Are we now more smart or just more sissies compared to ppl centuries ago?

[Bereta_Eder]

or rather you're what churchil warned the fascists of the future will be called antifascists (of course he was a fascist himslef)

now I'm not for the killing and maiming of inocents.

but fact is that NATO seems to follow the lines of nazi germany EXACTLY


it's strange, it's telling

[Bereta_Eder]

wasn;t the pope with the nazis?

of course he was

wasn't germany with ustaze?

of course


who was for humanity? just the serbs

unfortunately there was yeltsin at that time.

first time you fool me, your shame, second time, my shame

[Bereta_Eder]

all of them bastards

the albanians from ipirus the tatars, the most gruseome collaboratos of hitler along the pope and duh germany


now because it suits the fat belly of dinner they are trying to make them heros?

and what do they tell us?

stay put or what?

it's a brave new world

[Sir Og]

War is not really profitable if you are not allowed to kill all the men, enslave the women and children and take all the land.
With present day mass media it is kind of hard to commit mass murders like in ages past. Now that everybody has a camera and is ready to live stream the "conquest".

Even though war is no longer profitable people will keep trying instinctively to do it. (hopefully less and less often)

[The Mad Monk]

"He advises them that tough lands produce tough peoples, so, if they wish to retain the empire he has enabled them so spectacularly to gain, they must not even think about removing themselves to some softer, enervating environment."

- Herodotus, The Histories

[kentonio]

Space travel has no significant potential for profit that I am aware of, which is why it's really hard to get major funding for it. People simply don't belong in space, and there's nothing out there worth even a hundredth of what it would cost to get it.

You mean apart from potentially unlimited amounts of literally any mineral in existence that could potentially outweigh any cost involved in opening up that supply a trillion fold? Or indeed providing an eventual location for mankind to spread to once overpopulation on earth risks billions of deaths?

[Elok]

There's no way that interstellar or even interplanetary travel could be more economical than even the most expensive and convoluted recycling technology. You could build a million robots to sift through toxic waste dumps to reprocess rare earths (or whatever) and still come out ahead compared to the costs of running a colony on Mars to drag the crap through a million miles of space. Nor could it be a practical means of disposing of excess population, when it costs so much and takes so long to send off even small numbers of people; you couldn't even begin to keep up with population growth. Assuming, of course, we do not discover some incredible revolution in physics that lets space travel work the way it does in Star Trek. But if we're going to be counting on fantastic unobtainium tech for our reasoning, we might as well lean on matter replicators and/or core mining.

[kentonio]

You're making some huge assumptions there. The technology for mining from the asteroid belt for instance isn't that fantastical, especially if we overcome the power issues of launching and recovering into earth orbit. The issue on earth is that everything is finite and we're a society built on consumption and growth. That is simply unsustainable long term, so we can either find technological ways to interact with space, or change our entire social and economic approach. I know which one is more likely to happen.

[Elok]

Nothing is finite; it just changes form. We talk a lot about rubbish like asteroid mining b/c

A. The human mind has difficulty processing the vast distances involved, and
B. It's sexier and more glamorous than taking old crap apart and harvesting the useful stuff.

On the one hand, you can send a robot into space, have it spend months or years (more probably years) in transit, find an asteroid with the appropriate mineral, set up mining operations complete with a way to send back, with fuel, heavy-laden trawlers which will spend several more months or years in transit and then make their way back onto Earth to finally have the raw ore processed. On the other, you have a scaled-up version of a task currently done routinely by Chinese peasants.

[Elok]

At any rate, the OP was in the context of human daring, and I assume nobody's talking about sending people to hack holes in giant space rocks.

[kentonio]

Nothing is finite; it just changes form. We talk a lot about rubbish like asteroid mining b/c

A. The human mind has difficulty processing the vast distances involved, and
B. It's sexier and more glamorous than taking old crap apart and harvesting the useful stuff.

On the one hand, you can send a robot into space, have it spend months or years (more probably years) in transit, find an asteroid with the appropriate mineral, set up mining operations complete with a way to send back, with fuel, heavy-laden trawlers which will spend several more months or years in transit and then make their way back onto Earth to finally have the raw ore processed. On the other, you have a scaled-up version of a task currently done routinely by Chinese peasants.

We'll have to become better at recycling but we're not talking about meeting the current level of need, we're talking about meeting a massively explosive growth of demand that we have absolutely no way of meeting with the resources we have available. As for months of travel and quantities etc, in the shorter term it could still be viable for the smaller volume/extremely rare minerals, and something we have to develop new technologies for to one day be viable for high bulk stuff.

It's worth remembering that the exact same arguments you're using now, would have been applicable to the idea of moving items between continents in long ago ages. We're very, very new to space it's worth remembering. What we can do today is basically nothing but baby steps.

