We Will Never, Ever, Mine the Asteroid Belt | Hacker News Reader

We Will Never, Ever, Mine the Asteroid Belt

allanmlees59.medium.com

This article assumes that we'll solve any possible resource problems through ingenious innovations, but that no possible innovation will ever make asteroid mining economically feasible. Perhaps that's true and it will never be worthwhile, but I wouldn't bet against space flight becoming cheap enough and mining technology advanced enough on a long enough timescale.

(also, is the tedious snark really necessary? I find the topic interesting but the "sci-fi is dumb and I'm very smart" tone gets a bit wearing after a few paragraphs)

> This article assumes that we'll solve any possible resource problems through ingenious innovations, but that no possible innovation will ever make asteroid mining economically feasible

The base assumption for asteroid mining is that substances like carbon, iron and nickel that asteroids are composed of become so difficult to obtain on Earth that return trips of a few tens or hundreds of million miles including atmospheric reentry are worthwhile to obtain it. Space travel becoming cheaper alone doesn't make it economically viable, unless you assume our ability to mine and transport stuff cheaply on earth goes backwards.

No one said anything about re-entry. Assuming this level of development, we would also have production capabilities in space.

I'm not sure that multiplying the complexity (do future humans have non-trivial quantities of stuff that needs producing closer to a particular asteroid than planets with the same minerals in much greater quantities? Why?) is much of a counter argument to the basic intuition that it's only economically viable to mine comparatively tiny quantities of commodities in massively dispersed locations far away from human production centres if it's for some reason difficult to get it closer to home.

Indeed the snark and arrogance are so off putting I quit early too. It’s hard to imagine HN benefits from that tone of conversation.

We can calculate the amount of energy needed to get there and back with 100% efficient rockets, even then the numbers don't work out. It is much cheaper to get minerals on earth and recycle them.

Maybe for something like platinum it would work out, but only if we can detect from earth where astroid of nearly pure platinum is. I doubt such exists, most astroids have similar composition to earth: sand and iron, things we won't run out of.

Does that calculation change if the goal is not to bring minerals back to earth, but to mine them and use them in situ to build habitats and the like? I imagine a bunch of sand and iron and ice would be quite useful in those circumstances

Isn't it cheaper to mine resources in space for space travel then to eject them from earths orbit. If we found an astroid that had water that'd be worth it to bring it to a space dock or to any habitat that doesn't have water (planet, spaceship, satellite).

I do agree the idea of bringing them back to Earth makes no sense, and the technology necessary to do that will probably make it not necessary thru other breakthroughs. But if you believe that Earth isn't the only location for humans to live we won't want to bring ML (Mega Liters) of water to future habitats, we want to either find it, or manufacture it.

Exactly. I highly doubt raw iron or other common metals will ever make sense to import from space, but there will almost definitely be a market for materials to be used in space or manufactured in microgravity that can't be done on Earth.

Maybe, but habitats that far out probably never work because the sun is so weak.

why is the sun required for habitats.. plants can grow in artificial sunlight....

generational ships could spend entire decades in pockets with no sun...

all you need is the right raw materials, access to water and food, and fuel source to keep the uv lights working and the heater and oxygen pumping...

The energy source is the hard part. The sun will work for millions more years. Will fusion reactors work that long without some random failure of some part? Would you bet your life on it?

mirrors work forever in space

You don't need the sun when you have nuclear fusion.

or mirrors

Energy costs are small if you aren't in a hurry. See [1], and for more detail [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Netwo...

[2] http://www.dept.aoe.vt.edu/~sdross/papers/LoMarsden-Feature....

That doesnt make sense. Rockets that go slow take much less fuel, especially when starting and ending in zero gravity.

And if you move the manufacturing to a space station or small moon, you could move trillions worth of material for thousands in fuel.

This ignores the potential to build stuff in space, which would create a market for metals, like say aluminum. Sure aluminum is cheap on earth, but the delivery fees to space are $$$$.

