127
Against all odds, an asteroid mining company (AstroForge) appears to be making headway
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
127 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37757 readers
134 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I was about to say people can walk and chew gum. But this kind of miss the point.
This is not space exploration, this is not for science's sake. This is about extracting resources, and making a profit. I heard one of these companies perpetuate the idea that there's virtually infinite resource, which imply we can continue with humanity's exponential growth without negative consequences. That mindset landed us in the inextricable mess we're in.
"I wish we could mine without destroying the environment"
"Well what if we mined in space instead?"
"Why don't you focus on the problems here on Earth buddy. Wow what an idiot. Can you believe that guy?"
Hypothetically, it would only make sense to mine rare materials in space, and it would only have environmental benefits if we return significant amount compared to the mass of rockets we send into space.
There is no coal/gas/oil in space, and even if extracting these resources were cleaner, burning that stuff would still be disastrous.
Space mining would be at best viable for very niche uses for a few material. It won't bring us infinite clean resources, overall we still need to reduce extraction of resources.
If you engineer for it, you can send up a machine to fabricate the miners with raw resources. Then you just have to send up a couple starter miners and you never have to send another rocket up. Infinite resources down (limited by time). Solar power to drive the machines. Hell the manufacturer can double as basic initial processing plant and drop purified metals.
There miners robot don't exist yet, but they would probably require high tech components and manufacturing capabilities for all these different components (motors, electronics, batteries, sensors, ...).
Self replicating robots is still science fiction. If we wanted to build such robots in space, we'd need to build and launch manufacturing facilities in space before we can actually build robots in space.
Coal is a basic substance, so it is in the space. Maybe there is not likely oil or gas ( although I believe methan should be pretty much available everywhere as it's simple substance ), uranium will be in space for sure. Maybe even mining dead stars or close to dead would be possible in the future, who knows
This means space colonization. Here is the problem: 1) either we meet sooner or later aliens whom we don't whether they are dangerous and hostile 2) we discover we live in a simulation but still every simulation has its limits ( like maps in the games )