With our luck we’ll get caught between them…
I think the talk of where to build a colony is somewhat confused, because we aren’t just going to ‘decide’ it. It’s going to happen organically through the needs of the marketplace, or it won’t happen at all. We aren’t going to ‘plan’ it. We can do small outposts by fiat, but when you are talking about a large thriving population, it will have to justify its cost or it will never be sustainable.
So let’s talk about how such a colony could happen on the Moon. Let’s say a company sends out some probes to the asteroids and discovers methods for profitably mining the them. Billions can be made, but the cost of getting out there and bringing back mass is severely limiting. There’s a huge demand for a cheaper way. Billions will be made by whoever figures that out.
So, someone decides to build a fuel depot on the Moon. They do the math and realize that shipping oxygen and hydrogen sourced from lunar water into lunar orbit can be done at a good profit. So they start building facilities on the rim of Shackleton crater for mining the ice within. We have Musk’s Starship, which can move people and material to the Moon for a small fraction of what it costs today.
Now another company comes along and realizes that they can build better habitats than the mining company, or better spacesuits, or whatever. Specialization brings more companies into the market, all trying to beat each other in cost and quality, Costs start to come down, reliability goes up, and even more money moves into the moon economy.
All this activity regularizes trips to the moon, and commercial availability of lunar equipment kicks off a golden age of exploration. Countries, large corporations and well-heeled individuals can sponsor their own lunar excursions. For example, there should be plenty of debris from asteroid collisions, and some of that debris will be very valuable. Or perhaps we will discover gas pockets on the moon, or discover Lava tubes filled with volatiles.
All this activity lowers prices enough that research labs begin to open. A giant radio telescope on the farside employs a dozen people, and they need food and water. Fifty people work in another facility doing other research, Several hundred construction workers are on the moon at any given time. Eventually, you get to the size where secondary markets are feasible - markets making and selling things to the other people on the Moon.
Then there are those lava tubes. Imagine living in 1/6 gravity in a dome with a roof a kilometer overhead and five kilometers in diameter. If we could figure out a way to put a breathable atmosphere in such a place, it would be amazing. There might be huge profit to be made just selling real estate in such a place to rich old retirees who can be more mobile than they’ve been in decades. In such a place you could strap on wings and just fly like a bird. With suitable lighting, it would feel like a different world, not a hole in the ground. You could build lakes and rivers, have blue sky and weather, etc.
The moon is about 12% void space in the crust. We have identified over 200 ‘skylights’ into lava tubes. There are no doubt hundreds more to be discovered, Some of them likely have as much living space as major populated corridors on Earth, We’re talking about underground spaces as much as a kilometer or two wide, hundreds if meters from roof to bottom, and tens to hundreds of kilometers long. The moon could probably support living space for a billion people, if there was an economic reason for doing it.
But those colonies, or colonies on any other planet, would not be self-sustaining. They might be able to feed themselves, but they won’t survive long without Earth constantly providing high tech goods to replace the stuff that breaks down. There’s no way we could replicate everything needed to survive off Earth. It would take a huge industrial base and millions of people just to build up the supply chains of intermediate goods. You don’t just need to replace say, a broken compressor, but you need to refine the metals needed to make the ball bearings required to spin the motor, which requires copper wiring, which requires a smelter, which requires… And so it goes. Millions of separate products, all with their own unique needs.
No, any long-lasting off-world population has to find enough of value to Earth that it can earn the money needed to trade for the things it can’t make. So the ‘best place for a colony’ will turn out to be wherever that is. And right now, my money is on the Moon.
We shouldn’t go off Earth just as a safety valve for humanity. That would require true sustainable living without Earth in the picture, and that isn’t happening. At least, not in any time frame that could matter to us.
No, the reason to get off Earth is because Earth is a closed system, and eventually will limit us or we will ruin it. But once we are able to exploit resources off Earth, there are no limits to growth. We can survive in style, not just huddled on a planet with diminishing resources.
For example, just one asteroid loaded with precious metals could not just shut down all that dirty mining, but make useful materials like gold and platinum so cheap that we could use it to dramatically improve our products. Gold is extremely useful, but we don’t use it because of cost.
