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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27577 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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"Getting places in space is convoluted to begin with, and all trips beyond Earth orbit require carefully calculated momentum assists from various heavenly bodies. The error on these calculations is pretty large relative to the size of most asteroids. It's infeasible to pre-plan a route so specific and so accurate that one could send a spacecraft to a specific asteroid in the asteroid belt once, let alone reliably at different times. The energy and time cost for any such trip would be enormous as well."

I'm already lost on your first point. NASA has already done this. For both asteroid belt asteroids and near earth asteroids. If you don't swap your inches and centimeters then yes you can go to a specific asteroid. It is not too complex, we understand orbital mechanics.

There is no reason to mine in space while everything we need is much cheaper to obtain on earth. It’s unnecessary science fiction to build “industrial tech” settings that include asteroid mines and lunar helium farming or whatever.

There is no reason to mine in space while everything we need is much cheaper to obtain on earth.

This seems to presume that this state will persist into some unspecified eternity. Politics alone can make space mining plenty competitive. It's the same reason why "peak oil" predictions kept getting bodied.

There is no need to mine the new world when everything is much cheaper to obtain in Europe. Some have argued that most colonies actually did cost their home countries much more than they brought in, but one can't argue with the results. THE USA!

The new world actually did offer resources not available, or available only in very short supply, in Europe.

Same could be said for space. You can't find 6 trillion dollars worth of platinum laying around here anywhere!

And if there’s ever a demand for $6 trillion worth of platinum the same way as for sugar and tobacco, you’ll have a point.

You don't know what you can use it for till you get that much! Heck tobacco wasn't even a thing before they brought it back! Certainly don't need sugar or tobacco, people just like them, pure luxury goods. Platinum has actual uses. From pure utils, tobacco and sugar have been huge negatives for human health and society including the horrible conditions on sugar plantations.

Europe didn’t need tobacco, sugar, chocolate, indigo, and all the rest. But upon discovering these things, there was enough upfront demand to convince the merchant class that new world colonies would earn a profit.

What demand for an entire asteroid’s worth of platinum is up-front enough to convince someone to fund anything as expensive as asteroid mining? I guess you could postulate some new room temperature superconductor/cold fusion process relying on it, but then you’re firmly in the realm of science fiction.

Asteroid mining won't always be expensive.

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