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Space is starting to look like the better mining operation
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Launching trash with rockets with our current primitive technology is pretty dangerous. If a rocket gets out of control while suborbital it's like tons of small meteors hitting us.
This is also why launching radioactive material into the sun is a bad idea. The way there is too dangerous.
We have to face the fact that we don't have sci Fi space ships.
Regardless, mining asteroids (and potentially other planets) would be an absolute win.
Launching anything into the sun is a very bad idea unless you very specifically need it to be in the sun, because it takes so much energy. It pretty much only makes sense to send probes and nothing else.
If I'm reading the delta-V map on Wikipedia correctly escaping the solar system is cheaper by about 97.7% than shooting something directly into the sun (18009 m/s vs 790371 m/s from launch). Reducing orbital energy is paradoxically really expensive...
Even just getting something to orbit the sun closer than mercury is more expensive than shooting it out of the solar system entirely.
So yeah looking at those numbers I think space mining is a lot more practicable than I though, delta-v from the moon to the kuiper belt (including capture burns in the kuiper belt around asteroids/planetoids) is cheaper than from the earth to the moon, only problem is travel time.
Can't believe I didn't think of that. I normally know better, you're right of course.
Definitely agree. My point isn't that it will immediately solve all problems but it will step by step. As you say sending up trash is a bad idea in the beginning but once we know rockets are reliable enough (I dunno, maybe one failure in 10000?) we can start sending up chemically safe trash (stuff that won't damage the composition of the atmosphere) or find ways to bind potentially harmful substances into harmless ones (like is done with most of the exhaust gas in a combustion engine)
We obviously won't have a 100% perfect solution immediately but it is long term leaps better than what we currently have.
Not to mention the particularly toxic stuff won't even be here on earth because we will likely refine the ores in space, leaving the toxic byproducts there in the first place.
Your logic is exactly what I'm pointing out though. "We don't have a solution yet" should never mean "just make things worse, and we'll figure it out eventually".
If you haven't been living on this planet long, this is how the people who own the resources you're being sold kick that can down the road, and make it your problem when these corporations polluting the shit out of everything are the problem. If everyone in the world picked up their garbage on a daily basis, it won't fix rocket fuel pollution, microplastics, radiation, water shortages, or carbon emissions. Only the fucked up factories creating all the bullshit people think they need to live reforming will do that. Giving them more resources to make more junk to polite our planet isn't going to do shit but make them more money.