Space is starting to look like the better mining operation | Mining in space might be less environmentally harmful than mining asteroids on Earth.::Mining in space might be less environmentally harmful than mining asteroids on Earth.
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Space is starting to look like the better mining operation | Mining in space might be less environmentally harmful than mining asteroids on Earth.
Submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/10/space-is-starting-to-look-like-the-better-mining-operation/
Comments
Mafflez@reddthat.com 1 year ago
Huh. You don’t say? I could have told you that and I’m not a genius. Who knew off world mining would be less environmentally impactful to the earth. One issue though would be cost.
mint_tamas@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I think the point is that emission from space flight to and from the asteroid (with a sufficently economic size of payload and fuel) is starting to even out. If you take that into account it’s not so obviously less harmful to the environment. But I’m almost certain that it will be way more expensive for a long time.
jaschen@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Or figure out a space elevator which in theory would work but if it failed, it would be very bad.
cyd@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Realistically, asteroid mining is centuries away, if it ever happens at all. Deep space is an incredibly hostile environment, which makes it non-conducive for the kind of tinkering and experimentation that usually leads to human technological progress.
Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
The human body is incredibly picky. Everything has to be just right or the human simply dies of anything and everything. Space exploration and asteroid mining are the kinds of jobs better reserved for robots.
nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Feels like we’d need a very clean way to launch and land enough robots to-from space to iterate for it to have much less environmental impact.
Like a space elevator basically.
Zron@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You don’t need to land the vehicle with the cargo.
Just slow the cargo down in orbit, maybe slap some heat shielding made from space mined resources on it, and then let the cargo drop. The deorbit stage can stay in earth orbit and wait for the next piece of cargo to come in.
Realistically, once we start seriously mining in space, the only thing that needs to be launched from earth would be human consumables, like minerals for growing crops, preserved foods, and medications that require resources only found on earth.
Moving manufacturing up to space after the mining would seriously cut down on the cost of operations. There’s little reason to drop resources on earth, when you could sell things like refined metals, water, and fuel to other space based companies at a premium, just so they don’t need to launch it themselves.
Scubus@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
How often do we mine asteroids on earth?
frezik@midwest.social 1 year ago
All the time, but they hit long ago.
Etterra@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I think the implication was that some genius decided to suggest the idea of dropping the asteroids on the surface before mining them the old-fashioned way. Because there’s no way that could possibly go wrong. It’s not like anybody ever makes math errors or anything.
inconel@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
And all the mining waste are dumped in space, where people thought out of human’s reach so it’s safe to leave it there, until proven otherwise. I may be pessimistic, but if such technological advance made it will likely expand region of human activity and thus history repeats.
Brokkr@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Space is big, really big. On average there are thousands of kilometers between asteroids. Between the larger ones I’m seeing estimates if 100,000 kilometers between them. Earth is 12756 kilometers in diameter.
If humanity gets to a point where it can support a population as large as you are suggesting, then we can probably deal with space junk in the asteroid belt. Also we can just go “over” it.
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 1 year 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!
Jikiya@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They towed the boat out of the environment.
Parabola@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Into a different environment? Did the front stay on?
Sygheil@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Dead space vibes.
itsonlygeorge@reddthat.com 1 year ago
No shit sherlock.
pimento64@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Less harmful to Earth’s environment, anyway. The environment on those asteroids is going to be all kinds of fucked up, hard luck for any giant space slugs that might be living there.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I mean this is kind of a ridiculous take. There is no environment there. They are asteroids. The asteroid belt represents ~3% the mass of the moon.. There are plenty. Enough with the hand wringing.
It would be great if we could move this environmentally destructive practice to a place where there is no environment. Its one of the few justifications that really makes sense for investment in space travel. Not because it could be profitable, but because it could help us preserve literally the only habitable place in the universe we know of. That alone should be justification for investment.
Its just another implication of how hard it is for humans to understand that “space is big”.
pimento64@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
I don’t think it was ridiculous at all, and I wholeheartedly believe this would negatively impact the giant space slugs from Empire Strikes Back. Can’t you tell how serious I am?
otter@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
I think it was a joke
LordGimp@lemm.ee 1 year ago
No no, it’s beyond the environment. We took the mining operations and moved them outside the environment.
nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
It’s all fun and games until the front falls off.
MossyFeathers@pawb.social 1 year ago
I hope you’re aren’t serious. I’ve seen people who legit believe in extra-terrestrial environmentalism and that we shouldn’t ever mine asteroids because it might “mess up the ecosystem”.