All this seems hideously expensive and non-feasible. And yet… we drag oil out of the ground in the middle east, refine it, ship it across the ocean, the load it into tankers and ship it to destinations where it sells for less than an equivalently sized bottle of water. No one would have believed we could do anything like that a hundred years ago. When there is profit to be made, markets are very good at figuring out how to do it.
But we do use lots of gold. The computer or phone you are reading this on has many connectors with gold-coated pins. Many of us wear chunks of it just for decoration.
And worldwide gold production is around 2500 tons a year. Which asteroid has enough gold that we can shut down gold mining on earth?
Um…well, with a 2 second search, I found this article. It is Fox News, and mostly linking because it’s a joke, but the answer is there are LOTS of asteroids out there with a lot more potential for gold (and everything else) than on Earth. But the biggest thing is…mining them wouldn’t damage THIS planet. Anyway, just going to quote the headline from the link:
Here’s an example of how the moon might become a reasonable commercial location fairly soon. The United Launch Alliance has an open offer to buy fuel delivered to low earth orbit for $3000/kilo. There is constant demand for fuel in LEO to re-power satellites that would otherwise be scrapped. Also, a fuel depot in LEO would make every planetary mission much more affordable and much more capable.
At $3000/kilo, 100 million tonnes of water on the moon has a market value of 300 trillion dollars. Of course, we don’t need anywhere near that much, or won’t for a long time. But let’s say LEO can consume 100 tonnes of fuel per year, and we launch ten Starship-sized missions to the other planets and asteroids every year, requiring another 1000 tonnes of propellant. Fuel will be purchased for $3 million per tonne, so there is a market for fuel That could earn someone $3.3 billion or so per year in sales.
So some business manager figures out that they can build a facility for extracting water on the moon for $5 billion, and they can produce it and get it to LEO for $500/kg at the beginning, and with quantities of scale and refinement there’s hope to get it down to $100/kilo. In that scenario, we’re looking at breakeven in just a few years, and big profits after.
I used those numbers because they are very similar to the costs of building a deep sea oil platform. Such platforms also take years to build, and have a breakeven measured in many more years. So we know companies will go to these kinds of efforts if the profit is there to be made.
Now that you have one company making a killing, others learn from what they did, and build their own facilities to undercut them. And as the price of fuel to LEO drops, the market for it expands.
That’s the way we get to an industrial base off of Earth and a potential lunar population of hundreds or maybe one day thousands of people. Add in adventurers, movie studios, rich people vacationing, and soon you’ve got a real, diversified economy.
But it will never be self-sufficient. It will always rely on high tech from Earth to keep it going.
We use gold in very small quantities, because it’s really expensive. But ask yourself, what other uses might be have for a material that can be easily formed into any shape, which never corrodes, which has high thermal and electrical conductivity, etc? Anywhere we have insulation against heat we might use gold reflectors. Gold would make a good lining for caustic vessels. The industrial uses for gold are endless, and constrained only by its high price.
To see how useful gold is when cost doesn’t matter, have a look at spacecraft. Gold foil everywhere.
As for how much gold and other valuable metals are out there, take a look at 16 Psyche, a metal-rich asteroid that NASA already has plans to visit. It’s basically a solid block of metal about 253 km in diameter, weighing about 10^19 kg. It’s thought to be the core of a failed or destroyed planet, and so would be made up of the heaviest elements including gold and platinum. If current gold production were 2.5 X10^5 kilograms per year, we’re talking about enough gold to replace all gold mining for, essentially, forever. Or roughly 10^13 years if you like. That’s assuming we will continue to find gold on Earth at a constant rate. Even if gold only makes up 1% of that asteroid, it’s still 10^11 years worth of gold.
And gold mining on Earth is HARD. Huge amounts of earth have to be processed per gram of gold. A working gold mine can have ore with as little as 1g/tonne, and a high-grade ore might be 5-10g/tonne. So you might have to move as much as a thousand tonnes of rock to recover a kilogram of gold. That does a lot of environmental damage, uses a whole lot of energy, and that’s also why gold is so bloody expensive. What would it be worth to be able to shut down every gold mine on Earth, both economically and in terms of environmental damage?
The same goes for iron, nickel, platinum, and a host of other metals. One asteroid would provide more precious metals than all that has been mined in Earth’s history.
