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.
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.
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”.
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?
I’ve legit read articles from people unironically saying we shouldn’t ruin the environment of the moon with mining. The moon. The place often compared to bombed cities. They were worried we would look up to the moon and see big dust clouds, which doesn’t even work without an atmosphere.
No no, it’s beyond the environment. We took the mining operations and moved them outside the environment.
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.
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.
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.
The human body is incredibly picky. Everything has to be just right or the human simply dies of anything and everything. Things like gravity, radiation, temperature, pressure and so many other variables matter a lot.
Space exploration and asteroid mining are the kinds of jobs better left for robots.
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.
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.
What could possibly go wrong adding a ton of mass to earth
I’ve been curious about this subject (increasing or decreasing the planet’s mass) & wanting a real fact based explanation. The fact that man has built structures that had a measureable impact to Earth’s tilt indicate that there is a calcuable figure that represents the effect that the cumulative mass being removed from close to Earth’s core/surface & shifted into orbit or pushed out of the planet’s gravitational field has/will have. I’ve got no idea ehat the impact would be, but at some point reducing the mass of a spinning object has to result in changes. How many non-returning ships sent off-planet does it take to reduce the gravitational field of Earth? Does it impact Earth’s orbit around the Sun? And inversely, how much off-planet mined materials brought here before …idk - Earth’s gravity is increased? Assuming the # is “real”, shouldn’t we be determining how much can be mined on the moon & brought here? Better now than waiting until the next environmental crisis headlines read “Moon weight loss has lead to extreme ellipse-ing of it’s orbit: expect even more monumental tidal extremes!”. Again, I don’t know what the real impact would be, I made this last bit up for dramatic effect/illustrate my question.
There isn’t likely to be much material shipped down the gravity well. It’s too expensive unless you can also build a space elevator, and maybe not even then. Maybe for some very high value metals, like platinum. Otherwise, the value of the metal has to be greater than the value of the heat shield that you’re going to ablate away on entry.
Asteroid mining is very useful for building things in space. Not so much on Earth.
ROCK AND STONE