This article also seems to have a basic misunderstanding how travel in space works. You spend energy to accelerate/deaccelerate in space, you don't pay per meter like you do in the atmosphere. So once in the asteroid belt you can reach any other point in the asteroid belt with very little fuel, if you are patient.

A mine to the Earth’s core would be exceedingly rich. Such a mine would be impractical, given the large amount of planet to be bored through.

A large amount of space is more easily traversed. Core material from shattered proto-planets exist in the asteroid belt, unsurrounded by planet. It’s as if some heavenly hammer cracked the thick egg crust imprisoning a cosmic platinate egg, and left that creamy yolk of gooooold for us.

To you as a jeweler in New York City, this is perhaps irrelevant. You’re neither digging to the center of the planet nor are you flying in space.

But people do fly in space. They might need metal and lots of it, some day.

Asteroids are quite varied in composition; it doesn't matter what most are.

There are slow low energy ways to get around the solar system by using the Lagrange points in the orbits of various planets/moons. Large amounts of refined minerals could be distributed this way assuming a solar powered refinery on a large asteroid or even just parked in space.

I made it this far:

> But, we can imagine the scandalized fanboys wailing in the distance...

Oh, piss off. If you've got a sound argument, you can do it without the ad-hominem attacks on strawmen.

Same. I don't understand how people arrive at these emotions about mining asteroid belts.

I kinda get it -- we've gone a long way to making the earth uninhabitable, and (most) scifi paints a very rosy picture of the viability of space travel. In the US, getting to the moon was an incredibly big deal. The grass looks greener on the other side, and there is a huge emotional investment in this on the pro-space side. On the anti-space side, it looks like an incredible expenditure of resources, dumping tons of CO2 into the air, and for what? So there's a huge fear about the conditions of the earth; opportunity to fix matters being squandered. There's high emotions on both sides, which makes it both more difficult and more important to maintain discipline in discussions.

I would like to point out that nowhere in the best current scientific consensus position we have (IPCC reports) words like "uninhabitable" (or anything to that effect) are mentioned. This is an invention of activists trying to sway public opinion with alarmist predictions. See also [0]

[0]: https://extinctionclock.org/

So direct an article towards all things climate change and resource management. That’s not what this is. This is attacking people unrelated to that too far and too too harshly.

Note that I'm not defending the article nor the positions taken therein. I'm exploring some reasons that I see behind this being an emotional issue. Bit of a role reversal for happytoexplain :)

He doesn't think from first principles and is arrogant enough to say never, i want my 5 minutes back. Water in the form of ice is the most important resource on asteroids just use some mirrors and drone swarms. You can also try to encapsulate an asteroid and build on top of it with self replicating systems. Now you can dismiss this as scifi but at the rate of advancements in ML and control. 200-300 years of exponential or linear growth doesn't seem unreasonable. Also, there is no reason you have to use chemical rockets, thats obviously a dead end. Building up on the moon and mars will allow for easy liftoff due to the low gravity allowing for more advanced propulsion systems.

And we have the technology to get to a large asteroid in a month, from the frikkin 1960s: Pulse nuclear orion ships can have payloads of SEVERAL MILLION TONS.

The issue was the detonating of the bombs in the atmosphere for initial launch stages, but as you say, launch them from the Moon.

Near earth asteroid mining may be key to making a planetary space economy worthwhile.

I find the article weak overall. While it does have a couple good points, it betrays the same lack of imagination that it decries when it mentions that resources used now might not be the same in the future. Maybe also technology availabe now will be also different in the future. I can't say for sure whether we will or not mine the astereoid belt, but sure as hell neither can the author.

Never is a long time. Imagine trying to conceptualize modern shipping capabilities before the industrial revolution. It is not only that the cost per ton/mile has fallen drastically, but also the amount of purchasing power average people have. Not to mention the entire classes of industry that were created.

Costs to get to space will trend downward. Our knowledge of the solar system and it's potential for economic benefit trends upwards. At some point someone will find a way to make money, even if it is a niche application. That early industry will create the infrastructure which will open up other areas of development etc... A positive feedback process.