Other asteroids have huge quantities of other critical resources that could be used to enable off-world manufacturing. One day Earth could be a giant park, with all heavy industrial activity offloaded into space where it can’t pollute anything.
I can’t find any reputable cite to back this up. You’d think if there was a credible paper that backed this up, someone would have added it to the wikipedia page
How much mining equipment would we have to launch into space to start the mining operation? How much pollution will that produce?
In other words, it’s a very soft metal that doesn’t form very many chemical compounds. I suppose it would make a nice safe fishing weight.
No, that’s not gold. Those multilayer insulations on spacecraft are made of aluminum-coated polyimide. The gold color is the color of polyimide film.
The only gold I’ve ever seen on spacecraft are coatings on electrical connectors and a few infrared telescope mirrors.
Cite for the heavy metal content estimate?
Which do you think is easier, developing a cleaner mining method on earth, or developing an asteroid mining method?
Like I said, I linked to it more for the tongue in cheek factor that it was from Fox than anything else. That said, you can Google plenty about estimated resources on near Earth asteroids alone. We are talking about trillions of potential dollars in resources just from stuff relatively close.
As to the second part, I don’t know. Basically, we aren’t there yet. We aren’t really that close yet. My WAG is you’d need to first build the infrastructure similar to what Sam was talking about on the Moon. It’s a lot easier to launch from the Moon than from the Earth. You make rocket fuel there, launch it into orbit to a distribution station, then use that to logistically support (almost certainly mainly automated) mining operations of the nearest asteroids. In the short term it might be more pollution for the Earth, but long term? It’s a lot better to be mining, say, rare earth metals on some atmosphere-less rock than here on Earth. Same goes for producing rocket fuel for exploration on the Moon as opposed to here on Earth then sending it into orbit. Once you start getting materials in the pipeline, it would also be a hell of a lot better manufacturing them in orbit than on Earth too.
We are talking in the next few hundred years, not tomorrow, however. But it DOES make sense and, to me at least, it’s inevitable, unless we die out before we get to that point. It’s basically our species modus operandi…we expand to the limit of the local resources, then we move outward to find new resources. Right now, that expansion is the solar system, which has resources for…well, pretty much for the next few 10’s of thousands of years, at least. After that, we’ll just have to see.
Even if we accept that asteroid mining will be beneficial, that’s a separate issue from colonization of space. On a space mine, I doubt a human crew is worth all the resources necessary to keep the crew alive. Any space mine would depend heavily on automated equipment. AI and telepresence technologies are advancing quite fast.
That’s true that it’s separate, but it also plays into those spinning tin cans. Those resources can and, IMHO again will be used to make those things. I think that’s the real colonization that will happen…millions, maybe billions of large (many kilometers long) spinning cans with habitats, factories, housing, farms and the works. It will allow for an easing of pressure on the planet, allow us to move much if not all of our manufacturing off planet, to create and preserve habitats in space, and give folks room to expand and grow, while also putting them closer to where the work will be. While it’s true that AI and telepresense and automation will be big, I think there will still be humans in the loop for the foreseeable future. Even if there isn’t, I still think humans can and will expand outward as we are able.
Trust me - there are plenty of uses for cheap gold in industry that have a little more added value than fishing weights. For example, I imagine we’d see a hell of lot more gold-plated connectors. And gold-plated heat reflectors would be very common. Gold is an excellent reflector of infra-red heat. Every radiant heater might have a gold reflector behind it. But we don’t know all the uses for cheap gold, because we’ve never had cheap gold. Once gold is cheap, we would find lots of ways to exploit its unique properties.
Huh. I thought the MLI has a vapor-deposited layer of gold on the outside. Ignorance fought.
However, gold is still heavily used in spacecraft - just not for thermal insolation.
Space Suit visors have a gold layer to keep out infra-red radiation. Gold plated tape is used in some places.
Can’t do that, because we don’t know. But if it is a planetary core remnant, it will be full of the heaviest elements that collect to make planets. It’s probably mostly iron, may e 85-90%, 5% nickel or so, then smaller percentages of chromium, platinum, gold, etc. One of the reasons we need to explore it is to assay what is there.
