It actually reached the asteroid this week. And it is trying to bring back a few grams or less for scientific study. It is no closer to being on the way to mining asteroids than Apollo was to mining the moon or Stardust was to mining comets.
This.
It’s interesting to consider questions like “if we’re not first, why haven’t we detected others?”, but we just don’t have anywhere close to enough information to really understand the chances of life on other planets.
An interesting thing I learned from that arxiv link, is that they have a Popular Physics (physics.pop-ph) Subject!!! I need to watch for that because I don’t visit arxiv for Pop-Science.
To avoid resorting to an ad hominem but in an attempt to explain why it is understandable that they seem to lack a deep understanding of all of the processes.
Anders Sandberg: Transhuminist and cryonics advocate.
Eric Drexler: Known for molecular nanotechnology
Toby Ord: Dr of Philosophy
While this does not mean that they are unable to have expertise in this domain, it appears that some debaters working on the assumption that the authors are cosmologists.
Which may be why they missed newer data like:
Or that Dark Carbon which is critical to life is fairly common
And numerous other findings while focusing on current rates of star generation, when the past death rates of Carbon stars is far more critical.
The paper shows a selection bias to meet the desired result, and this is typical of human bias.
But also note how their claimed conclusion doesn’t match the claim of the paper, and they mention that the probabilities were produced from datasets that may or may not have been appropriate for the use case, but fit their need.
(bolding mine)
But the real problem with this paper are assumptions like the following.
This is where they just lose my respect.
On one side they hand pick the most pessimistic values when it meets their needs, then they resort to what is pure wishful thinking and fiction to support a pivotal portion of their claim.
We have no idea how if we can make interstellar travel safe for our biological system and the uncertainties in this claim are huge. The uncertainty here is just as great if not greater than the data they dismiss earlier in their paper. When generating their own summaries of the current state of uncertainty, they selectively decided what uncertainty was important to meet their hypothesis.
At this point I realized they had no intention to test the null hypothesis and decided to move on.
Drake’s equation estimates N, the number of advanced civilizations in our galaxy, with:
N = f[sub]1[/sub]·f[sub]2[/sub]·f[sub]3[/sub]·f[sub]4[/sub]·f[sub]5[/sub]·f[sub]6[/sub]·f[sub]7[/sub]·f[sub]8[/sub]·f[sub]9[/sub]
Some people have made wild guesstimates of f[sub]1[/sub], f[sub]2[/sub], f[sub]3[/sub] etc. and come up with N≈100 as the expected number of advanced civilizations in our galaxy. One point the paper cited by OP makes is that even if the f[sub]1[/sub], f[sub]2[/sub],… estimates are excellent, the conclusion that there are about 100 advanced civilizations is totally unfounded. Given the huge uncertainties in those probability estimates it might be that there is a 1% chance of 10,000 advanced civilizations and a 99% chance of zero — this still works out arithmetically to Expectation[N]≈100.
Once again, care is needed when interpreting probabilities.
What obstacles do you see in the way of this technology being developed further?
This is like sitting on the hills at kitty hawk early last century, listening to someone say that this mechanical device that I’m playing with will never catch on, and that we are no closer to heavier than air flight than the people flying gliders the next mountain over.
Except of course, we actually know much more about space and space flight than the wright bros knew about aerodynamics.
There is vast wealth out there, to expect that no one will put forth the effort to retrieve doesn’t make any sense to me.
Will it be in the next decade? I seriously doubt it. Next couple, maybe, but unlikely. Within the next century? Yeah, I cannot think of any reason why, within the next 100 years, we should not have developed industries of exploiting resources and manufacturing using those resources in space.
Unless we have some apocalyptic event that wipes out and prevents high technological progress, I see it as inevitable. What do you see as the major stumbling block that would prevent this?
A few things:
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If a duplicate Earth was orbiting around Alpha Centauri, emitting the same kinds of radio signals and with the same kinds of telescopes, we would have absolutely no clue they exist, and they would not know we exist. The only way we could ever see each other is if each side pointed a dish the size of Aricebo right at the other, then pumped their planet’s entire energy input into it. Then we could pick it up, if we happened to be pointing our dish directly at them. Alpha Centauri is only 4.3 light years away. The galaxy is 20,000 times larger.
