5 ms·

The same may be told of our unwillingness to harness the solar system. Future dwellers would say we knew how to do this and simply did not want.

adastra22 2y ago
We want and we will. It’s just the minority of us that will have to push progress forward, as has always been the case.
- xvector 2y ago
  You're spot on. Historically, it's always been a few visionaries driving tech forward while the average person resists change or even causes regression. Look at the bike, camera, car, and airplane [1]. Same story with AI today. People fear and hate change, but progress is inevitable so long as visionaries continue to push it forward. Humanity will be dragged into a better future, kicking and screaming if need be, like it always has been. [1]: https://pessimistsarchive.org/ https://pessimistsarchive.org/
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
Exactly. If we had kept funding NASA up to now, at the levels that reached the Moon, we would be mining asteroids by now. Instead, once the space race was one, there was no purpose so funding was cut. That we do anything with such meager funding is incredible. Imagine if we had vast solar arrays, bases on multiple planets. It is totally doable with current technology, just a matter of funding. Thought, guess that is the point of this article. There is no demand.
- afh1 2y ago
  More so the economics have to work out, the author points multiple times to profitability and ROI. Is it profitable to invest trillions of dollars into... Asteroid mining? Vs cheaply mining the earth? Maybe when there's so little to mine here and rocket fuel is virtually free...
  - thriftwy 2y ago
    You will get access to many order of magnitudes of minerals out there. You answer to it "we don't need that much, and it's not where we can use it". Which is basically Emperor's speech from the linked article.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      > many order of magnitudes of minerals out there. There are less than 100 useful elements on the periodic table. Everything else is a molecule that we can make from one of the above atoms. We mine for gems, but even then lab grown gems are competitive in price. We mine for energy (oil, coal). We mine for sand where we mostly care about cheap (specific properties matter, but in general you can find something local that is good enough and transport is cheaper). Most of the rest we are separating out the raw atoms and then recombining into the exact allow we want. For gems you might be able to sell this is from whatever asteroid. I'm not in marketing but I can see someone paying extra for that. Everything else either cheap is important - the energy needed to get it to earth counts against you - or we want the raw atoms in pure form.
      - thriftwy 2y ago
        Space minerals are cheap by the bulk if you use them in space. But that's alao true for fruit of industrialization. Railway and steel mills make more steel mills and railway.
        bluGill 2y ago
        It will take a lot of lifting earth stuff into orbit before we have useful mills in space to refine those metals. Maybe eventually you will be correct, but current human lifetimes space minerals are very expensive.
        thriftwy 2y ago
        Same with industrialization. Awfully huge down payment.
- moomin 2y ago
  As disappointed as I am by modern levels of space funding, I think everyone underestimates just quite how hard “produce a closed sustainable ecosystem that lasts two years” is. If we wanted to spread out, that would be very high on our research priorities and I don’t think right now we have any idea how hard it actually is.
  - jfyi 2y ago
    To be fair, we do a pretty good job at a sealed 10 gallon carboy with plants and aerobic bacteria. It's just scaling from there, right? ;)
  - thriftwy 2y ago
    You don't actually need humans to be out there all the time. Humans are not present at the bottoms of oil wells or on top of wind turbines.
- DennisP 2y ago
  There was no demand, at the absurd travel costs you get when you throw away an expensive rocket with every launch. Now that we're on the verge of mass-produced rockets that are completely and rapidly reusable, the economics are about to change and we might find plenty of demand. (And it's not just SpaceX; Stoke Space for example looks really interesting.)
  - vundercind 2y ago
    It makes it cheaper, but still very expensive. A dozen or more launches of very large rockets to ready a payload large enough to do any work in the asteroid belt and come back, and that’d be like a tiny prospector-robot aiming to return a couple kg of material. Doing much more remains locked behind the expensive (to put it mildly) and unproven notion of getting industrial-scale fuel refining working in space (or at least in a much smaller gravity well) with minimal inputs from Earth. There are… a few challenges there.
    - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
      Guess I was thinking if we did have 50 (from 70's onward) years of massive funding, that cheaper re-usable ships would have been developed earlier. We wouldn't have needed SpaceX, because re-usability would have been achieved earlier. The Space Shuttle was an attempt, but even that was pretty small funding, and later. If the funding had continued from the 70's onward then even the Space Shuttle would have looked antiquated. As mentioned there is a huge initial capital cost to enter into the Space Industry, that is why you need government to jump start it. SpaceX is great, but even that is decades later than it had to be.
      - pfdietz 2y ago
        I think the experience with the Shuttle shows that NASA was fundamentally unable to produce an economically viable product. They simply aren't structured to be able to do that -- the political structure around them prevents it, regardless of the level of funding. It's the same reason private companies in competitive industries outperform government design bureaus.

