How to pick pocket the riches of space

Great Debates
1

Basically I want a world where metal is cheap as water is now. That has energy sources so vast Saudi Arabia can easily to replace it’s lost oil economy with farming using desalinization and pumping of sea water. Not farming as we know it, but farming done in vast sky scrappers. Made of solid steel where plants are grown in hydroponics in floor after floor of artificial light, and farmland has returned to country side prairie and forests. Where global transportation is so cheap it can be provided as a public service for free. Where the economy is rich computers are cheaper than paper. Basically I want a post scarcity society.

Scarcity is by definition a problem of resources. To get our scratch we should look at two marks, the sun and the asteroid belt. The asteroid belt is like this giant pocket floating around in space full of enough mineral wealth to be worth (estimated at today’s prices) $600,000,000,000,000,000,000 (6 billion x 100 billion). All we have to do is jack it’s contents. Further the sun is gigantic purse full of energy with it’s owner in the can, just waiting for us to grab and run.

Short version even if we never develop revolutionary new propulsion systems to mine the riches of the asteroid belt, or capture the vast energy of the sun, I think existing technology, and observed science shows it’s possible to do so roboticolly, and if we could develop a self replicating device we could do so very cheaply. For the cost of one launch.
Before I beginning the longer version I’d just like to state I am not a futurist and if I was futurism seems to be closer to dice rolling than anything objective. This idea may be 5 years away or it may be a 100. It may, and probably does sound crazy but working toward something like this is my main driver for the path I’m taking in college. I may not be able to build it, but if I can at least develop one piece of the puzzle for this then I’ll be happy with myself.

Anyway a self replicating machine I think could be reduced to 3 stages very similar to a program. Input collection (finding the resources needed to build, and collecting the energy), processing (turning those resources into a copy of it’s self), and output (fly free little bird, you’re finished!). Further to operate in space it’d need some kind of rocket, and to be useful to humans some kind way to communicate to receive instructions. It would also need bee intelligence equivalent AI for resource collection.
About the trickiest component I think is the AI. The next hardest is resource extraction\collection. The rest should just be reimplementation, refinements, and developments of things we already do.

For example parts fabrication and assembly could be done be an advanced 3d printer, maybe even a decedent of the RepRap project. Except things like ICs. Having and producing a mobile IC fab might be troublesome, but there’s no natural law against it so it’s an engineering problem. For propulsion we could use Ion Thrusters, are maybe something nuclear. It isn’t like there will be radiation sensitive life. Although it might be bad for the electronics, and the exports back to earth will need to be kept clean.

The engineering problems are pretty big, but let’s say we over come the challenges and build one such device. Just one. Well we input the data of what we know is where and launch it and it goes to work. One builds another, two builds four builds 8 and so on. 12 generations and we’d have thousands. 24 and we’d have millions. Millions of workers to do things like build solar cells or haul resources to earth. Solar cells could be constructed and dropped in a lower solar orbit and then transfer a steady stream of power to earth via something like a microwave power beam. Enough solar cells and energy just becomes something we have, as much as we want and with little consequence to the earth. Aside from any birds that happen to fly into the microwave beam, but they could be tasty.

Human society could be begin a new age beyond industrialism, where our bread, roof, heat, and toys comes from the stuff of space not of the earth. We’d be immune to the problems of climate change, and we could greatly cut back our impact on nature.

At least that’s what I think. I post this for discussion, but since it’s my dream I do ask you to be kind, but don’t hold back any problems you see.

2

Off hand while I consider this further, I’ll point out that manufacturing steel in space is something that will be very difficult. It requires more than heat and iron ore. The same would apply to other extra-terrestrial manufacturing. I don’t see where AI fits into your scenario at all. If we had AI, it might do the work of creating the devices you imagine, but IMHO we will get self replicating machines before useful AI. Also the resources we have on earth now are probably sufficient to create the utopic world you describe if we had self replicating devices or the AI to develop them. That’s a lead in to another point, we don’t have a real scarcity of resources now, nor have we ever, but we’ve had a scarcity of cooperation in using those resources to eliminate individual resource shortages. How would the future you describe be any different than the present, where a small percentage of the people control the resources, and use them for exlusive advantage?

3

Well I’m looking at bee level intelligence. I’m thinking it’d be needed for assembling as well as mineral identification, and piloting. I guess humans could do the planing and identification for that back on earth. After many generations it might exhaust the pool of skilled labor and resources to do that. The main difference between it and actual bee brain is bees don’t have the library of human mineralogical data it could take with it.