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The Drake Equation is only a thought experiment designed to organize our thinking around the necessary requirements for technological life. And it essentially encapsulates the thinking of Drake and the art at the time he conceived of it. Perhaps a future iteration of the equation will require us to factor in untold number of parameters we don’t even know about yet.
When I studied astronomy in college in the 80’s, we had just gotten to the point where the Big Bang was the prevailing theory and Steady State universe was out. We still weren’t positive that black holes existed, or that there were any planets in the universe at all aside from our own, since we’d never seen one. A hot topic of research then was the recently-discovered gamma ray burst. Dark Energy seems to make up 75% of the universe, and until only 20 years ago we had no clue about it.
I can’t emphasize enough how quickly our knowledge of the universe has been growing. When I was in college, the biggest telescope we had was the 5m reflector at the Palomar Observatory. There was no Hubble telescope, no adaptive optics, no computers for lucky imaging or image stacking. Today, we have telescopes like the Keck pair, at 10m with adaptive optics. And we are currently building 30m scopes. Plus of course our vast array of space observatories such as the Gaia mission, which has now mapped the brightness, color, location and apparent motion of a huge number of stars in our galaxy. We have a new problem in that our observing programs are now generating so much data that scientists can’t keep up and are enlisting amateurs to help.
The point is, our knowledge of the universe is in its absolute infancy. To assume to know enough to make sweeping generalizations about the propensity of life in the universe is pretty much unwarranted.
cont’d
However… We do know some things. For example, we know that single celled life appeared on Earth almost as soon as it possibly could - as soon as the Earth stopped being bombarded constantly and cooled down sufficiently for water to be available. But then it took almost 4 billion more years for multi-cellular life to appear. So one possibility is that life is going to be everywhere we look, but the first big filter is the jump from single celled to multi-cellular life. Maybe that’s the thing that almost never happens.
But ‘almost never’ translates into certainty if the numbers are big enough. There are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone.
We also seem to see that no civilization has grown powerful enough to substantially change its entire galaxy. We have looked at millions of galaxies at all distances, and have never once seen anything we would recognise as the footprint of some form of intelligence. So maybe we can rule out Kardashev level 3 civilizations, as least as we conceive them. Maybe by the time a civilization becomes sophisticated enough, its expansion needs are radically different than what we can imagine. Again, we are mere infants here.
The history of science has progressed in one direction - every time we discover new things about us or the universe, we discover that we’re less special than we thought. We once thought that we were uniquely created by a creator. Now we know we’re just one of millions of animal species on this planet. We once thought we were the center of the universe. Then we learned that wasn’t true, but perhaps the Earth was the center of the solar system. Nope. But surely the solar system is the center of the universe? Wrong again - the solar system is just one of billions in our galaxy, very average. And our galaxy is very average and just one of billions in the observable universe. And it also looks like our observable universe is an infinitesimal part of a much larger or maybe even infinite universe.
We once were not sure if our solar system was unique. Then we started discovering planets around other stars. Then we thought planets in the habitable zone of a star might be rare, but we find those are common as well. To this day we have found absolutely nothing that would imply that we are in any way unique, special, or rare. Nothing.
So if we are just a normal planet orbiting a normal star in a normal region of a normal galaxy, there is no reason to believe that life is unique to us - even intelligent life. I think it’s likely that we will find at least unicellular life almost everywhere we look. I would not at all be surprised if we discover that type of life on Europa, Enceladus, Ganymede, Ceres, Mars and pretty much any other place where that has water and the right minerals and a source of energy. Given the single data point of Earth, I’d say that it’s much rarer that multi-cellular life arises, but not so rare that we shouldn’t expect to find it in many other places. Technological life rarer still, but given the number of stars in the galaxy, that seems extremely likely as well. Let’s not even consider other galaxies right now, because we have no way to know about life there today.
But let’s say technological societies only arise in one out of a million star systems. That would still mean there are 100,000 technological civilizations in our galaxy. So why haven’t we seen them or heard from them?
Think back to Alpha Centauri’s communications problem. Why would anyone aim a beam directly at us, especially since they have no way of knowing we even exist if they are much farther than Alpha Centauri. And if they aren’t beaming directly at us, we’ll never hear them, even if they are transmitting messages 100 times more powerful than anything we’ve ever released into space. We might find ourselves accidentally and temporarily in the path of a powerful laser communication or a highly directional radio beam, But given the size of the galaxy the odds of anyone accidentally beaming through our path to someone else are extremely low. And if they did, we might only detect the signal for a few seconds or minutes before it sweeps past. The WOW! signal could potentially be something like that, but if the signal isn’t on us long enough for any kind of decoding, we’ll never know it was alien.