What absolute rubbish. I went into the article expecting to have my mind changed and was sorely disappointed. The author makes some basic mistakes. First, while they correctly point out that most asteroids are small and the distances between them vast, they incorrectly infer that this automatically makes asteroid mining impractical, saying any given asteroid would yield just a few grams of useful minerals. No one is proposing mining individual grains of dust. Rather, we will probably first mine asteroids ranging in diameter from several dozen meters to several miles; such asteroids can potentially contain substantial quantities of ore. Second, the author makes it sound like we have no idea what minerals any particular asteroid will contain, and must blindly sample the asteroids until we stumble upon a valuable one by chance. This is also false. Asteroids generally fall into one of a few basic types (C, M, and S), each with different compositions. Of course there is some individual variation, but these days we can get a reasonable estimate of the composition of an asteroid from it's orbit and from spectrographic analysis. Third, the author makes some trite observation about whale oil and infers that technological progress here on Earth will obviate any need for asteroid mining. There are several problems with this, but the simplest ones to me are 1) not every resource has a substitute (water, for example), 2) just because people have often found substitutes for resources doesn't mean they will continue to do so in the future. Regarding the second point, many economists have pointed out that rates of technological innovation are decreasing (see The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cohen for a good introduction to this line of work). This suggests we can not unthinkingly rely on technological progress to improve our access to dwindling resources. Another aspect of this issue the author conveniently ignores is the environmental destruction associated with mining minerals on Earth, which gives some motivation to mining them in space. Finally, the author makes one final error, but it's a doozy: they assume the only motivation for space exploration is economic, claiming that anyone familiar with basic economics will recognize the futility of space exploration and that colonies on the moon or Mars are nothing more than a pipe dream. There are many possible reasons for space exploration and colonization, only some of which are based on economic gain.

What I can't stand most about the article is the arrogant certainty with which the author writes; the gist of the article is "obviously we will never mine the asteroids or colonize Mars. Anybody who knows economics can see that."

If civilization ever expands off-surface in a major way, then there may be strong economic incentives to use material from the asteroid belt. Humans are exploratory and expansionary creatures at our core, so barring catastrophe it is only a matter of time. Once it is feasible, people will do it.

For a simple initial analysis, we can look at the energy requirements to move from the surface to LEO vs LEO to the asteroid belt. The delta-v needed to get from the Earth’s surface to LEO is at least 9.4 km/s [1]. Meanwhile, there are about 4,000 known main-belt asteroids reachable from LEO with a delta-v budget of 8 km/s or less [2].

Obviously, that isn’t the only factor, but it is one of the most fundamental factors.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945...

Let's look at it from the perspective of a space-faring civ that arrives in a solar system, and you need resources.

Would you mine things in a big gravity well like Earth's and have to pay to get the resources out of the gravity well?

Or mine asteroids and low-G moons?

That is a nice way of putting it!

It's probably true that asteroid mining will never be economically viable for supplying Earthbound industrial processes. Where it might possibly be useful someday is if we ever try to do manufacturing and industrial processes in space. Absent completely sci-fi propulsion technology, it will probably never be a good idea to launch bulk raw materials out of Earth's gravity well.

Where does this guy get the idea that there are only a few grams of useful material on a given astroid? Check the potential targets section of the Wikipedia article, there are many astroids with hundreds of billions of dollars of value.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining

The guy clearly has no idea what he's talking about. I would find it funny if the author wasn't so condescending and smug.

The author assumes we will only ever use raw materials on Earth. There are definitely impractical fantasies about asteroid mining in sci-fi, but the author ignoring the cost of getting things off Earth means the article is just a strawman.

Never is a really long time. Very small and light craft could take chucks out of rocks and direct them elsewhere. Allowing the process to take a long time period substantially changes the physics. The source of this idea is not science fiction, but industry. Valuable materials get sought after and rational bounds do not always apply, at least not at first. Remember that many said man would never fly, and then it was commonly said we would never walk on the moon. Never really gets around. Remember not needing more than 640k memory?