But given the mass of the thing, even tiny percentages equals a whole lot. Let’s say only .1% of it is gold. That’s still 10^16 kilos of gold. So instead of having 10^13 years worth of gold at current production rates, it might only have 10^10 years.
Of course, we don’t know how hard it would be to mine, where we would find it in the asteroid, etc. But the potential is certainly there to replace all our gold needs, plus our need for nickel, iron, platinum, etc. And that’s just one asteroid. Whether we can figure out a cost-effective way to extract it and exploit it remains to be seen.
There is no easy way to move hundreds of thousands of tonnes of rock. We have been gold mining for centuries, and our techniques are pretty mature. So I’m going to say asteroid mining might turn out to be much easier to do cleanly, since all we need to do is learn to do it all all. From Earth’s perspective, the most wasteful mining project on an asteroid is still perfectly clean. Do you have evidence to the contrary? Are there any even theoretical gold mining techniques that are substantially cleaner than what we do now without raising costs through the roof?
There is just no way you can get around the energy requirements of moving that much rock. And then the rock has to be crushed, heated, and processed chemically to get the trace gold out of it. Then the tailings have to be transported somewhere or put back where they came from. How are you planning to do that cleanly?
I’m curious where else gold (including gold plated tape) is used on spacecraft - I thought I was pretty familiar with most basic spacecraft components and I couldn’t think of any. I do agree space suit visors is an example (I suppose that’s technically a spacecraft).
I could turn around and ask, how are you planning to do all that in microgravity & vacuum?
p.s. Mining operations on Earth are dirty not because it’s an insolvable problem, but because they are allowed to be. They emit as much pollution as they can get away with - why wouldn’t they? They would find ways to make the process cleaner if there were any financial incentives to do so, or if they were required by regulations (which were actually enforced).
Same question should have been asked before we started mining in the first place on Earth. We didn’t know how to smelt ores, we had to learn and develop techniques.
If you are asking a poster on a messageboard for a detailed dissertation on exactly what technologies will be used in what way, and what will be developed and how to develop it, you are not framing things in a serious way.
It may be a challenge, but I see no reason why it is intrinsically harder to do it in a vacuum or microgravity, in fact, I can see a number of reasons why not having to worry about weight or insulation or contamination from or of the outside environment would make it easier.
So, I guess what would make the most sense would be to turn around and ask you why you do not believe that we can develop these technologies? What is it about micro gravity or vacuum that would prevent us from being able to smelt or refine ores?
I thought it was obviously a rhetorical question in response to a rhetorical question.
I’ve spent a lot of time doing experiments and measurements in vacuum. Making mechanisms work in vacuum is inherently difficult. There is an extremely limited set of lubricants that can be used, and most of them have very high viscosity. Yet lubrication is even more important than in air. The most common cause of failure of satellites is for the mechanisms (momentum wheels and gyroscopes) to seize up. The Hubble, for example, had all 6 gyros replaced in 2009 and already half of them have failed (and they need 3 for standard operations).
Smelting is inherently dependent on gravity. Without gravity, gases don’t rise and escape from the molten ore, and heavier materials don’t collect at the bottom of the vessel.
All earth-moving machinery rely on gravity. All machinery for handling aggregate materials rely on gravity. Without gravity, the machinery themselves won’t stay anchored to the ground. Without gravity, stuff don’t stay in the bin/container/scoop, it won’t stay on the conveyor belt, won’t drop down when you open a hole in the bottom.
I’m sure all these are solvable problems, but I can’t imagine these problems being easier to solve than the problem of reducing pollution from mines on earth.
I don’t know why people keep on insisting on that. It will take a long time to ramp up production in space, but there’s no reason that high tech couldn’t eventually be produced in space. After all, here on Earth we had to invent ways to do it and gradually increase our abilities, there’s no reason we would do the same in space. The first step is producing raw materials, then gradually making more and more sophisticated production facilities.
Here you go for gold. Here is platunum. I think that you will find all siderophile elements concentrated in iron, stony-iron, and undifferentiated asteroids relative to the Earth’s bulk crust.
Cool, thanks.
But the largest number reported there for gold is around 10 ppm. At that concentration, we’d have to process quarter of a billion tons of ore per year, in space, to get enough gold to replace earth’s current rate of production.