keepthepace

Absolutely, I only commented on the scarcity aspect.

The local pollutions of mining is a subject I never dived enough into and I wonder how much of it is really necessary and how much hinges on the fact that you always go to the lowest bidder who is often the one with the lowest environmental regulations.

Minerals are very fungible. Even if it is possible to mine one in an environmentally friendly way, in a socially acceptable manner, the person undercutting you by 10% by using slavery and dumping toxic waste in the environment is going to win.

When I started looking into that, I realized that this was much more than a simple technical and environmental discussion but a broader criticism of the global trade system.

“relatively” does a lot of work here. Lithium is not going to be a scarce ressource any time soon: https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/mcs2025-lithium.pdf

I have had so many debates about so-called minerals depletion that I ended up giving people quick advice:

If you think a mineral is problematic, do two things:

1. Find the appropriate report of the USGS on that mineral. Here is the link. Note that “rare earth” is a report of its own but some of the minerals called that have a separate report.

2. Go read their definition of reserves and resources. This is not an optional step because that’s where a lot of misunderstanding comes from.

3. I said step 2 is not optional, but in case you skipped it, here is a dumed down version

What do you mean by “shaded”?

And I think the idea is to have several satellites taking turns at illuminating a given target. Your diesel generator (actually nuclear power plants where I live) will have to turn on anyway without these additional sources, but they lower the need.

Until they reach the endgame of being able to produce continuous illumination all night long.

That sounds like the logical next step for the space industry. Intermittence is a big problem for PV installations, this partially solves it.