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Planetary Resources, Inc. Asteroid Mining: First telescope launch within 24 months
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Big Magnets. Haven't found a more recent article, but this vein of thought has been developed further in the past four years. However, with this you would still combine magnetic fields with: industrial waste from mining (silicates & slag), dirt (specifically for Mars/the Moon), or Water to shield inhabited zones from cosmic rays.
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Hire Sir Ian McKellen?
The foam idea is actually way smarter than mine. In space you can make all kinds of crazy stuff. So, you get a nice big focusing mirror and your prepared platinum block in zero g. You focus solar radiation using the mirror which melts the platinum and then you have a big blob of molten platinum. Then you get a straw made of a material with a higher melting point and froth up the molten platinum with nitrogen. This will give you solid platinum again, but it will be like the volcanic pumice stones you get. Full of air pockets so it's less dense than water (possibly massively so)
You then proceed to push it down into earths atmosphere, likely with a parachute and a little engine attached to do a bit of course correction if needed and plop it into the sea (or a big lake, or directly on land once you start getting really good at it). Since the metal you have chosen is platinum, or gold, or silver it doesn't rust or break up and so there is no environmental hazard. You wouldn't do this with like, Tellurium, if you want that from space you'd have to drop it on land. Or spray your metal/foam block with a plastic coating. Which would be a good idea anyway. Space is awesome, it makes doing really hard things way easier.
Possibly we could build the early bases in Martian caves for shielding.
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Mars I think is within our technological reach, if not our current financial reach.
Let's Play Mass Effect - Set 6 Updated 9/8/2012
It was Dr. Neil De Grasse Tyson who pointed out (several times if you follow him frequently) that on over 70% of earth's surface, if you were dropped in naked, you'd die. You'd be eaten by animals, drown, freeze, starve, dehydrate, or die in any number of horrible ways. Human beings adapt. We adapted to cold, heat, disease, and being very far down on the food chain in most areas. We're a highly adaptive species, and not just biologically. We adapt through our scientific studies, our technology, and our society to live in places more and more inhospitable every decade. Are we going to find a perfect world for us? No, our own world isn't even perfect for us! Well, at least we wont find one we can reach in several thousand generations. What will happen is that we will adapt technologically, sociologically, and yes, potentially even biologically to live on a different planet and in harsh environs. Mars is actually an example of an easily-made-habitable planet, but it doesn't mean we're going to be out walking on it's surface without any suits or anything.
Then the basic minimum we get out of this project is still awesome; matured mass production techniques for satellites.
Hopefully they will invest in the Skylon project too, because that makes LEO cheap too. Like family holiday cheap.
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In all seriousness, there are two planets in our system that I would call "habitable"--Earth and Mars. Mars is marginally less habitable than the most inhospitable parts of Earth (though it is much more distant) and is very far ahead of any other place in our system. It's cold, dry, and you can't breathe the air--but all the resources necessary for human life are ultimately still there. "Habitable" depends on technology, of course--I live in Colorado, and this place was as uninhabitable as the surface of the Sun until my ancestors came up with clothing, shelter, weaponry, and other technologies that allowed them to colonize it. We're only really native to the African Rift Valley, after all.
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I hear low Venus orbit is nice this time of year.
Edit: Also, I agree that we strongly need to work on getting the price per kilogram to achieve orbit down drastically if we are to have any hope of any sustainable space program.
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Current lowest I think is held by the Proton rocket for heavy lift, with Falcon 9's coming in 2nd (Proton will be beaten by Falcon Heavy). Source.
The Battlebots Thread - It's Alive!
But its physical properties mean it's much more like Earth: it's only slightly closer to the sun, it's large enough to support a dense atmosphere, it's rocky etc.
The problem with the Venus is it has too much atmosphere. There was a speculative proposal on the table from NASA that Venus could be terraformed by crashing asteroids into it to shear off the atmosphere to make it survivable. I think the other plan is you'd hit it with comets until there was enough water to make the acid and atmosphere condense out and short-circuit that run away greenhouse effect.
There are regions of Venus' atmosphere that have Earthlike temperatures, or Earthlike pressures (not both at once, but you can get reasonably close). Say at 55km above the surface, you have temperatures around 27c (80f), and atmospheric pressure of a bit over half that of Earth (0.53 atm or so). Go a bit lower in the atmosphere if you want a higher pressure, go a bit higher if you want it cooler.
