Um…seriously? Even on the face of it, why wouldn’t there be gold (and other materials) in asteroids? Do you think they are some sort of magic rocks totally separate from the Earth?? And, again, this is something even a quick google search shows. Look up S-type asteroids.
It’s incredible to me, but apparently you really don’t think there are resources out there. This isn’t just cost to benefit to you apparently, or the fact that, right now, today we just don’t have the means to exploit the resources. You really don’t know that there ARE resources at all or you wouldn’t ask such a silly question.
Figured I’d link to this article on the asteroid 16 Psyche.
The Most Valuable Thing In the Solar System Is a $700 Quintillion Asteroid. Except It Isn’t.
Consumer technology outlet CNET tweeted out a picture of the asteroid 16 Psyche over the weekend, calling it the most valuable object in the solar system. That’s because it is mostly metal, leading some to wonder how much gold can be found in “them thar space-hills.”
The tweet repeated an oft-reported value for Psyche of $700 quintillion. For those keeping score, quintillion comes after quadrillion, which comes after trillion. A quintillion is a million times a trillion. Seven hundred quintillion has a 7 followed by 20 zeros.
Anyway, the article goes on to explain that bringing back such a haul would basically tank the commodities market, which is true. If you dumped that level of metals on the market (note, it’s not just gold) then the price would go down…standard supply and demand. Which gets into why just going up there to grab some gold isn’t a cost to benefit…you could do it, but right now it wouldn’t be worth it. If you brought back a lot it would suppress the price, if you brought back a little you wouldn’t recoup your costs.
I’d bet I’ve been studying space since before you were born. I’ve been hearing about the fabulous wealth hidden in the asteroids since it was a science fiction fantasy. I know about Kaku’s book and 16 Psyche trillionaires and the big plans of Planetary Resources. And this.
It’s ludicrous to suggest I’m saying there’s nothing of value in the asteroids. I keep saying explicitly that the cost of extracting them is more than they are worth. And also that proof of precious metals are lacking. Your own link to 16 Psyche says, “scientists think the M-type (metallic) asteroid 16 Psyche is comprised mostly of metallic iron and nickel similar to Earth’s core.” Not one word about less common and more valuable metals.
If you back up your claims with some real cites (even spectrometer data) I’d be interested. Right now we’re several “ifs” away from reality. If there are sizable deposits. If we can retrieve the asteroid or send a mining ship there. If we fund such a venture in a way that makes it profitable. (Mars at its closest is 36M miles; Psyche is 225M miles. If a round-trip to Mars is just over a year, a round trip to Psyche would be six times that.) If we can keep from tanking the economy in the process.
A four “if” project is essentially impossible with current technology. A base on Mars, itself a two or three “if” project, would help only slightly. Come back in a century and we’ll talk.
But the OP isn’t just talking about exploration. And in any case, human exploration of Mars would be unbelievably expensive but establishing a permanent colony of a million people would be insanely, unimaginably expensive. And what would we gain by doing so? It would be a drain on Earth resources for a century or two.
If the idea is to spend the trillions on such a remote possibility as a world-killing meteor, surely we should first spend money on the climate crisis that isn’t a remote possibility.
That’s like saying we don’t need to bother backing up data, just make sure we don’t lose the original.
And, BTW, meteorite is the least likely of the disaster scenarios. War, plague, famine and pollution are far from unlikely. And I forgot to mention climate change, which is the most likely of all right now.
Transporting our problems over to Mars isn’t likely to solve them - we will just take our inbred savagery and dirty habits to another location - hardly worth doing unless we solve them here first. Backing-up bad data and all that. Besides, if we don’t get our collective act together we wont be around long enough to entertain a Mars colony, much less ever set foot there.
I am not sure the comparisons to the Age of Exploration are apt - look at what happened to the environments (and people) that got “discovered” by the explorers. Why do we get to do that to another planet?
I agree. The planet would have to be Terra Formed not only biologically but socially and economically as well if it is to safely sustain a population of that magnitude.
Colonizing Mars in case we totally ruin Earth is a bad idea, because even a totally ruined Earth is still far, far more hospitable than Mars. Whatever you’re doing to make your Mars city habitable (putting it all underground, or building a big dome over it, or whatever) could be done on Earth much more easily. There are a few conceivable scenarios that could potentially completely kill off all humans on Earth, but all of those scenarios are things that’d kill off Mars, too.
