Gratuitous Red Dwarf post:
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That too…but I was thinking philosophically/ideologically, that we will eventually die without new challenges.
Without reason to evolve.
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In High School I write a crappy short story about mining Jupiter, sucking out all it’s hydrogen, and mining the diamond core.
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I think that might be for the best. Not unlike how astronomy is an actual science and astronomy a quaint primitive ritual, the corresponding relationship between the disciplines of economy and ecology are basically the opposite. There is a future in ecology, but not in economy.
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No, becoming a people who stop shitting where we eat is absolutely essential to our survival.
There is cool stuff we can do in space, but it’s a distraction from all the fucking up we’re doing to our current spaceship.
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I think you should post it and let us judge how crappy it is.
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Isn’t that like saying that you cannot go to work because you need to clean your house? They are not mutually exclusive activities.
One thing I like about work in space is that it forces people to completely manage their resources for a change. A lack of resource management I think is how humans have largely destroyed the terrestrial ecology. That sort of discipline would be revolutionary planetside.
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No, that is like forgetting we are already IN SPACE
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I’d have to find the floppy it is on, and then find a computer that accepts it…
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He is talking LOOOONGGG term,
The issues we have to day will be sorted out in the next couple hundred years or so.
LOOONNNGGG term, earth will not be habitable, whether there are humans here or not.
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waits patiently
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This. One of the biggest problems we face currently is that we have no clue about cleaning up after ourselves, and often could care less, or the solution is worse than the problem.
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I suppose I was thinking mostly of fixed position cells, but I suppose the demand there won’t ever get close to the current automobile demand.
There’s always reasons to evolve, though, no matter where we are, and it’s not like we’ll ever be short of challenges.
Like many commenters here, I’d agree that the chart is an exercise in pure handwavium. There’s so many technology leaps needed to free up even a fraction of one small rock. Mind you, I think Peter Hamilton had the right idea in the Nano Flower:
The slowsilver was pumped through one of a bagpipe array of extrusion pipes out into space in the shadow of the mirror, where it was allowed to accrete until it formed a globe fifty metres in diameter. Then after the outer shell had cooled and solidified the pipe disengaged, setting it loose. The foundry produced a hundred and forty orbs a day, a constant emission of metallic spawn.
Julia had no option but to store the second cavern detritus in this fashion, New London’s refineries and microgee materials-processing modules could only consume a fraction of the mining machines’ daily output. So the orbs accumulated in the archipelago, tens of thousands of them, like an elongated globular cluster staining space behind the asteroid. Some of them were nearly pure silver, others had abstract rainbow swirls frozen into their surface where exotic salts and minerals had curdled and reacted from the heat.
Refinery complexes floated round the fringes of the archipelago; big cylindrical modules, two hundred metres long, forty wide, hanging behind a kilometre-wide solar mirror. Perspective was difficult out here, part of his mind saw the refineries as chrome water lilies drifting on a velvet ocean. Almost an op art canvas. Space hardware had an inherent harshness, he thought, every square centimetre was functional, precise, there were no cool shades nor half colours, white and silver ruled supreme.
There was an annular tug departing one of the refineries, an open three-hundred-metre-diameter ring of girders with a drive unit at the centre, starting its three-month inward spiral to low Earth orbit. Ten foamedsteel lifting bodies were attached to the outside of the ring, blunt-nose triangles, massing three thousand tonnes, but with a density lighter than water. Spaceborn birds which would be dropped into the atmosphere and glide to a splashdown by one of the two permanent recovery fleets on station in the Pacific, or the one in the Atlantic.
What a splashdown that would be…
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You’re not going to be bringing bulk materials back from space. Hell, Pets.com couldn’t even make a profit bringing dog food by UPS.
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It would just depress the value of metals. The firms and/or governments that control asteroids, whether captured or mined on site for materials to catapult on long slow Hohmann orbits, would be able to control and manipulate the market value by deciding how much metal to sell on the market. They would also incidentally be able to manipulate the futures markets for those metals. Other governments would respond with import restrictions, and possibly threaten economic sanctions if the home nations of those corporations didn’t limit the quantities of ore the companies could bring down to Earth. But that would be to try and stop market manipulations, not crashes. None of the companies or governments with the resources to attempt asteroid mining would benefit from crashing the economy.
Even if they did stand to benefit, crashing a single, albeit large, segment of the commodities market wouldn’t ruin the global economy, though it would severely harm it and probably cause a major depression. Carbonaceous asteroids could provide an effectively endless supply of fuel, and that actually could crash the whole economy, but it would also utterly destroy the ecosphere, so any country that attempted it would find itself in the crosshairs of the world up to and including military intervention.
But asteroid mining is still at least decades away. It won’t happen until there’s enough demand to make it profitable, and right now there isn’t. An asteroid isn’t worth quintillions of dollars is there’s only a multi-billion dollar market for the products. It just becomes an expensive way to get what other companies are already tooled up to rip out of the ground or recycle from obsolete infrastructure.
It makes for great SF, and I’ve used the above scenario myself along with other fun sociopoltical wrinkles, but for now it’s firmly econ-futurism. Not really a present concern except for the a few billionaires that fancy themselves blue-sky entrepreneurs.
ETA: I suspect Musk and his ilk are more interested in other uses anyway. There’s the obvious, metal and fuel for space-based infrastructure. And the less obvious. He’s probably familiar with Freeman Dyson’s proposal to use asteroid belt ice to hydrate Mars, and Asimov beat Dyson to the punch by about 20 years, albeit having his characters get the ice from Saturn’s rings whereas we now know we wouldn’t have to go that far. But still a fun read…
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Well, there’s the Money Belt…
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