What's more, since it's largely carbon dioxide, and denser than Earth's atmosphere, a standard oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere is a lifting gas on Venus, it's buoyant, with over half the lifting power that helium has on Earth. You could fill a large habitat up with Earth's partial pressure of oxygen, and fill the rest with nitrogen, and it could float. Maybe have additional balloons of hydrogen for extra lift, and your colony could just float along in Venus's upper atmosphere.
Getting heavier raw materials might be a bit of a problem, but there's plenty of carbon dioxide and nitrogen around, and even some water vapor and other various things at lower concentrations. You could set it up as an outpost for missions to fly down to the surface and return, if you have machines that can operate across that range of temperature and pressure. (Not that it would be particularly efficient in terms of mining materials and getting it back to Earth though)
Geoffrey Landis wrote a fantastic short story predicated on this: The Sultan of the Clouds.
Read it; it's brilliant.
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EDIT: And the technology you need to move asteroids to useful orbits works equally well in diverting them from catastrophic ones.
Are we really managing that well here on Earth when 884 million people lack access to clean water? I'm reminded of the pictures for sad children quote, transposed slightly: "space travel is the nerd way of saying 'in the future, being rich and white will be even more awesome.'"
I'm not saying that mining asteroids could not possibly be worth doing for straightforward economic reasons: I'm not an engineer or a physicist; I'm not even an economist, so I really have no idea how cheap rare earth metals would impact the lives of ordinary people. So maybe this will all be totally great--although I already worry about a private billionaires club asserting ownership over vast tracts of natural resources. Space and the asteroids in it belong to all of us in common, not to any one person; imagine if the person who invented the pick-axe had been given the rights to all the world's mineral wealth.
What gets me is the people who talk about humanity's need to dream big, or some variation on that theme. Many people dream of eating and drinking safe food and water, learning to read, and receiving medication for life-threatening illnesses. Why are those dreams less majestic than the dream of walking on a far-off planet--why are we 'stagnating' unless we get off Earth, even if in the meantime we are creating a just social order? If we are to laud our billionaire philanthropists on the basis of their big dreams, why do we not, instead of James Cameron, laud Bill and Melinda Gates for dreaming of an end to malaria?
I am reminded of the Pharaohs. They dreamt of building monuments so big they would literally impress heaven. It never occurred to them to think: what about the slaves?
Of course, this is the space thread, so some space enthusiasm is to be expected. Maybe in the curing malaria thread we can get excited about that. What bothers me is not thinking that this is cool, which it is, but rather the implicit endorsement of a picture wherein it is to be prioritized over other human objectives which are less cool but more responsive to concerns of social justice.
YAWN
I think you'll find most people want to increase standard of living across the board when it comes to space tech. Space travel has real world benefits, including creation of technology that can help store and distribute food and water. Not to mention that access to more materials would decrease cost and make technology more widely available.
Hah. I'm imagining a situation in the future where a giant asteroid is spotted on a direct collision course with the Earth.
Instead of mass panic, Planetary Resources Inc. stock goes up.
It's almost like you didn't read the part of my post where I said that space might make sense for economic reasons, but that I object to the 'grand sweep of destiny' argument.
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No offense was intended, good sir, and the Grand Sweep of Destiny argument isn't as good at winning votes as the "make some fucking money" or "piss off the chinese" arguments would, but I take exception to your hand wringing over worrying about the third world over space as it smacks of "Those guys are wasting money up there when we've got problems down here!" which is a specious argument at best.
The problem is everything you say sounds good in the vacuum of consequence, but in the real world there are very good reasons those problems are not "oh we just need to get water to them".
We have tons of water, tons of ways to clean it, and yes - even tons of people who'd happily go and help setup and run such things.
That is not the problem which keeps those people from having it though.
I don't think it's specious in principle, actually--although I won't get into it here, since it's largely speculative and hinges on a bunch of details I doubt any of us know (what's the expected return on a dollar spent on malaria nets versus a dollar spent on asteroid mining? The answer is complicated).
I think this also counts as a response @electricitylikesme . It's true that there are complicated social issues surrounding meeting the basic needs of marginalized populations, and these issues make it more complicated than 'I bought a bottle of water for thirsty person.' But that is not to say that it is somehow impossible to address these issues. It just might be more expensive and less straightforward than we naively thought. Aid agencies are engaged in this sort of strategizing all the time.