You’re right about steel production, but I still think that’s an engineering problem.
The biggest differences I’d think is the cost of metal would fall greatly. As you say resources on earth are controlled by a few, but there’s no reason asteroid metal couldn’t be delivered in such quantities and multitude of locations as to overwhelm that small control group. Further technology developed for the worker probes could be rolled into greatly improving earth based production.

I do agree it’s mostly economic resource allocation but the hope would be to up the supply so much it flood out any problems down the line. Basically in a world of trickle up vs down I wanna crack the dam and just flood everything.

Further if nothing else the energy delivery could greatly help things. No more peak oil, no more antinuke people, no more coal, no more global warming, no more oil spills, just the occasional roast sea gull.

4

Eh. It’s easy to mine in space. Find asteroids. Shoot 'em at the moon. Refine 'em there. Don’t have to have anything all that fancy.

5

I’m as big a space enthusiast as you’re likely to find, but I’m sorry to say that most of the ‘riches’ of space simply are not valuable to us on Earth.

Take solar energy. A lot of people think that solar power satellites are the answer to our energy problems. But we don’t have an energy problem - we have a cost of energy problem. Enough solar flux hits the surface of the earth to provide our energy needs, but it’s too expensive to make the solar cells and install them. Just how does putting solar panels in space help? Yes, they get more energy, and they work 24 hours a day. But that is balanced against the extreme cost of putting them in space, maintaining them, the energy losses of beaming the power back to earth through the atmosphere, the cost of the collectors on Earth. I don’t think there’s any combination of known or upcoming technologies that could possibly make this cheaper than any number of earth-based energy sources.

Or take steel: The problem with mining asteroids for steel is that steel is cheap. So cheap that we have landfills full of it that we don’t bother to recycle. Not only do we have vast reserves of easy-to-mine iron ores, but iron makes up about 5% of the Earth’s entire crust. At the cost of mining iron-rich asteroids, we could probably extract iron from all kinds of places we don’t bother to extract from because it’s too expensive.

And so it goes. Doing things in space requires huge amounts of energy and money. There’s nothing up there that we could go after profitably with any reasonable extrapolations of technology we have today.

Now, maybe in 100 or 500 years, when we have exhausted some basic materials and driven their price up while the cost of getting to space continues to come down, we’ll cross the price curve for certain materials where it makes sense to mine them from space-based resources. Maybe Solar Power Satellites will make sense if we can first build a space elevator and get the materials required into orbit for free. But we won’t have anything like that in my lifetime, and I would bet we won’t have anything like it in this century.

6

The problem with that is getting asteroids to the moon. How do you shoot them to the moon? It’s doable but the devil is in the details, and figuring out those details will lead to something even more fancy because you’ve just added the complication the moon’s gravity well. Better to refine them in space where high impulse but low thrust rockets can be used, and they can be deccelerated and dropped down to earth.

Anyway the metal is a secondary benefit, the main one I’m looking at is all that uninterrupted energy just streaming out of the sun waiting for us to get our grubby hands on it and take a bite of it’s juicy goodness. drools

With our gravity well launching enough solar cells would be very very costly. Even the moon’s gravity well would be complicated. With self replicating machines doing space based manufacturing it’d be almost free, and less complicated, though still complicated.

7

What I’m looking at is to take the cost of making and launching solar cells out of the equation via extreme space based automation, and using stuff already up there.

If the solar cells (and their propulsion systems) are produced in space by machines doing the work for free with stuff already up there; that dramatically lowers the cost.

If the machines are self replicating then for the investment of developing, building, and launching one of them the whole earth gets an all you can eat buffet of energy.

8

Eh, but then you need a complicated remote refinery. I say, use drones in the belt, strap on rockets, and accelerate 'em to the moon. Pretty trivial technology, it’s literally just a strap on booster rocket. All the tricky stuff can be at one centralized home base, then.

And yes, the real money is in solar power.

The problem with this ‘self replicating’ business is that we can’t do it yet. At all. My way? We could start today. I’ve got a plan for the whole project. The start will be a little slow, but after the first set land, the flow will be nigh-constant. We’ll be building stuff on Mars in no time. And it can be done with more or less 2000 technology. Hell, 1960s technology, if needed.

