Hey, at least we could fix soldering. 80% gold, 20% tin is the best solder.[1] Very strong, no whisker growth. Often used inside ICs, and for some avionics boards.
[1] https://www.palomartechnologies.com/blog/why-gold-tin-is-the...
[1] https://www.palomartechnologies.com/blog/why-gold-tin-is-the...
I'm not a physicist yet without something like fusion as a miniaturized propellant I don't see how it can ever be wiser to mine asteroids than try to live more sustainably on Earth first.
* We don’t have fusion reactors
* If we did, we could mine fuel from the gas giants’ atmospheres
* He3 is so poorly concentrated in the Lunar regolith that the easy way to extract it also produces high purity silicon and oxygen
* Turning that silicon into ingots and firing them at the Earth, you can generate more power from electromagnetically decelerating them then you would get from the fusion of the helium, and this is a perfectly sensible way to generate power because of the relative depth of the Earth and Moon gravity wells
* You can then burn the silicon instead of coal, and this is absolutely fine because the ash is sand instead of a greenhouse gas. You can also bring oxygen from the Moon to burn it with so you won’t run out of oxygen on Earth to breathe.
Unfortunately I can’t find the post whenever I’ve tried searching for it.
If you can create solar panels from asteroid materials and use water as propellant, it's relatively easy to move materials around in the solar system. You operate on asteroids so you never need high thrust. Delivery takes time though.
Pretty sure Iain M. Banks describes such a game in “Consider Phlebas” though.