As for Moon vs. Mars, Mars does have some atmosphere… and that’s a problem. It has just enough to make a lot of things more difficult, but not enough to make anything any easier. Airless Luna is much easier to deal with.
And the lower gravity on Luna is another point in its favor. The surface acceleration on Mars is about twice that of Luna, but that’s not the whole picture. More relevant is the surface potential energy, because that determines how difficult it is to get on and off the surface, and that’s nearly four and a half times greater for Mars than for Luna.
Lower gravity might be a problem for either of them, for bone development and the like, and is more likely to be a problem for Luna than for Mars. We don’t know for sure: The longest that humans have ever been exposed to gravities below 1 g but above 0 was the scant few days that the Apollo astronauts spent on Luna. My suspicion, though, is that you could avoid most of the problems just by wearing weighted clothes. That won’t work on the Space Station, because zero times your added weight is still zero. But a few hundred pounds of lead just might be doable, and could plausibly be enough.
I honestly can’t see a million people wanting to permanently be on mars. Not as long as you’re stuck indoors most of the time. Covid has shown me people don’t really like that.
You’d have to be over a hundred for this to be true.
It was your own quote. If you misspoke
then that’s fine. I was honestly shocked to see you saying this, and then doubling down, so I’m relieved that it was not what you meant.
No, you said this:
This is just wrong. We know of a lot of things that would being such a return. The real issue is getting that trillion dollars (or even hundreds of billions) on such a long term project. But saying that we know of nothing? And you claim to have been following this stuff? What I THINK you MEANT to say is that the cost to benefit isn’t there…yet. That the technology isn’t there…yet. And might never be for all we know. IS that what you meant?
Back my claims to what, exactly? Your own claim is we know of nothing that would give a return, which was trivially simply to rebut. I didn’t make any other claims. The fact that we know…for a fact…that vast resources exist outside of the Earth is pretty much undeniable. Whether we can actually exploit them IS an ‘if’ question, and I’m not making a claim we will be able to do so. I THINK we will, and I THINK we are moving towards the first steps in this as there are missions planned to go out and directly explore various asteroids, including the one mentioned in the link, sometime in this decade. Even sample return missions which will be tests for how it could or would be done. Personally, I think it’s like any untapped resources…when the cost to benefit is there, we’ll do it. If NASA and the other international partners actually put in place the next international space station around the moon, I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of this, including the early stages of a real business, which won’t be about gold but, as I said earlier, about water. If you could process water ice on the moon into rocket fuel, and build an infrastructure to fly that out to the various satellites there are folks right now, today, who have already made clear what they would pay. And it’s more than a penny.
Yes, the OP is talking about something different than this side discussion. IF we could put a million people on Mars, or, hell, even 100k then we’d certainly be doing all this other stuff in the side discussion. We’d have to be just to do that.
As to the last bit, this is like saying that colonizing the America’s would drain the resources of Europe. True enough, if you are talking about large colonies in 1500. They would also have said the same things. The things is, we wouldn’t be colonizing Mars to that extent for a long, long time…AFTER we send a bunch of exploration missions there. At most, we MIGHT see something like a scientific research facility on Mars or in Mars orbit, maybe, as part of some of the latter missions. We aren’t going to be sending 10,000 colonists there tomorrow (we aren’t even planning to go there at all until the 2030’s). IF we ever go, it will be because the economics makes sense to do so (like I said earlier, I doubt we will ever colonize Mars this way…to me, trying to colonize a planet like that makes little sense).
As to what we’d learn, start with we’d learn how to do it and go to the incredible scientific data we’d get…you know, kind of like the incredible scientific data we have gotten from the various unmanned probes and the data we are still using from the manned missions to the moon. I just don’t understand this desire to belittle exploration and scientific knowledge, let alone what the engineering itself will give us. Or why folks are just so knee jerk about manned missions.
Could you please read my posts to see what my words are? I said we know of nothing today that would give a return from mining asteroids. That there is water on the moon is obviously helpful to future projects, but it does not bring in a return on investment; at most it lessens the cost of exploration.
And my requests (plural) for a cite referred to the mining of previous metals on asteroids that you have in fact mentioned more than once. (I’m reading your words closely.) You wobble so rapidly back and forth between claims and hypotheticals that you might as well be a newly discovered binary system.
