In all seriousness, what do you think is going to happen if we strip mine Asteroids? Unlike earth there is no life on Asteroids, there is nothing to destroy. Even the other planets are lifeless and sterile, holding back from mining them is just stupid. We are sitting on the only known rock in the solar system we can’t indiscriminately strip mine, I say we switch our mining operations to one of the many rocks we can harvest without issues as soon as possible.
Comment on Space is starting to look like the better mining operation
just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 year ago
YEAH, AWESOME! We’ve totally fucked up our own planet with excessive and unrestricted mining operations, let’s move on to others so a few people can get wealthy, and the masses can get their cheap shit from Amazon. Woohoo!
neshura@bookwormstory.social 1 year ago
just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Where do you think all our current junk is going right now? We don’t even have a handle on that at local levels, let alone globally. Bringing more junk to our planet isn’t fixing shit for anyone except the wealthy people and corporations who want more money and can afford to mine asteroids.
What do you find it to be solving, exactly?
neshura@bookwormstory.social 1 year ago
Ship goes down, brings ores. Ship goes up, takes trash with it. Two issues solved with one rocket.
I don’t think you realize just how huge and dead space is. We can dump all the trash humanity will ever produce in space and it’d likely not even be noticeable for anyone looking in from the outside. There is no life we can potentially ruin by dumping trash in the asteroid belts, there is no environment that would be getting harmed. No water it can poison, no way to come back to us except by orbital intercept and we already have ways to avoid that as well.
Space is the ultimate solution to pretty much every single environmental problem. The only thing we need to pay attention to is what happens while we send stuff up and while it comes back down. Manufacturing, trash dumps, everything remotely environmentally harmful can just be relocated to space where it does 0 harm to anything.
PlexSheep@feddit.de 1 year ago
Launching trash with rockets with our current primitive technology is pretty dangerous. If a rocket gets out of control while suborbital it’s like tons of small meteors hitting us.
This is also why launching radioactive material into the sun is a bad idea. The way there is too dangerous.
We have to face the fact that we don’t have sci Fi space ships.
Regardless, mining asteroids (and potentially other planets) would be an absolute win.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Person…you really need to read up on the weight ratios required to move junk into space. If that was at all economically, environmentally, or logistically possible to so, don’t you think someone would have done that by now? We still launch rockets with fossil fuels, friend. You need something closer to a 1:1 weight to fuel ratio even start thinking about this being a wash.
Sci-fi thinking is great. Get with the real world and educate yourself about the problem before you start thinking that way though. Attack the problem from an informed point of view, not from what you can imagine in a Gene Roddenberry world.
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 1 year ago
Currently the best price to low Earth orbit is $1,500/kg. In Seattle (where I happen to live), they charge about $0.18/kg to send trash to a landfill from a waste transfer station, and I assume it’s quite a bit cheaper in less crowded places. That’s about a factor of 8200 difference, but it gets worse. For one thing you still need to get the trash to a spaceport, which could be thousands of miles away. For another, you can’t use LEO for trash because it’s way too crowded already. You’d need to put the trash in a much higher orbit, which of course costs quite a bit more money. And if you want to get it out of Earth orbit entirely, well…I don’t even know where to look for a price for that, because it’s just not normally done.
I really can’t imagine a scenario in which launching trash into space is even close to cost effective compared to just burying it.
SaltySalamander@kbin.social 1 year ago
The equivalent of luddite thinking, right here.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Or just obvious sarcasm to bring to light how people are looking to bring MORE junk back to our planet instead of cleaning it up first.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 1 year ago
Why are you wasting time and emitting carbon dioxide by using a computer to converse on the Fediverse when you could be out picking up trash from gutters right now?
just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You’re glossing over the obvious point to make a stupid one. 💨
FaceDeer@kbin.social 1 year ago
Indeed. I sighed before I clicked on this post because I knew a comment exactly like this one was going to be a the top.
z500@startrek.website 1 year ago
Asteroids are basically piles of rock, it’s not like anything is living on them.