Comment on Space is starting to look like the better mining operation
neshura@bookwormstory.social 11 months agoIn 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.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 11 months 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 11 months 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 11 months 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.
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 11 months ago
Launching anything into the sun is a very bad idea unless you very specifically need it to be in the sun, because it takes so much energy. It pretty much only makes sense to send probes and nothing else.
neshura@bookwormstory.social 11 months ago
My point isn’t that it will immediately solve all problems but it will step by step. As you say sending up trash is a bad idea in the beginning but once we know rockets are reliable enough (I dunno, maybe one failure in 10000?) we can start sending up chemically safe trash (stuff that won’t damage the composition of the atmosphere) or find ways to bind potentially harmful substances into harmless ones (like is done with most of the exhaust gas in a combustion engine)
We obviously won’t have a 100% perfect solution immediately but it is long term leaps better than what we currently have.
Not to mention the particularly toxic stuff won’t even be here on earth because we will likely refine the ores in space, leaving the toxic byproducts there in the first place.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 11 months 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.
neshura@bookwormstory.social 11 months ago
You do realize that space flight has been pretty much stagnant for the last few decades. Before SpaceX came in and started reusing boosters there was pretty much 0 innovation in propulsion tech. So just throwing in the towel from the get go is a bit silly.
Besides there are plans to move industry to space, it’s the entire reason NASA is restarting their moon base ambitions. And news flash: moving heavy industry away from earth will already do more for the environment than any pollution reduction program ever could. Most of the toxic trash we are stuck with gets produced while turning the raw materials into something usable. The rest of the trash is comparably a drop in the ocean.
I’m not thinking too sci-fi here, this is all pretty reasonable to do given moderate advances in rocket tech (the only major problem I see is added green house gases from rocket fuel so that’s something to look into I guess)
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 11 months 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.
neshura@bookwormstory.social 11 months ago
I can pretty safely assume that the $0.18 figure does not include any measures to contain and reduce damage to the environment done by that trash. The entire point of dumping trash in space would not be that it’s cheaper it’s that it would be overall better. General rule from life experience is that cheaper usually isn’t even close to acceptable in all other parameters.
But yes as things stand now sending trash up is not economical, however by moving industry to space a lot of the trash gets produced in space though so there would be less to shoot up in the first place. Particular heavy industry pollutes like crazy and would benefit from not having to worry about their toxic goop poisoning everything around it.