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Nope. We can't even make asteroid mining happen, and that * Is also shiny and has movies * It's cheaper by a good number of orders of magnitude * It has mass

Nope. We can't even make asteroid mining happen, and that * Is also shiny and has movies * It's cheaper by a good number of orders of magnitude * It has massive commercial value (bringing home piles of gold. Well, platinum metals) * It has actual military implications, which is the main motivator for any government progrem * It gets to call the military research "planetary defense", and there are more cool movies about that. No government is getting its act together on that. A distant black hole is right out.

eru 3y ago
We have sent probes to asteroids. So we should be able to get our act together to send probes to the hypothetical black hole.
Yizahi 3y ago
Outside of mining unobtanium, or fossilized unicorns, or HP ink, almost anything else is not commercially viable to mine in space and bring down to Earth. And it will be so even if Starship is ready, and even if that Starship would indeed cost 1-2 mil to launch as advertised. It is always cheaper to mine stuff on Earth, ever rare elements. That's why nobody is seriously doing anything in that direction. Mining asteroid for a local asteroid settlement would be profitable, but there are no asteroids settlements.
- groby_b 3y ago
  Note that, as we cling to geographic borders, some metals might well become unobtainium for some countries. But yes, agreed, it's way too expensive. And so we're not even going to make that happen. That was the point - it's more attractive than neighboring black holes along several different axes, and it's still not worth it.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  What you'd want to do is de-orbit an asteroid made up mostly of precious metals, say, platinum, using something like an Orion drive. Then use the moon as a catcher's mitt (even better if you can use Earth, but K-Ting ourselves is going to be a hard sell at the shareholder meeting). Refine / cut up your asteroid on the lunar surface, then you need a relatively small amount of dV to put your payloads into a decaying orbit around earth (~1/4 the dV to get into low earth orbit from the surface). Enough heat shielding, and you'll be able to crash your payload into the ocean somewhere for recovery. Frankly, the biggest issue is that you'd end up flooding the market.
  - groby_b 3y ago
    "K-Ting ourselves is going to be a hard sell at the shareholder meeting" Not if you launch first, and present after ;)
  - Yizahi 3y ago
    First of all - such asteroid need to exist in the first place. Much more likely that there are asteroids which have higher concentrations of rare ores compared to earth, but nowhere near being "mostly of out them". Second - humans need to locate this deposit. Remotely. In the asteroid field. We are still finding out deposits in the habitable Earth regions, because that is a hard task, talking about locating deposits in the Belt is an impossible task, and will remain so for a long time. Third - we need to get there. Excluding flyby's, the best humanity managed is to deliver two 1 ton vehicles to the Mars. And there we had a luxury of aerobraking to save a lot of fuel. Belt is way farther, there is no aerobrake possibility and we will have to deal with other asteroids along the way. We don't have such tech. Fourth - we will need to strap engines to the asteroid, remotely, with an hour signal lag. Engines which don't exist in any form today. And we need to get fuel to them somehow. Impossible task. Fifth, we need a Moon colony with robots or humans. Sixth - high energy tech on the Moon. Seven - launch facility on the Moon. And I've probably missed a few other impossible hurdles, writing this. Then IF all of that would exist, you would need it to be at least as cheap as Earth based mining, which is a pipe dream. Any space tech is more expensive by design, sometimes orders of magnitude more expensive. AND finally there need to be an infinitely elastic market on Earth for this new source of materials. Imagine you will sell a billion tons of platinum tomorrow, the price would crash and never ever recover. You see this yourself in your last sentence.

eru 3y ago

We have sent probes to asteroids. So we should be able to get our act together to send probes to the hypothetical black hole.

Yizahi 3y ago

Outside of mining unobtanium, or fossilized unicorns, or HP ink, almost anything else is not commercially viable to mine in space and bring down to Earth. And it will be so even if Starship is ready, and even if that Starship would indeed cost 1-2 mil to launch as advertised. It is always cheaper to mine stuff on Earth, ever rare elements. That's why nobody is seriously doing anything in that direction. Mining asteroid for a local asteroid settlement would be profitable, but there are no asteroids settlements.

groby_b 3y ago
Note that, as we cling to geographic borders, some metals might well become unobtainium for some countries. But yes, agreed, it's way too expensive. And so we're not even going to make that happen. That was the point - it's more attractive than neighboring black holes along several different axes, and it's still not worth it.
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
What you'd want to do is de-orbit an asteroid made up mostly of precious metals, say, platinum, using something like an Orion drive. Then use the moon as a catcher's mitt (even better if you can use Earth, but K-Ting ourselves is going to be a hard sell at the shareholder meeting). Refine / cut up your asteroid on the lunar surface, then you need a relatively small amount of dV to put your payloads into a decaying orbit around earth (~1/4 the dV to get into low earth orbit from the surface). Enough heat shielding, and you'll be able to crash your payload into the ocean somewhere for recovery. Frankly, the biggest issue is that you'd end up flooding the market.
- groby_b 3y ago
  "K-Ting ourselves is going to be a hard sell at the shareholder meeting" Not if you launch first, and present after ;)
- Yizahi 3y ago
  First of all - such asteroid need to exist in the first place. Much more likely that there are asteroids which have higher concentrations of rare ores compared to earth, but nowhere near being "mostly of out them". Second - humans need to locate this deposit. Remotely. In the asteroid field. We are still finding out deposits in the habitable Earth regions, because that is a hard task, talking about locating deposits in the Belt is an impossible task, and will remain so for a long time. Third - we need to get there. Excluding flyby's, the best humanity managed is to deliver two 1 ton vehicles to the Mars. And there we had a luxury of aerobraking to save a lot of fuel. Belt is way farther, there is no aerobrake possibility and we will have to deal with other asteroids along the way. We don't have such tech. Fourth - we will need to strap engines to the asteroid, remotely, with an hour signal lag. Engines which don't exist in any form today. And we need to get fuel to them somehow. Impossible task. Fifth, we need a Moon colony with robots or humans. Sixth - high energy tech on the Moon. Seven - launch facility on the Moon. And I've probably missed a few other impossible hurdles, writing this. Then IF all of that would exist, you would need it to be at least as cheap as Earth based mining, which is a pipe dream. Any space tech is more expensive by design, sometimes orders of magnitude more expensive. AND finally there need to be an infinitely elastic market on Earth for this new source of materials. Imagine you will sell a billion tons of platinum tomorrow, the price would crash and never ever recover. You see this yourself in your last sentence.