9

Guys, if we can build self-replicating robots capable of building complex engineering projects in orbit, they can do the same thing on Earth. If we had that kind of technology, we could make autonomous diggers that could ‘micro-mine’ the crust for all kinds of metals and other valuable elements. If we can build self-assembling solar plants, we can build great big ones out in the desert as needed.

In any event, you need to have a sense of how fast space research progresses. We can already map out the next 20 years in space, because most of the missions that will happen in that time frame are already being designed today. We can extrapolate the next 40 years in space, because the space missions of the next generation will need to build on the missions of this one. And we simply don’t have anything like that even remotely on the drawing board. Space engineering takes a very long time.

This is a fun subject if we’re just speculating on what the indefinite future might bring, or plotting out cool ideas for science fiction novels. But if you’re expecting any of this stuff in your lifetime, don’t hold your breath.

I’m rather bitter about this, because I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s, when we were all sure we were going to be living in space habitats by the year 2010. If you had told anyone back in 1974 that Apollo 17 might mark the last time humans set foot on the moon for at least 50 years, they would have thought you were nuts. If you would have told them in 1980 that by 2010 the U.S. would still be flying the space shuttle and would have no reasonable replacement for it and were about to lose the ability to put men into space at all, they would have thought you were smoking crack.

To a space nut like me who has watched the glory years of space exploration fade away, talk of self-assembling robots mining asteroids and building large installations in orbit is just fanciful. If it happens at all, it will be so far in the future that our grandchildren will be lucky to see it, and by then we’ll have solved our energy problems or we’ll have lost the ability to anything like this at all.

10

When it does happen, it will happen fast. Once self replication gets started (real self replication, all the way from unmined ore to finished machines), it will expand exponentially as the OP suggests. Micro machines are probably a big part of the equation, changing the concept of mining ore from a macro process to a micro process, and similarly up the manufacturing ladder. Watch out for the Luddites though. They have axes and boards with nails sticking out.

11

It isn’t clear why you believe that “shoot[ing] [asteroids] at the moon,” aids in refining them, but I assure you that nothing is further from the truth. Aside from the difficulty of having to lift the refined material up from the Moon’s surface, there is the problem of operating in a Lunar environment, particularly the fine, charged dust that sticks to everything and poses a hazard to kind of joint or mechanism. There is really no reason to operate off the surface of the Moon.

The problem is even worse than that; the utter wealth of minerals available in space doesn’t translate to riches down on Earth. In fact, the massive amount of material that is easily available (once a mining and refining infrastructure is in place) will only serve to devalue the worth of terrestrial and extraterrestrial supplies. While there are some rare earth metals that may be scarce enough that orbital mining may be necessary to provide for demand, for the bulk of metals the floor will drop out just with the resources available from a handful of very modest sized asteroids. The more you have, the less valuable it is. The reason to develop a mining and manufacturing infrastructure in space isn’t because it will make things cheaper down on Earth (and in fact, the primary scarcity problem Earth will face in the 21st century isn’t any metal, but fresh, potable water suitable and appropriately located for irrigation) but because it will make it possible to sustain a permanent human presence in space.

As for the proposal of the o.p., he vastly overestimates the capability of autonomous refining and manufacturing technology. “Self-replicating machines” are purely an imagining of science fiction authors; no such thing exists, either in practice or workable concept, save for natural organisms that are scarcely adaptable to the harsh conditions of interplanetary space, and none of these are capable of breaking down heavier metals in any significant quantity. It may be that some day we’ll develop nanomachines that are energetic enough to jerk iron, nickel, and copper from metallic lattices without requiring refining facilities, and form them for their own purposes, but that is vastly beyond the current capability. I also have doubts about the o.p.'s plan for hydroponics skyscrapers being anything like efficient. As anyone who has worked with hydroponics knows, they are actually quite maintenance-intensive for their yield, and are suitable only to a subset of crops. The ultimate goal should not be to increase the yield to whatever is demanded by an increasing population, but decrease the size of the global population to a sustainable number while maintaining a quality of life and leisure suited to supporting advancement in science and technology, while developing a sustainable orbital, interplanetary, and eventually interstellar presence for human population.

We could build orbital habitats today, with only very modest advances of extant technology using fiber-reinforced water ice matrix spun structures and chemical or solar power-based ion propulsion. The investment would be in the tens of trillions, but the line of development is easily supportable. Interplanetary habitats–those capable of a self-sustaining presence in the asteroid belt or the outer system–are more complicated due to the dearth of solar flux, but still feasible, particularly if nuclear fusion or some other compact and efficient energy source were available. An interstellar presence is beyond a linear or reasonable extrapolation of existing technology; the thermodynamic problems and energy requirements of traveling between stars are just too great, although breakthroughs in energy production or advanced propulsion may provide a means to make this feasible in the distant future.