So let’s step back and look at the problem another way. Let’s say we only have the capability of picking up a broadcast or even beamed message from 100 light years away or less. There are about 500 ‘G’ type stars within 100 light years of us. If we survey them heavily with super large radio arrays and can’t find any signals at all, that just means that technological life is rarer than 1 in 500, and that’s not even remotely surprising. In fact, as a guess I would say that technological societies are much rarer than that, and we shouldn’t expect to find any at all within 100 light years even if they festoon the galaxy.
All of these issues have caused a shift in SETI away from just listening for signals towards ‘artifact SETI’, which I think will prove to be much better. Artifact Seti says we should be looking for visible signs of ET, not listening for their signals. Examples of this would be looking for Dyson Spheres, studying the spectrum of extra-solar planets for signs of life such as abundances of Oxygen or Methane or even looking for artifacts of a civilization like pollution.
We should also be looking at stars that dim to look for signs of intelligent signals. If you need to send a signal a long way, a star can be used as an amplifier, just as we use small control currents to control much higher power through the use of transistors. it might make more sense to communicate between stars by erecting shutters in space that can block the star’s light. That way, you can encode messages and transmit them anywhere in the galaxy with the power of an entire star. Tabby’s star was one such candidate for a little while - a star that had very strange fluctuations in light that couldn’t be explained by conventional theory. If a star is dimming strangely and it isn’t a variable, the main candidate is usually dust. But dust has its own signature - it heats up and glows in the infra-red, and the size of the particles can create scattering that we can measure. But if a star dims strangely and there is no excess infra-red, it becomes an interesting target to study.
There’s also Przybski’s star, a very strange star that has a spectrum showing evidence of very short-lived actinides that should not exist unless they were artificially created or created from even heavier, speculative elements we’ve never managed to create in a lab or collider. One of the interesting things about this star is that before its discovery, some scientists when asked what it would take to positively identify alien life specifically mentioned finding short-lived actinides in the star’s spectrum. Then they found exactly that. But no one actually believes aliens are responsible in this case, in part because the star is too young for a civilization to evolve as we understand the timescales required. That just goes to show you how hard it really is to detect extraterrestrial civilization.
Looking for Kardashev type 3 civilizations in different galaxies is another example of artifact Seti.
A lot of these techniques can detect signatures of life from a much greater distance than we could ever hope from listening to radio waves. It’s no big deal at all to get a light curve from a star thousands of light years away, or even to examine the atmosphere of a planet from a similar distance as it transits its star.
Artifact Seti is just getting started. And it’s moving so fast that I’m going to guess that we will in fact discover at least simple life in another star system in a decade or two. We are on the eve of new telescopes and satellites that will have serious capabilities in these areas.
The trace elements in asteroids aren’t concentrated into veins of ore but spread throughout the asteroid–to mine an asteroid means pulverizing/melting/chemically treating cubic miles of rock by machines in a vacuum in microgravity. Miners on Earth don’t pulverize entire mountains into dust and leach the trace elements out of it–what makes you think that doing it in a vastly more difficult environment is going to be likely?
When someone grinds the entirety of Mt. Everest into dust to filter out the platinum group minerals, then you’ll make me think people are going to mine asteroids.
All of these hypothetical civilisations would be in the same situation - not knowing who, if anyone, is out there. They might all come to the same conclusion to the same situation. Or they might have different reasons for not deliberately broadcasting their existence. They might, for example, have faith that they are the only people in the universe. Or they might not care whether or not there are any other people in the universe.
I wouldn’t call it paranoia. I’d call it caution. The result of contact could be the destruction of their civilisation or even the extinction of their species. It’s a lot to risk for…what?
Perhaps. If so, my guess would be that the new civilisation would have to be judged to be not a threat to them, able to withstand contact (which, amongst other things, would require being roughly on a par with them in terms of technology and science) and interesting to them.
Maybe, in some form. We really have no clue.
Getting into specifics of technologies that we may not use for a century or more seems a bit of a reach, but it’s not quite as you say.
