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Comment by kenny11 | Hacker News Reader

In 10,000 years will it be technologically and/or economically viable to mine landfills for these materials? The elements are still there, potentially in greater concentrations than the ores from which they were originally mined.

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I would hope that in 1000 years we will be herding asteroids filled with these materials from the far reaches of our Solar System into an orbit around our earth or moon for mining.

How much volume is actually available inside of asteroids that populate our solar system?

https://xkcd.com/1389/

This xkcd talks instead about surface area, but suggests that the Earth holds a good chunk of the mine-able volume that can fuel industry.

Now, if we could siphon off hydrogen from the gas giants and fuse them into heavier elements, we could have orders of magnitude more material to work with.

It isn't just surface area, but also the elemental composition. When the earth was molten, every siderophilic[0] element sank into the earth's core, leaving the crust with relatively low concentrations of precious metals[1]. All the precious metals we can mine are from later asteroid impacts, not the initial material that formed the earth. Mining asteroids would potentially give us more access to those precious metals.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldschmidt_classification#Sid...

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110907132044.h...

Not sure about volume but mass wise it’s a drop in the bucket. About 4% of the moons mass according to Wikipedia.

I was surprised to learn that the earth is about as massive as Mercury, Venus, Mars, the moon and a few more moons combined.

The Earth is too massive - almost all of the earths mass is below the crust and inaccessible due to extreme temperatures and pressure, bad sci-fi movies not withstanding.

Most asteroids have so little gravity that mining them out would be quite feasible.

Pretty sure this future is already occurring, just not evenly distributed. Not 10,000 years away.

Well before 10,000 years from now we will be mining asteroids.

I've been wondering this for years

That's a good point indeed

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