Space Mining

What do you think of mining the moon for minerals

  • Total voters
    32
So if we're mining on Lunar by the end of the 2020s, would that mean I'd see humanity spread throughout the inner solar system within my lifetime? If so, I'm truly privileged to be alive now.

I also wonder what a new space race would mean for Globalism. The scramble for resources and eventually colonies would surely cause friction.
 
Lord Sovereign said:
So if we're mining on Lunar by the end of the 2020s, would that mean I'd see humanity spread throughout the inner solar system within my lifetime? If so, I'm truly privileged to be alive now.

I also wonder what a new space race would mean for Globalism. The scramble for resources and eventually colonies would surely cause friction.
Click to expand...

If we get to the point of actual economical space mining within the next decade, unless we see either an internal US political collapse, or China throwing off the shackles of communism, we're looking at at least another half-century of total US political and military domination.

There's no other modern nation with anything approaching a stable demography, and the US has a completely unparalleled ability to assimilate immigrants into being American, even if that's been abused of late. Combine that with the economic power the US has, and you'll probably see dozens of American space industry sites and colonies, compared to a bare handful from any other contender.

On top of that, the other nations doing the best, will be America's closest allies, who get to piggyback off of America's space industry to get some space infrastructure of their own setup, further reinforcing the pattern.

How this would affect globalism as a whole?

The totality is hard to predict, but I expect a lot of declining US involvement in foreign nations for resource production purposes. Why risk unstable political climates, brushfire wars, and high crime rates, when you can instead simply invest in space, where nobody can get up there to cause you trouble outside of US competitors? Physical security has a high monetary value.
 
LordsFire said:
If we get to the point of actual economical space mining within the next decade, unless we see either an internal US political collapse, or China throwing off the shackles of communism, we're looking at at least another half-century of total US political and military domination.

There's no other modern nation with anything approaching a stable demography, and the US has a completely unparalleled ability to assimilate immigrants into being American, even if that's been abused of late. Combine that with the economic power the US has, and you'll probably see dozens of American space industry sites and colonies, compared to a bare handful from any other contender.

On top of that, the other nations doing the best, will be America's closest allies, who get to piggyback off of America's space industry to get some space infrastructure of their own setup, further reinforcing the pattern.

How this would affect globalism as a whole?

The totality is hard to predict, but I expect a lot of declining US involvement in foreign nations for resource production purposes. Why risk unstable political climates, brushfire wars, and high crime rates, when you can instead simply invest in space, where nobody can get up there to cause you trouble outside of US competitors? Physical security has a high monetary value.
Click to expand...

Well that asserts the United States as the solitary great power of this new colonial age, likely ignoring the the impotent UN in the process. I am interested in what everyone else would be up to though. I could see Britain and Japan doing very well out of piggybacking off America there, although still not nearly a challenge to the US. We'd essentially be more like the Dutch in the 18th and 19th centuries; powerful but not overwhelmingly so.
 
Lord Sovereign said:
Well that asserts the United States as the solitary great power of this new colonial age, likely ignoring the the impotent UN in the process. I am interested in what everyone else would be up to though. I could see Britain and Japan doing very well out of piggybacking off America there, although still not nearly a challenge to the US. We'd essentially be more like the Dutch in the 18th and 19th centuries; powerful but not overwhelmingly so.
Click to expand...

What about possible "terrorist" attacks or sabotage to keep this from taking off?

Hell, it could maybe even be used to justify "intervention" and with the right politicians in the USA, they can have more influence over it
 
CarlManvers2019 said:
What about possible "terrorist" attacks or sabotage to keep this from taking off?

Hell, it could maybe even be used to justify "intervention" and with the right politicians in the USA, they can have more influence over it
Click to expand...
Always possible but relatively difficult. We're in a situation now where terrorists find it seriously difficult to hijack a plane. It's unlikely that hijacking a rocket is going to be easier, while shooting down a rocket before it manages to, say, ram the International Space Station is going to be pretty easy to do with even minimal preparations.

The smart money when an asteroid does show up in orbit is going to be keeping most of the metal there, in orbit. Stuff like rare earths or transuranics that are a worth a fortune per gram, yeah that'll come down but the building material type stuff, iron and such, those should stay in orbit given the massive cost of sending things up out of earth's gravity well unless we're able to build a space elevator, which I don't really see coming soon.