The minerals in asteroids are far more concentrated than they are here on earth. Here, most of that stuff bonded with sank to the core, and is inaccessible to us. The whole fact that you do have access to cubic miles of rock is why it is attractive for extracting resources. Grinding down everest, and dealing with the tailings, would be much harder to do on earth than an equivalent rock in space, and would net you only a fraction of what a metallic asteroid would.
As far as melting, that’s the easy part, really. You have access to solar power all day, and day is all the time. No convective means of losing heat means that it is easier, from an energy budget standpoint, to heat things up and melt them than it is on earth. The micro gravity and vacuum work for, not against this enterprise.
There aren’t that many places where platinum group and rare earths are concentrated in the crust. In fact, most of what is accessible to us came from asteroid impacts after the crust cooled. Point of fact, the entire earth is made of asteroid impacts, going back far enough. All the good stuff is out of reach though.
And, well, we do pulverize mountains on earth for the materials in them. Have you ever seen strip mining? Have you noticed that the Appalachians have fewer mountains than they did a few decades ago? And that was just for some coal that we burn.
But, exact timelines aside, if we don’t collapse as a civilization, we will exhaust the easy resources that earth offers us, and the stuff in space is not really all that far out of reach, not anymore. If we are talking on timescales of thousands or more of years, the exploitation of the resources available in our solar system and even nearby stars seems inevitable.
Is your point that we may not see such technologies in our lifetime, or that such technology and use of it is simply never going to happen? I can agree on the first part, but I’m not sure what the argument for the second part really is for.
With very good reason. What would be a minor bump in a car, not even worth making an insurance claim on, would be fatal in the air and often kill people on the ground too. Two flying cars crashing into an urban area could kill dozens of people.
They also have another (albeit far less serious) problem - they’re a compromise between two quite different things and are inferior to both. A car will be a better car and a plane will be a better plane. In almost all situations, a person who would use a flying car would be better off with a plane and a car. Flying cars are great in sci-fi, but in sci-fi they can have perfect VTOL, perfect agility in flight, can fly in exactly the same configuration as they drive (i.e. no wings, etc), don’t need air traffic control, can’t crash, etc, etc.
Then there’s the terrorism aspect. It would happen. Repeatedly. There’d be no way to stop it happening.
See the links in this post for some of the concentrations.
My point is that I’m deeply confident of the former and fairly confident of the latter.
It really depends on the asteroid. Only the larger ones are likely to have differentiated due to gravity. Smaller asteroids could simply be entire chunks of various materials including metal.
But in any event, zero gravity and the environment of space can make mining easier. For example, you could construct a conducting ring around an asteroid, then power it and rotate the asteroid to create eddy currents in the metals in the asteroid, melting them. the spinning asteroid would then separate due to centripedal forces. And of course, you could always slam other things into them to break them up, then just harvest the floating detritus.
But more importantly, once miners are actually tackling the problem I am sure there will be lots of new techniques developed.
Recent iron meteorites on Earth represent more than 50 differentiated parent bodies that have been smashed so thoroughly that their nickel-iron cores have been exposed and fragmented. We also have mantle and core/mantle boundary samples from differentiated asteroids. (I say “recent” because the sampling of meteorites reaching Earth today is different than it was in the past, related to which asteroids have most recently been smashed.) Asteroids of any degree or type of gravitational differentiation can be found at any size thanks to that smashing.
But I’m not talking about nickel-iron, which is plentiful in concentration if that is what you want, I’m talking about trace elements such as the rare earths and platinum group metals that k9bfriender mentioned–those are going to be spread throughout the asteroid no matter what type it is–more concentrated in the core material from differentiated asteroids, less concentrated in the bulk of undifferentiated asteroids, but not in veins of ore like are (sometimes) found on Earth. If any differentiated asteroid had volcanic activity long enough and in the right way to concentrate veins of ore, no evidence of it has ever reached Earth in an asteroid fragment.
Agreed. Flying cars would, at the least, need significant driver assistance, or more likely be entirely self driving.
It depends how you parse “flying car”.
If we take it to mean “A car, that also flies”, then you’re right.
But in a lot of sci fi the vehicles never touch the ground. They are planes, but performing a personal transport for short and long distances role. So by " flying car" what I think people mean is “A flying vehicle, taking the role that a car does today”.
The biggest problem with flying or hovering vehicles IMO is just energy. It will always be significantly e less efficient than just rolling the same distance.