Escape velocity is very very small so navigating between small asteroids entails a fixed non-solar fuel supply and a function of how quickly you want to jump between asteroids (speed-burn-up and speed-burn-down).

We would not be fighting the Sun’s gravitational pull as most asteroids are in the same orbital pathway.

Also once landed, releasable anchor bolts can then be fired.

Well not anytime soon, sure. But never ever and it's physically impossible? There is plenty of solar power around that could be used to power a smelter. Maybe someone will devise a new kind of ion-engine that runs on asteroid dust instead of exotic gases...

Mining asteroids is a way to obtain materials for use in space, not for transiting back to earth. Duder here seems to think that earth use is the goal. That’s dumb. You mine asteroids to avoid the cost of getting the material up the gravity well.

It's interesting to consider how an 'asteroid mining' company could be profitable without ever building a rocket: Suppose SpaceX announced they had (a) identified an asteroid with high percentage of gold; and (b) bought a large amount of gold put options with 10-year expiry. If SpaceX could convince the market that it had the technical capability of mining the asteroid, the price of gold would plummet and SpaceX would make a tidy profit. It would also cancel the mining operation because the low price of gold had made the operation uneconomical.

We live in an absolutely wonderful biome, at the bottom of a deep, steep well. Sending materials down the well might or might not make sense, depending on the needs of the people at the bottom, who will be the vast majority of humanity well into the foreseeable future. But for the people up there, asteroids could be a better source of mass and materials than sending things up from the bottom of the well.

Thinking about space habitats, or very-large-mass spacecraft made from asteroids, may seem fairly far-fetched, but it's fair game in opposition to the author's 'Never, Ever'.

From first principles, I think the most we can say about any of those future goodies and gizmos we've been promised -- warp drives, longevity, colonies on Mars, asteroid mining -- is "we're not getting there anytime soon" (within 2-3 generations, say).

Beyond that, everything about the unpredictable nature of science and innovations says: we just don't know. And any attempt to assert confidently otherwise is exactly what it seems -- just posturing.

I think it's easy enough to argue the opposite case. Global orbital lift capability is rapidly increasing and, arguably, will soon make large scale commercial exploitation of space economically feasible. Channeling my inner scandalized fanboy, it's not hard to to imagine the construction of MSG style space habitats made from hollowed out asteroids, which solves both the "what to mine" and "where to live with gravity" problems.

> space habitats made from hollowed out asteroids

This sounds much more like a hypothetical supermax prison for supervillains than a desirable place to live.

Living in a hollowed out asteroid sounds like a special kind of hell.

(Also what is an MSG in this context?)

Mobile Suit Gundam, a japanese cartoon from the late 70's. It envisions a future where the majority of the earth's population has been forcibly relocated to such colonies, while the rich and powerful remain on earth.

In a sad way, that’s really optimistic. I’m pretty sure in a situation where the elite were demanding that most of the people on Earth be removed, that would imply death, not relocation to space.

No chance Bezos is going to pay to relocate anyone else to space.

If there is money to be made from it then it will be done. The material is already in space making it much easier to use on space ports than lifting material out of our gravity.

My question is how do we prevent people from using their space cars from dragging asteroids back to earth and extorting people out of money in exchange for not lobbing the rocks down to the planet? Will we have a space defense force that watches for people doing dumb things?

The author seems to be very big on debunking speculative sci-fi tropes:

https://allanmlees59.medium.com/where-is-everybody-6437e1160...

Mining asteroids isn't about bringing those resources back to earth... its about breaking down resources in space to be re-used in space for space purposes.

Is this just a personal attack on the expanse? I've not seen asteroid mining in anything else really

Yet the expanse is still really good.

This guy really hates sci-fi

Guess that what it takes to be a true fan of the genre.

Lots of pearl clutching and exception taking going on in the comments here. That's a good sign that the author is probably mostly right.

So you see lots of people disagreeing and assume the author is right? If everyone was agreeing would you assume he's wrong? It doesn't seem a particularly intelligent heuristic.

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