Stranger

12

Good post. But* modest*? Even the dollar amounts you estimate as* tens of trillions* don’t sound modest. I’d go with possible but difficult.

As I write this, I realize maybe you mean modest in comparison to the OPs concept. In that light, I guess your concept could reasonably be described as comparatively more modest.

Please tell us more about fiber-reinforced water ice matrix spun structures.

13

Oh. Sorry. I picked the moon as a mildly arbitrary target that A: can stop the asteroids without additional effort, B: can have a single refining location, and C: has negligible atmosphere.

Also, I think shooting them at Earth would just be a bad idea.
It might be possible to shoot 'em at a space station, but then you need retrorockets, and you also have the problem of people working long time in null-G, which has bad side effects. I admit the dust is a problem, and possibly a LaGrange point might be a better choice, but I think it might be manageable.

The point being, asteroid mining is a really good idea for building things off-Earth. Way better than building things on Earth and lifting them up. But doing it in the asteroid belt isn’t necessary.

If you want a single refining location, where would you put it and why? Remember, my first goal here is to build a net of solar energy gathering sol-stationary satellites that beam the power back to the base station, there to be used for more work. And possibly beaming back to Earth.

TriPolar: The advances in technology needed would be relatively modest, Stranger is one hundred percent correct. The investment would be significant.

14

[POST=9514841]Pykrete habitat[/POST]

Why would you want a refining facility to be in a single “fixed” location, or to “build a net of solar energy gathering sol-stationary satellites that beam the power back to the base station”? Everything in orbit is moving, and it makes far more sense to seen a refining station to the Near Earth Asteroid that you are disassembling, thereby only having to boost refined materials to Earth orbit. Any mining and refining facilities, whether in orbit or on the surface of a body, are going to have to be largely automated; operating in a pressure suit is just extremely taxing and not just slightly dangerous. The dismissive attitude about the dust of the Lunar regolith shows a lack of knowledge about the hazards of such dust; read NASA/TM—2005-213610/REV1 The Effects of Lunar Dust on EVA Systems During the Apollo Missions, James Gaier, April 2007.

Beaming power from solar satellites to the Earth’s surface is science fiction. The reality is that even though the bulk of the atmosphere is transparent to microwaves, there is enough suspended water to absorb a small fraction of the energy, which would cause disruptive thermal blooming and other deleterious effects.

Stranger

15

What if you miss?

16

I’d like to learn more about this, possibly in another thread if this is too much of a hijack. I’ve been following the 'power from space" thing since I first read Peter Glaser’s articles on the topic, and have been keeping an eye on it all along. Although people have complained and objected about microwave problems, this is the first I’ve heard about thermal blooming being an impossible obstruction. Certainly there are plenty of conferences devoted to it still, and Japan is reportedly pursuing it as a real project:

Do you have a cite for the blooming problem? I’d be interested to read it.

17

Oh, Pykrete! Well fiber-reinforced water ice matrix spun structures sounds way cooler. Yes, that is modest, no more development necessary. The strength is inconsequential, the walls would be very thick because the ice is a supply of water, oxygen, hydrogen, and provides shielding from radiation. I imagine inflatable structures would be sent up and filled with ice over time. That’s still where the development is needed, getting the water into space. I don’t recall the source, but recall the claim that there is water outside the atmosphere falling to earth all the time. Does this sound familiar to you? If thats true I wonder if it can be mined somehow.

A quick search didn’t pop up anything useful. There are news reports in there, which are consistently off base on those topics. One report had the moon being made out of 50% water. But some indications of water on asteroids. Anyway, I don’t think the construction of habitats is all that difficult. Its the cost of getting materials into space. But that doesn’t magically turn into useful asteroid mining.

18

Sounds like this is the right thread. Do you think transmission at the poles would help? The atmosphere is thinner, air drier(?). Is the ozone layer a loss factor in transmission? Hmm, can we keep a satellite ‘stationary’ over a pole?

Do you have a sense of what is the most efficient method of transmission? Infrared, visible light, microwave, other?

19

Then they go sailing on and out of the solar system. That’s why you don’t aim 'em with the Earth as a backstop.

20

Where do you live? We’ll point them at that spot.