So you need either a damn good reason to be in the
air or effectively free energy.
Sadly a simple truck or minivan can rack up a pretty big bodycount as we’ve seen. Lots of current and future tech has this possibility, unfortunately.
I’m not sure I follow, in that post, you talk about fairly high contreations of minerals, higher than I was prepared to try to convince you of.
Have you changed you mind, or are those concentrations not high enough?
All is speculation and guesswork. But, I will say that the richest man in the world is betting differently. I feel rather healthy today, so I’ll give about even odds on the former, and more or less inevitable on the latter. What do you think would prevent us from following through on developing these technologies? I can show you several companies and countries that are working hard to develop this, what do you know that they don’t?
Keep in mind, that in this thread, we are not just talking about earth, we are talking about alien civilizations. So, any thing that would prevent us from reaching space would have to apply to all of them as well.
You don’t need veins, it’s already reasonably concentrated in the asteroid itself. The most valuable stuff will actually be the iron, for building in situ, and all the other stuff will be a useful byproduct of the iron mining and smelting. Some of which can be fairly cheaply returned to earth, and the rest can stay and be used for manufacturing and construction purposes there. That you don’t have to actually locate veins of ore that can be played out is a feature, not a bug.
The idea of a flying car is less that you have a literal car that turns into a literal airplane, it is more the concept of personal air travel for daily commuting. You have this guy that’s been around for decades, and his “cars” are actually pretty cool, if you can afford one and find anywhere that’ll let you fly them.
They don’t need to be perfect to be functional. But, as I said, we don’t trust people to drive them. You really need a pilot’s license if you are going to be flying these, or they need to be fully automated with better autopilots than we currently have.
But, they do exist, you can buy one, and if you have the proper licenses, you can even fly one.
I see it as more for use in short hops, which is where electric powered drones may be useful. If they can lift a person, and transport them a dozen miles or so before recharging, that could cut down a massive amount of traffic on the interstates.
Missed edit window and forgot link.
Because I think you are hand-waving away profoundly difficult issues as just a matter of engineering. Science fiction is fun to read, but everywhere outside the Earth is a really deeply shitty place to be, and I really do not expect much to happen there other than some exploration, mostly by robots. I do not expect there to ever be the infrastructure in space to either support or require such massive undertakings. Also, I expect civilization to collapse and collapse hard and possibly never rise to today’s levels again.
An observation about futurism seems appropriate here: that we tend to overestimate what technology can achieve in the short term, but we underestimate the long term. We get the short term wrong because we don’t see all the big obstacles, and perhaps because we’re natural optimists. But we get the long term wrong because we fail to see transformational advances that carry us forward in unimaginable new ways.
You seem to be overcompensating for this short-term optimism by adopting a pessimistic outlook, but the long-term principle still holds. For instance, the development of superhuman AI and the merging – perhaps physical merging – of the human mind with that artificial substrate. “Everywhere outside the earth is a deeply shitty place to be” only if it’s from the perspective of fragile meat-based intelligence, and only if “everywhere” refers to the known planets within this solar system.
I’m going to go with the side that says we will definitely be able to extract useful minerals from asteroids at some point IF this is something we need to do and will decide to do, which may involve locating appropriate mineral-bearing ones and bringing them closer to where they are needed. We may want to do this if the earth gets depleted and we need resources for mega-engineering projects, such as repairing our environment, terraforming Mars, or building craft for interstellar migration. The latter would likely be self-contained worlds, built on a scale requiring vast material resources.
The caveat to all this is that we may all blow ourselves up instead. It sometimes seems amazing that we haven’t done it already. After the Trinity atomic test in the New Mexico desert on an early morning in 1945, Robert Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
All of that is just a matter of time, and when we are talking timescales of thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years, then I think that those factors will change. I don’t see us setting up a manned permanent presence of quite a while, but robots smelting metals and putting together and repairing satellites in orbit should be our next step. A fair amount of money is spent in commercial space activities now, some of that being diverted to activities that use in situ resources does not seem a stretch.
That is a possibility, and one that is, IMHO, the only actual obstacle I agree to be a real stumbling block. I see it as less likely than you do, but it is still looming there. We’ll see, I hope you are wrong.
Do you feel that that would be the case for all alien civilizations as well, that their civilization collapses and never gets to the point of making a noticeable presence in space, or just pessimism about our particular species on our particular rock?