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This argues that off-world activity will be mostly conducted by robots. That doesn't conflict with my point about the vast stores of resources available to huma

This argues that off-world activity will be mostly conducted by robots. That doesn't conflict with my point about the vast stores of resources available to human civilization outside Earth.

dredmorbius 4y ago
There are vast stores of resouces available to human civilisation under your feet. Space mining faces not only distance and energy costs, but extreme environments, lack of ore formation, highly limited element availability in numerous cases, and the challenge of delivery for Earth use without leaving a literal smoking crater. Space is for virtually all intents an informational domain. Not one of matter. Keep in mind that even in the one field for which space-based methods were most widely and plausibly promoted, telecommunications, it is literally easier and more useful to wrap the globe in glass than to incur the round-trip time costs of Earth-to-orbit transmission. Starlink overcomes some of the time delay but seems unlikely to match the sheer bandwidth of fibre-optic communications.
- ETH_start 4y ago
  Mining a single metallic asteroid would increase the supply of certain metals many fold: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/asteroid-16-psyche-may-be-worth-more-than-planet-earth-at-10-quintillion-in-fine-metals-180979303/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/asteroid-16-psyche... And there are millions of these types of asteroids in the solar system. Extra-terrestrial resources also include the sunlight that is currently being beamed into empty space all around the Earth, that could otherwise be harvested by massive solar farms. There is millions of times more sunlight missing the Earth than reaching the Earth. Setting up an infrastructure for harnessing these resources would be a massive endeavor but once the infrastructure is set up, the amount of resources that come to be accessible to human civilization grows by orders of magnitude.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014960

This argues that off-world activity will be mostly conducted by robots. That doesn't conflict with my point about the vast stores of resources available to human civilization outside Earth.

dredmorbius 4y ago

There are vast stores of resouces available to human civilisation under your feet. Space mining faces not only distance and energy costs, but extreme environments, lack of ore formation, highly limited element availability in numerous cases, and the challenge of delivery for Earth use without leaving a literal smoking crater. Space is for virtually all intents an informational domain. Not one of matter. Keep in mind that even in the one field for which space-based methods were most widely and plausibly promoted, telecommunications, it is literally easier and more useful to wrap the globe in glass than to incur the round-trip time costs of Earth-to-orbit transmission. Starlink overcomes some of the time delay but seems unlikely to match the sheer bandwidth of fibre-optic communications.

ETH_start 4y ago
Mining a single metallic asteroid would increase the supply of certain metals many fold: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/asteroid-16-psyche-may-be-worth-more-than-planet-earth-at-10-quintillion-in-fine-metals-180979303/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/asteroid-16-psyche... And there are millions of these types of asteroids in the solar system. Extra-terrestrial resources also include the sunlight that is currently being beamed into empty space all around the Earth, that could otherwise be harvested by massive solar farms. There is millions of times more sunlight missing the Earth than reaching the Earth. Setting up an infrastructure for harnessing these resources would be a massive endeavor but once the infrastructure is set up, the amount of resources that come to be accessible to human civilization grows by orders of magnitude.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014960