ROCK AND STONE
Space is starting to look like the better mining operation
Submitted 8 months ago by boem@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/10/space-is-starting-to-look-like-the-better-mining-operation/
Comments
Sanctus@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Squid@lemmings.world 8 months ago
Rock and stone in the heart
heyou@lemmy.world 8 months ago
If you rock and stone, you’re never alone!
shortwavesurfer@monero.town 8 months ago
Launch costs are coming way down. Once we get enough people into space to get industry going this will be great. Give adventureous people something to do and not destroy our planet. Asteriods are airless lumps of rock and metal just hanging around.
set_secret@lemmy.world 8 months ago
yeah rocket launches are excellent for the planet.
shortwavesurfer@monero.town 8 months ago
We launch a few rockets to bring starter ewuipment and from then on everything gets mined from NEAs (Near Earth Asteroids) or the moon. Then no more rocket launches needed except to refresh crew as we already do with ISS.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 8 months 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!
z500@startrek.website 8 months ago
Asteroids are basically piles of rock, it’s not like anything is living on them.
neshura@bookwormstory.social 8 months ago
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.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 8 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?
SaltySalamander@kbin.social 8 months ago
The equivalent of luddite thinking, right here.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 8 months 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 8 months 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.
seaQueue@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Can we just get on with engineering a space elevator already? We’re going to want one if we’re serious about exploiting resources off planet.
Pons_Aelius@kbin.social 8 months ago
You might as well ask: "Can we just get on with engineering an FTL drive?" as it is about as far beyond our capabilities as a space elevator is.
Overspark@feddit.nl 8 months ago
It really isn’t. We know it’s possible, we roughly know how to build one, it’s only our material science that isn’t there yet. But there are promising leads in that direction and with the right investments that problem looks solvable.
youtu.be/lldv_u4R6BU?si=65llxa5uHygOlT3K
With FTL our current science is saying that it’s probably impossible and will never happen. We might be wrong about that, but if we are it’s not going to be cracked anytime soon.
CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Well we’re gonna need one of those too might as well get to work
KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
Sure, if you can find a material strong enough
seaQueue@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’m thinking we’re going to want either really big spiders or a whole lot of goats now that we’ve spliced the spider silk genes into goats milk.
grahamja@reddthat.com 8 months ago
I also am under the assumption that no material exists that could be stacked tall enough to build a space elevator.
A_A@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Fantastic ! Well, in the next millenia we could see some real progress in this field (if we are lucky). So, lets look forward to the next million years with joy !
PlexSheep@feddit.de 8 months ago
I don’t think it will take a millenia. Rocket science is making good progress towards astroid stuff.
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 8 months ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
For instance, a study by Ian Lange of the Colorado School of Mines considers the potential—and challenges—for a fledgling industry that might reach a significant scale in the next several decades, driven by the demand for critical metals used in electronics, solar and wind power, and electric car components, particularly batteries.
While other companies are exploring the controversial idea of scooping cobalt, nickel, and platinum from the seafloor, some asteroids could harbor the same minerals in abundance—and have no wildlife that could be harmed during their extraction.
Lange’s study, coauthored with a researcher at the International Monetary Fund, models the growth of space mining relative to Earth mining, depending on trends in the clean energy transition, mineral prices, space launch prices, and how much capital investment and R&D grow.
By their assessment, metallic asteroids contain more than a thousand times as much nickel as the Earth’s crust, in terms of grams per metric ton.
Electric vehicles and their batteries need about six times the minerals conventional cars do, and they require both nickel and cobalt in significant quantities.
The Democratic Republic of Congo accounts for 70 percent of cobalt production, for example, while nickel primarily comes from Indonesia and the Philippines, and Russia and South Africa have most of the global supply of platinum-group metals.
The original article contains 701 words, the summary contains 215 words. Saved 69%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
PrincessLeiasCat@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Yay! Let’s continue our fucking up of everything into the solar system!
We did it, boys!!
there1snospoon@ttrpg.network 8 months ago
I mean. If the planet or asteroid isn’t habitable and has no ecosystem to speak of, then we aren’t really fucking anything up.
PrincessLeiasCat@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
It’s just a new frontier playground for billionaires after they fuck everything up here. It won’t be used for anything worthwhile, like actual science or whatever.
Geek_King@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’m so intrigued by the prospect of mining asteroids! The amounts of metals and other resources, including rarer things like platinum family metals is incredible. There are some serious challenges that would need to be overcome, but the first country or company which pulls it off would open the doors to a future where we don’t need to rip up earth to obtain all the rare stuff we need for high tech industry. And with huge amounts of asteroids being in the belts in our solar system, a practically inexhaustible supply too.
echo64@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This is a lot of exciting words to say “instead of digging up the effectively limitless amount of rock under our feet we can go into space to do it in the least efficient and most expensive way”
It’s very cool, but I would rather we spend our time and resources on more pressing things, given we have the rocks right here.
vmaziman@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I would agree if mining the rocks on earth didn’t cause ecological collapses and kill off animals and displace indigenous and exploit underprivileged ethnic classes in post colonial hellholes
FaceDeer@kbin.social 8 months ago
If it's truly the "least efficient and most expensive way" of mining then you have no reason to be the slightest bit worried, it won't get done in that case. Obviously.
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 8 months ago
Rocks ≠ ore. There are numerous materials (e.g. lithium) for the total known deposits on Earth won’t cover more than a few decades’ worth of projected demand, and even then, the mining process is an environmental disaster. Asteroid mining is a long-term project that will require huge advances in multiple fields, but it addresses a real need.
qyron@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
I can imagine a sort of a conveyor belt made of miniature cargo vessel with one robotized mining station at one end, cutting away an asteroid piece by piece, and a cargo dock at the Earth side.
With enough cargo vessels deployed, let’s say one would arrive at each end everyother day, the moment the conveyor belt was full, the mining operation would be swift.
Assuming a global deal between nations could be struck to have a refinery or at least a cargo dock placed on the moon, to organize large cargos to come to Earth at programmed intervals, it could prove to be a very interesting endeavour.
Raw matterials price could drop, given the sheer available volume.
At least it sounds like a diferent sci-fi plot