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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28220 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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Obtaining rare earths in a place where the toxic lakes the size of Delaware don’t matter would certainly be a benefit for the environment. If we can stop being retarded about building nuclear uranium supplies might be worth it too.

But I’m unclear on the economic incentives behind space travel. Mars and Venus are the most terraformable planets and would still require centuries worth of government subsidies. Without FTL(let’s say heim theory turns out to be true, or there’s a breakthrough that develops a working Alcubierre drive, or someone figures out how to build a krasnikov tube) there’s no shirtsleeve environment out there, so people don’t want to live there. You might wind up with the equivalent of oil rigs in space but I doubt you’ll have major colonies.

Couldn't we also find this stuff on the moon? Why not the moon? I would presume every crater has something interesting at its center. It just seems like the most obvious place to start but I rarely see it mentioned or discussed.

I'm not super up-to-date on all the latest space exploration talk, so maybe someone can give me the tl;dr.

Obtaining rare earths in a place where the toxic lakes the size of Delaware don’t matter would certainly be a benefit for the environment. If we can stop being retarded about building nuclear uranium supplies might be worth it too.

I will point out here that lithophile elements are literally the worst things to get from space as far as relative difficulty of mining them goes. Atmophiles are found in much-greater quantity in the outer system. Siderophiles (which include literal gold) are far more accessible on asteroids because on Earth they sank into the core. But lithophiles (which include rare earths and actinides) are strongly concentrated in the crusts of planets; Earth is a great place to find them, only matched by other rocky, differentiated bodies (which have notable gravity wells and frequently atmospheres greatly increasing the expense of sending stuff back).

Ok, sure, bad example. But there’s resources(uranium, osmium) and industrial processes(titanium smelting) that genuinely make more sense in space once costs come down. Just that those economic justifications aren’t good reasons for permanent habitation.

Uh, uranium's an actinide (and thus lithophile), the thing I just said is highly concentrated in Earth's crust (see e.g. here for Sol System vs. here for Earth's crust; note that this somewhat understates the effect because both are normed to silicon being 10^6 and silicon is mildly concentrated in the crust compared to undifferentiated rocky bodies/epically concentrated in Earth as a whole compared to icy bodies). Sorry if that wasn't clear.

The yellow region in the second graph is the highly-siderophilic elements (plus tellurium), which are strongly depleted in the crust, and indeed osmium's one of them.

Wrong. The human will and imagination will make it happen. As we advance in technology this will become easier and easier.

First Mars, then the stars.

Ok, but terraforming Mars takes what, 100 years minimum? Who's going to keep funding going for that for 100 years when it definitionally doesn't earn a return?

I guess there could be a structure such that running oil rigs in space requires taxes to fund a terraforming project. But whoever those taxes get paid to has every incentive to iron law of bureaucracy those taxes into conferences in the Bahamas about current thing in terraforming.

You could fund the terraforming of Mars by leveraging the equity of the total value of the theorized real estate.

In other words, a mortgage the size of a planet.

Except that, even after spending trillions in Terraforming Mars, you'd end up with land worth less than land than Earth due to extreme cold, proximity to amenities, ability to grow things, etc. No one but crazy rich people would want to live on Mars until Earth becomes largely uninhabitable.

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