Currently we have no way to smelt an asteroid in orbit and there are some really massive technical hurdles to most of the ideas people throw around casually. Depending on how tech advances, we'll either develop orbital smelting and harvest the metals out in the belt itself, or need a base on the moon (I lean towards the moon base myself). The moon's relatively feeble gravity well will be cheaper to lift from but it has enough gravity to make some industrial processes easier, and you can drop your asteroid on the moon itself and then cut it up into manageable chunks will far less risk than trying to saw/heat/drill an asteroid in orbit and having it spall navigational hazards all over orbit.

This, however, leads to a weird chicken-and-egg problem where we need a moonbase to harvest asteroids but need the resources of an asteroid to build a decent moonbase. We'd have to start very small given the expense of shipping a habitat up to the moon, then use the asteroid itself to expand over time.
 
Lord Sovereign said:
Well that asserts the United States as the solitary great power of this new colonial age, likely ignoring the the impotent UN in the process. I am interested in what everyone else would be up to though. I could see Britain and Japan doing very well out of piggybacking off America there, although still not nearly a challenge to the US. We'd essentially be more like the Dutch in the 18th and 19th centuries; powerful but not overwhelmingly so.
Click to expand...
‘Rule America, America rules the stars’?

:p
 
I still don't really understand why you believe a company is obligated to slit its throat: the commodity price says x, the near monopoly supplier say's "no".

Of course, moving an entire astroid is also a bit silly unless its something like 90% valuable material. You process the material out in the belt, then ship it back by a ship load. Does knowing there's a million tons of platinum out there in the belt dripping to earth at some 1,000 tons a year colllapse the price?

How is that material different than there being 1 million tons of unprocessed patinumum 100,000 km away?
 
JagerIV said:
I still don't really understand why you believe a company is obligated to slit its throat: the commodity price says x, the near monopoly supplier say's "no".

Of course, moving an entire astroid is also a bit silly unless its something like 90% valuable material. You process the material out in the belt, then ship it back by a ship load. Does knowing there's a million tons of platinum out there in the belt dripping to earth at some 1,000 tons a year colllapse the price?

How is that material different than there being 1 million tons of unprocessed patinumum 100,000 km away?
Click to expand...
The company is going to be obligated to sell the material because they spent a fortune going to get it, hence the problem.

As I said before, there's a splendid way to make immense profits compared with mining an asteroid and not selling it: not mining the asteroid in the first place and thus not incurring the massive expense.

There's basically three options, get an asteroid and sell it, get an asteroid but don't sell it, or don't get an asteroid. Option 1 gluts the market and your company dies from low commodity prices. Option 2 costs you even more since you don't even get the value of selling at cheap commodity prices, so your company dies harder, and then your successor sells it at low commodity prices. Option 3 doesn't have the massive expense of going after an asteroid so it wins, and by some crazy coincidence is what we've seen happening to date.

That said it's always possible this will change in the future. The best way to make space mining viable would be a cheaper way to get to orbit, making space infrastructure more affordable and thus reducing the cost of getting an asteroid and making glutting the market more profitable. Second best is orbital manufacturing, making things that can only be made in freefall conditions and are consequently valuable. That would raise the overall value of space infrastructure and thus make it more viable to bring metals back to produce the factories that produce the goods. Third viable option is a government footing the bill for the first asteroid, glutting the market with it, and not caring because they're the government and don't have to make a profit. This could also be a strategic move to wipe out a competitor, for instance glutting the market of rare earth elements to hose China who holds the biggest deposits and uses them as an economic weapon. Once the first asteroid is harvested it will be much cheaper and easier to harvest more, and the market will have adjusted to consume asteroid-sized chunks of resources.

Of course a way to actually harvest the metals is a must since we don't really know how to do that now.
 
We've had a Scramble for Africa, soon we'll have a Scramble for the Solar System. Colonial Wars of the late 21st and early 22nd centuries will be some very interesting things to behold.
 
Lord Sovereign said:
We've had a Scramble for Africa, soon we'll have a Scramble for the Solar System. Colonial Wars of the late 21st and early 22nd centuries will be some very interesting things to behold.
Click to expand...
It definitely will no matter the bitching. Tis human nature to be greedy fucks and leave the losers behind.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Users who are viewing this thread

Total: 1 (members: 0, guests: 1)
Back
Top