kill your entire crew or destroy the only space gas station for tens of millions of miles. The Sahara is inhospitable and will kill you if unprepared. Space is downright hostile. You can't really be taken seriously when you sort of hand wave the challenges doing anything in space. It just sounds like you're pointing to some sci-fi books as if those are the answer to everything. Space is hostile and doing anything in it is dangerous and expensive. Any resources that exist there are orders of magnitude more difficult to access let alone exploit than any on Earth.

yellowapple 6y ago
> Ceres does not currently have a space gas station on the surface. Golly gee whittakers, really? I had no idea! Well that changes everything! Obviously we'll need to build infrastructure. My point is that it's a worthwhile investment. You obviously seem to disagree, which is fine, but if all you're going to do is be needlessly condescending then this conversation is probably not worth continuing (but eh, it's a Sunday morning and I ain't got much else better to do, so why not? Happy to be condescending, too, if that's how you'd like to conduct this particular discussion). > Also raw ore amounts don't mean anything without refining capacity. There's roughly zero of it currently anywhere off the surface of the Earth. Golly gee whittakers, really? I had no idea! Well that changes everything! > you'll spend billions to mine precious metals which will cease to be precious thus lose their monetary value. Good. That's the whole point. These precious metals have vast industrial uses that are much more viable if they're, you know, not-so-precious. So what if the price of the metals themselves drops? The wealth you've created from these invigorated industrial processes will more than make up for it. If you really did want to prevent this you can artificially restrict the supply, like diamond mines already do to keep diamond prices unnaturally high. I feel like that's pretty myopic, though. > Kick up dust on an asteroid and it goes into orbit around it and takes potentially centuries to settle. Then catch it, which is a thing, that you can do. The hard part is then putting that dust somewhere else (you'll probably want to compact it, and then put it back on or in the asteroid - tricky, but not impossible). Or let it orbit free. Yeah, it's harsh on the equipment, but you can indeed build equipment to handle that (lunar and Mars missions already have to do this, albeit to a much lesser extent). I think you're overestimating the ability for that dust to really "orbit" anything besides the Sun; you do recall that asteroids have very very low escape velocities, right? > That all just makes the venture more difficult and more expensive. Which is offset at least somewhat by the lack of gravity making it much easier to dig tunnels (you don't have to worry nearly as much about structural supports) and get ore out of the asteroid (you're not fighting gravity). > The differences between crossing the Sahara to find gold and looking for it in an asteroid are when you cross the Sahara there's air at the destination. Golly gee whittakers, really? I had no idea! Well that changes everything! > You can't really be taken seriously when you sort of hand wave the challenges doing anything in space. Nowhere did I say that doing things in space is easy. All I'm saying is that they're possible and worthwhile to at least consider doing. You can't really be taken seriously when your only response boils down to "la la la YellowApple's stupid this will never work never mind the decades of research that has been done and continues to be done for this exact venture". Everything is "prohibitively" expensive until someone actually does it; I'm calling for us as a species to figure out how to do it, and a lot of the answers are right in front of us, and with some development can even be relatively affordable when considering the economic gain alone (let alone the scientific gain and the improved probability of our species surviving some catastrophe on Earth). Like, if your main objection is "but but but it'll cost billions", we're already burning trillions in the US alone (public and private) on far more fruitless ventures. What have we got to lose by diverting some of those trillions to asteroid mining instead? (To be clear, I don't expect you or anyone else to take me seriously, either. I don't even take me seriously. But I do have a select few strong beliefs, and the strongest of those beliefs is that humanity must expand on a permanent basis beyond Earth or else it is doomed to perish. It probably won't happen in my lifetime, but it absolutely must happen)

yellowapple 6y ago

> Ceres does not currently have a space gas station on the surface. Golly gee whittakers, really? I had no idea! Well that changes everything! Obviously we'll need to build infrastructure. My point is that it's a worthwhile investment. You obviously seem to disagree, which is fine, but if all you're going to do is be needlessly condescending then this conversation is probably not worth continuing (but eh, it's a Sunday morning and I ain't got much else better to do, so why not? Happy to be condescending, too, if that's how you'd like to conduct this particular discussion). > Also raw ore amounts don't mean anything without refining capacity. There's roughly zero of it currently anywhere off the surface of the Earth. Golly gee whittakers, really? I had no idea! Well that changes everything! > you'll spend billions to mine precious metals which will cease to be precious thus lose their monetary value. Good. That's the whole point. These precious metals have vast industrial uses that are much more viable if they're, you know, not-so-precious. So what if the price of the metals themselves drops? The wealth you've created from these invigorated industrial processes will more than make up for it. If you really did want to prevent this you can artificially restrict the supply, like diamond mines already do to keep diamond prices unnaturally high. I feel like that's pretty myopic, though. > Kick up dust on an asteroid and it goes into orbit around it and takes potentially centuries to settle. Then catch it, which is a thing, that you can do. The hard part is then putting that dust somewhere else (you'll probably want to compact it, and then put it back on or in the asteroid - tricky, but not impossible). Or let it orbit free. Yeah, it's harsh on the equipment, but you can indeed build equipment to handle that (lunar and Mars missions already have to do this, albeit to a much lesser extent). I think you're overestimating the ability for that dust to really "orbit" anything besides the Sun; you do recall that asteroids have very very low escape velocities, right? > That all just makes the venture more difficult and more expensive. Which is offset at least somewhat by the lack of gravity making it much easier to dig tunnels (you don't have to worry nearly as much about structural supports) and get ore out of the asteroid (you're not fighting gravity). > The differences between crossing the Sahara to find gold and looking for it in an asteroid are when you cross the Sahara there's air at the destination. Golly gee whittakers, really? I had no idea! Well that changes everything! > You can't really be taken seriously when you sort of hand wave the challenges doing anything in space. Nowhere did I say that doing things in space is easy. All I'm saying is that they're possible and worthwhile to at least consider doing. You can't really be taken seriously when your only response boils down to "la la la YellowApple's stupid this will never work never mind the decades of research that has been done and continues to be done for this exact venture". Everything is "prohibitively" expensive until someone actually does it; I'm calling for us as a species to figure out how to do it, and a lot of the answers are right in front of us, and with some development can even be relatively affordable when considering the economic gain alone (let alone the scientific gain and the improved probability of our species surviving some catastrophe on Earth). Like, if your main objection is "but but but it'll cost billions", we're already burning trillions in the US alone (public and private) on far more fruitless ventures. What have we got to lose by diverting some of those trillions to asteroid mining instead? (To be clear, I don't expect you or anyone else to take me seriously, either. I don't even take me seriously. But I do have a select few strong beliefs, and the strongest of those beliefs is that humanity must expand on a permanent basis beyond Earth or else it is doomed to perish. It probably won't happen in my lifetime, but it absolutely must happen)