I do suspect that the calculations, if you actually carried them out, would tell you that malaria nets are a better return on investment. But I'm not prepared to argue for that here. I certainly don't pretend to know very much about how one would go about mining an asteroid.
What bothers me is the idea that what constitutes great human achievement, or the glory of man, or whatnot, is 'conquering' space. Conquering poverty is a greater achievement, in my book. I am not in general prone to endorsing language like that of glory, imagination, destiny, dreams, and so on, but if I were, it would be satisfying human needs that fit the bill, not putting someone on a blasted rock a million miles away.
Looking at space exploration in a big picture sense, the ability to manipulate environments in space could have huge impacts in the developing world, particularly regarding complications coming from climate change.
But again, we don't have to pick one over the other, there's plenty of time, money, and people to do both of these things and more.
And a mosquito net isn't going to stop an asteroid impact if you want to get into the philosophics of it all. Needs of the many and all that.
I would however also argue that there's a difference in approach: namely, aid efforts have historically - on the whole - failed - when targeting a single issue, or exacerbated other ones. At the end of the day, one does not necessarily wind up with a new technology, or a more productive populace or a higher standard of living - you can in fact wind up making the problems worse, and then making your original problem much worse.
The problems of the 3rd world are just not amenable to the type of focused-investment which many technical projects are, but they are generally amenable to being improved by the technological trickle-down. The consumerist computer age has done wonders for the availability of computers to everyone, and cellphones have had arguably a larger impact on the third world then the first.
People don't generally argue we should go to space "just because" it's awesome, we expect technological returns on such a project. Up until OLPC though, I'm not sure of an aid project which has yielded similar - and OLPC is popularly derided as "why are we giving them computers when they need food?"
Indeed. It's really hard for the outside world to give real aid in these places (that's of course not to say that we shouldn't try).
My roommate is doing his PhD on the failure of western aid in Africa so when he gets drunk and talky I get to learn a lot. Benefits of international student housing.
When exactly did Khan see all that? He was a conqueror on earth, then put in a sleeper ship and jettisoned into space to get rid of him. He was found by the Enterprise, then marooned on a planet. When exactly did he get to see all that stuff he says he saw?
EDIT: Also, does anyone see the inevitable "industrial accident" being an asteroid hurtling to earth out of control?
Let's Play Mass Effect - Set 6 Updated 9/8/2012
Outside of deliberate sabotage I'm not sure that would happen. I mean, once its in a stable orbit it wouldn't take much to keep it there. And you could put it far enough out that it isn't really a danger anyway I imagine.
Ed & Larry : "Doesn't matter."
I recently was gifted a thing in Steam. If it was from you, thank you very much!
Are you being serious?
Uh, Khan didn't see that stuff. It was Roy Batty in Blade Runner.
I'm probably like hugely late on this, but that quote is from Blade Runner and is spoken by Roy Batty. It's a very powerful moment.
Also, I think the plan is to move asteroids into orbit around the moon, so the worst it would do is possibly shift the moon's orbit very very slightly?
Nah the orbit of the moon wouldn't change in a meaningful way.
Actually moving asteroids isn't on the table yet, because nobody is sure of how to do it. They need to spot and visit potential targets first. Then land on them, take samples and what not. You can set up a mining operating without changing the orbit of the rock. Some ideas for moving asteroids include attaching a solar sail or using the craft to gradually nudge the asteroid away. The effectiveness of these methods depends on the composition of the asteroids, and if, for example, the asteroid is a solid body or is more of a loose pile of gravel. We wont really know until more of these rocks are visited and analyzed by spacecraft.
/emo /fatalistic faux intellectualism
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Also, "Here's your pound of communal space gold, we're just charging a shipping and extraction fee for it precisely equal to the cost of one pound of gold"
A friend of mine took a course in space law (yes, a few law schools offer such a thing). Property law in space is understandably primitive, but apparently it's modeled after maritime law. IIRC, that means that the first person to claim an asteroid in "international" space, as it were, has dibs on the asteroid.
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Ed & Larry : "Doesn't matter."
I recently was gifted a thing in Steam. If it was from you, thank you very much!