adastra22 2y ago

We want and we will. It’s just the minority of us that will have to push progress forward, as has always been the case.

xvector 2y ago
You're spot on. Historically, it's always been a few visionaries driving tech forward while the average person resists change or even causes regression. Look at the bike, camera, car, and airplane [1]. Same story with AI today. People fear and hate change, but progress is inevitable so long as visionaries continue to push it forward. Humanity will be dragged into a better future, kicking and screaming if need be, like it always has been. [1]: https://pessimistsarchive.org/ https://pessimistsarchive.org/

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

Exactly. If we had kept funding NASA up to now, at the levels that reached the Moon, we would be mining asteroids by now. Instead, once the space race was one, there was no purpose so funding was cut. That we do anything with such meager funding is incredible. Imagine if we had vast solar arrays, bases on multiple planets. It is totally doable with current technology, just a matter of funding. Thought, guess that is the point of this article. There is no demand.

afh1 2y ago
More so the economics have to work out, the author points multiple times to profitability and ROI. Is it profitable to invest trillions of dollars into... Asteroid mining? Vs cheaply mining the earth? Maybe when there's so little to mine here and rocket fuel is virtually free...
- thriftwy 2y ago
  You will get access to many order of magnitudes of minerals out there. You answer to it "we don't need that much, and it's not where we can use it". Which is basically Emperor's speech from the linked article.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    > many order of magnitudes of minerals out there. There are less than 100 useful elements on the periodic table. Everything else is a molecule that we can make from one of the above atoms. We mine for gems, but even then lab grown gems are competitive in price. We mine for energy (oil, coal). We mine for sand where we mostly care about cheap (specific properties matter, but in general you can find something local that is good enough and transport is cheaper). Most of the rest we are separating out the raw atoms and then recombining into the exact allow we want. For gems you might be able to sell this is from whatever asteroid. I'm not in marketing but I can see someone paying extra for that. Everything else either cheap is important - the energy needed to get it to earth counts against you - or we want the raw atoms in pure form.
    - thriftwy 2y ago
      Space minerals are cheap by the bulk if you use them in space. But that's alao true for fruit of industrialization. Railway and steel mills make more steel mills and railway.
      - bluGill 2y ago
        It will take a lot of lifting earth stuff into orbit before we have useful mills in space to refine those metals. Maybe eventually you will be correct, but current human lifetimes space minerals are very expensive.
        thriftwy 2y ago
        Same with industrialization. Awfully huge down payment.
moomin 2y ago
As disappointed as I am by modern levels of space funding, I think everyone underestimates just quite how hard “produce a closed sustainable ecosystem that lasts two years” is. If we wanted to spread out, that would be very high on our research priorities and I don’t think right now we have any idea how hard it actually is.
- jfyi 2y ago
  To be fair, we do a pretty good job at a sealed 10 gallon carboy with plants and aerobic bacteria. It's just scaling from there, right? ;)
- thriftwy 2y ago
  You don't actually need humans to be out there all the time. Humans are not present at the bottoms of oil wells or on top of wind turbines.
DennisP 2y ago
There was no demand, at the absurd travel costs you get when you throw away an expensive rocket with every launch. Now that we're on the verge of mass-produced rockets that are completely and rapidly reusable, the economics are about to change and we might find plenty of demand. (And it's not just SpaceX; Stoke Space for example looks really interesting.)
- vundercind 2y ago
  It makes it cheaper, but still very expensive. A dozen or more launches of very large rockets to ready a payload large enough to do any work in the asteroid belt and come back, and that’d be like a tiny prospector-robot aiming to return a couple kg of material. Doing much more remains locked behind the expensive (to put it mildly) and unproven notion of getting industrial-scale fuel refining working in space (or at least in a much smaller gravity well) with minimal inputs from Earth. There are… a few challenges there.
  - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
    Guess I was thinking if we did have 50 (from 70's onward) years of massive funding, that cheaper re-usable ships would have been developed earlier. We wouldn't have needed SpaceX, because re-usability would have been achieved earlier. The Space Shuttle was an attempt, but even that was pretty small funding, and later. If the funding had continued from the 70's onward then even the Space Shuttle would have looked antiquated. As mentioned there is a huge initial capital cost to enter into the Space Industry, that is why you need government to jump start it. SpaceX is great, but even that is decades later than it had to be.
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      I think the experience with the Shuttle shows that NASA was fundamentally unable to produce an economically viable product. They simply aren't structured to be able to do that -- the political structure around them prevents it, regardless of the level of funding. It's the same reason private companies in competitive industries outperform government design bureaus.