[Elok]

The only way asteroid harvesting would make sense is if it becomes more practical to travel millions of miles to get resources from rock than to travel perhaps a few hundred, then work out a way to extract them efficiently from waste. If it were possible to get rubber, vanilla, coffee, spices, diamonds, gold, and all the other valuable produce only available outside of Europe by digging through trash-heaps--and only Europe were inhabitable--travel outside of Europe would have been idiotic regardless of new technology. It's a matter of economics, not science.

We're already doing resource recovery from trash today; it's quite normal in various third-world countries to dig through old cell phones or computers to extract bits of rare earth or precious metals for sale. I find it easier to envision scaled-up recycling than economic space mining.

[Proteus_MST]

Nothing is finite; it just changes form. We talk a lot about rubbish like asteroid mining b/c

A. The human mind has difficulty processing the vast distances involved, and
B. It's sexier and more glamorous than taking old crap apart and harvesting the useful stuff.

On the one hand, you can send a robot into space, have it spend months or years (more probably years) in transit, find an asteroid with the appropriate mineral, set up mining operations complete with a way to send back, with fuel, heavy-laden trawlers which will spend several more months or years in transit and then make their way back onto Earth to finally have the raw ore processed. On the other, you have a scaled-up version of a task currently done routinely by Chinese peasants.

You catually could just strap an engine on the whole asteroid and change its orbit to earth orbit (or moons orbit), so it can get refined there.
Or you process the ores on the asteroid and then use a railgun in order to shoot the processed minearly to earths or moons orbit (advantage of this approach: You don't need fuel, just electric energy, which can get collected by solar panels)

The biggest hurdle with regards to space travel always is to get out of the atmosphere.
Example:
You need a fuel requirement that produces a dV of ~10 km/s to get from earths surface into LEO (lower earth orbit)
But once you are in LEO you may just need an additional 3.6 km/s dV to get to Mars (+~ 0.6 km/s dV to decelerate enough to get captured).
And from LEO to Jupiter you also just need ~ 6.3 km/s dV.
Of course, everything depending on the constellation of the planets ... suboptimal orbits may require a higher dV.

Also, to get to earth orbit, your rocket needfs tro have a TWR of > 1 (else you don't lift off), whereas in space the TWR doesn't matter all too much and can be quite low (it just means that you will have to accelerate longer)
That means, in space you can use engines that may have a low thrust value, but are really efficient when it comes to fuel use (an example would be ion engines, which may need a lot of electric power, but only small amounts of fuel ... but produce really low thrust)


So, actually, it all depends on the infrastructure we can get to space.
If we actually can do all refining of the minerals in space and also use space in order to get the fuel for our spaceships and the attitude thrusters of our space stations (and only send refined minerals back to earth) then space mining may get competitive (especially later, when resources on earth get more and more scarce (and resource extraction from trash, as you mentioned, is the only, more expensive, way to get certain resources))

[Ben Kenobi]

You catually could just strap an engine on the whole asteroid and change its orbit to earth orbit (or moons orbit), so it can get refined there.

Dumb. You're better off processing the asteroid there and shipping the energy back to earth than you are sending it back to earth for processing. The energy required to move the asteroid is greater than the energy you'd get mining it.

Momentum is a thing, yo.

[Proteus_MST]

Dumb. You're better off processing the asteroid there and shipping the energy back to earth than you are sending it back to earth for processing. The energy required to move the asteroid is greater than the energy you'd get mining it.

Momentum is a thing, yo.

We are not talking about energy, but rather about raw materials (metals, rare earths and so on).
Therefore the "energy" we gain out of the asteroid is rather unimportant (as the raw resources we gain out of it are more important).


Also, if we would want to talk about "energy" you would have to specify which one.
If we talk about electricity, then it surely is more efficient to process the metals in earth orbit.
Asteroids (at least those of the asteroid belt) have a distance of 2-3 AU from the sun. That means, they just get 19-1/4 of the solar energy earth gets. Therefore, to get the same amount of energy you would have produce (and put into asteroids orbit) at least 4-9 times so many solar sails, as you would in earth orbit.
And you would need a lot of electrical energy, if, yor example, you would want to send the refined resolurces via a railgun "back home"

If, with energy, you would mean "fuel", it also isn't as easy. The machinery of the refineries may break down, therefore they may require maintenance flights to the refinery (probably manned ones, considering the time delay between earth and the asteroid belt, which may make telecontrolled repairs even more difficult ... and manned flights also means, that they need lots of resources (Food, H2O, O2...) and life support equipment, and also means that you have to choose more direct approaches to the asteroid, which may cost much more fuel than on longer, unmanned approaches ... and also need to calculate the fuel for the return trip of the astronauts).
And during the whole time that the flight is underway, the refinery isn't able to do any further refinery work (in contrast to earth orbitm, where the downtime of the factory would be much lower, due to the ready availability of atsonautes (in space stations, for example)

The most important question, however, is, how much of the mass of the asteroid can be turned into useful metals/edlements via refining. The larger the percentage, the less feasible it would be to send a refinery up there and the more it would make sense, to strap engines to the whole asteroid in order to change the asteroids orbit in order to have it get caught by earths gravitation