Where in the galaxy will we mine lithium? | Hacker News Reader

Where in the galaxy will we mine lithium?

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69 pointsjelliclesfarm60 comments

If you like to think about interstellar travel, one interesting option is that somebody (something?) could develop the ability to live independently of stars based on fusion. In this scenario you wouldn't have to move very fast, 10,000 years to get to the nearest star is about right, but you might lose all interest in dry inner solar system planets like the Earth (compared to something like Pluto which is closer to 50% water) before you get there.

If you could find lithium you could breed tritium and run a D + T fuel cycle, which creates a massive flux of neutrons (maybe need Pb or Be for multiplication) and will let you breed extra T that you can let decay to He3. D + He3 is a good candidate for a fuel for "fast" interstellar travel that might make the crossing in 50 years.

Alternately if you can make D + D work you can certainly live between the stars and you can still harvest some bred T and He3 for "mobile" applications.

Once you are out of a gravity well as a civ, why would you bother with them economically aside from tourism? Unless we get antigravity, or loop launch / space elevator / space hook sized planetoids (I think Mars is the practical limit of space elevators last I looked).

Red dwarfs appear ideal. Very long lived, and there do seem to be planets and asteroid material in them. A globular cluster of mostly red dwarfs would be an ideal long-term place for an "interstellar" civ. The stars drift as close as 1/3 light year.

Look at what some of the projected mineral yields of asteroids are. And comets can probably get you other element mixes as needed.

Yes, I think Lithium will be be available artificially with some form of fusion. Or you capture solar wind material perhaps.

Gravity wells are where most of the resources are. For example, Earth outmasses the asteroid belt by a factor of over 1,000.

Is the factor just a 1000x? That would actually be an argument in favor of asteroids.

All you need for space habs for construction (well, maybe not all the organic matter) is in asteroids. Maybe all we need material-wise is probably in the larger asteroids that we are trying to track for collision detection.

Here, let's cut the difference: MOONs! Why bother with planets if their moons have all the resources and none of the lifting issues.

I guess our moon is pretty resource poor since it formed from Earth's crust. But then again, have we surveyed what's under the surface?

There is a core of a failed planet in the asteroid belt. That will be a rich source of iron and precious metals.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7429663/metal-asteroid-16-psyche-...

But do humans really want to live on pluto? We evolved to live in nature, surrounded by plants and animals. I just don't see people wanting to live on a cold rock.

raises hand

I would love to live on Pluto. I'm sure lots of people would. Anyway, we evolved without Twitter and HN too, but here we are, spending our waking hours online. Many people alive today have never physically even visited 'real' nature and are (probably, mostly) fine without it.

I don't think 'we evolved to X and therefore would never want Y" holds much water.

Whether it’s acknowledged or not, “real” nature is all around us, everywhere, in a way that Pluto could never mimic unless of course humans magically terraformed it into existence, or some illusion of it.

It’s odd how easily we forget the simple things, like having a blue sky and a distant horizon. Or feeling the pull of the earth beneath our feet. Or the myriad of subtle scents in our nose, that immerse us even when we are unaware of them.

A little searching online will find you plenty of studies that show how nature, both simple and complex, reduce mental stresses in humans.

It seems prudent to at least assume that the environment in which we arose and for which we are adapted, would be not only better suited for the human body but also for its mind.

As a starting point for research into the effects of a similar, but still far more “natural”, environment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter-over_syndrome

All that said, I suppose it’s possible that humans born on Pluto might fair better. We probably (hopefully) have very few case studies that could even begin to provide some insight into such a scenario. So who knows…

It seems to me that the amount of energy expended by the sun to maintain earth's environment would be extremely difficult if not impossible to configure for Pluto.

Placing a magnetic shield in front of Mars to protect its atmosphere from the solar wind seems far more practical.

Here is what you do with Pluto.

You take the entire planet apart and use the entire mass. It contains large amounts of nitrogen, carbon monoxide, water and stony material. Use the energy of D+D fusion to do the job. Fabricate a small megastructure (compared to Niven's Ringworld or Dyson's sphere.) that never the less have much more floor space than the inner solar system.

I imagine it shopping malls for millions of miles as is shown in some O'Neill graphics and also Wall-E. Some people would find it comfortable.

It would be a big space and have some room for "nature". It looks hard for me to see how to provide relief like a mountain range unless the relief is axisymmetric.

I sketched out a very small Bernal sphere for a showy space hotel where it would be quite easy to climb up to the low-gravity "hub". It needs 15 starship loads of N2 for the atmosphere - pluto has a lot of N2 and could enable those bit O'Neill airspaces.

Haha clever, and I guess this technically counts as living “on” Pluto, albeit a deconstructed Pluto.

If you say you don't like nature, well, sure, I'm not going to argue that. You're entitled to your preferences. I certainly don't like mosquitos.

But if you say you would like to live on Pluto, I have trouble constructing a model in my head of your rationale.

I mean, you could live underground on Earth. Or in Antarctica. Or in a remote desert. Or underwater.

And you could have practically the same experience of Pluto via robotic means, whether or not you were also there.

On the other hand, actually being there would make it impossible to utilize the resources of Earth if and when something unexpected happens.

I can't think of anything but downsides (same applies to Mars).

In the remote future, if humans could be modified to live on the surface of other planets without equipment and build up a civilization as if indigenous, that appeals to my imagination. But surely that's a long time away.

A "colony" that is scrap and a tomb when one of a million things go wrong can never take root. Statistically, it will vanish before long. See: Croatoan.

Why? Assuming you can control environment to make it habitable, you might as well live anywhere.

You overestimate home many people even see grass these days :)

Seen the actual state of thing I have no interest living on Pluto or some other planet, but I might be interested in the ability to live in a Borg sphere/cube with full autonomy (food, water, weapons, ...) and enough (selected) humans to have enough DNA variability to been able to survive generations, a thing most people forget going to planets just for some natural resources when recycling is not enough...

Moving the entire solar system is my favorite solution so far:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3y8AIEX_dU

Sorta unrelated to the article. But it linked to a NASA blog post on how the moon was formed. There's an embedded YouTube video from 2006 that has a computer simulation on how the moon was formed.

Was NOT expecting a (drum'n'bass) banger of a track on that video when the protomoon hits the protoearth. Shazam couldn't properly identify. I love old internet posts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sr-MriOCzw

Haha that second paragraph was great.

Says at the end of the video “Music - Kyo Ichinose” but I didn’t have much luck hunting down the actual track.

Oh good eye! I see now his recent stuff, but nothing from that era. Probably a score created just for it.

Additional lol. Found a NYT link to the animation again, but it's in a obsolete format. (Requires Real Player)

The 90's man. You had to be there.

If we're talking about mining lithium from elsewhere in the solar system or even galaxy, I'm willing to be that fusing hydrogen and helium to get there is a much more energy efficient route. Maybe this is something you do where you don't need as dense a form of energy, but still. It's only the 3rd element. Rare earth metal mining in the asteroid belt is the one most likely to be necessary.

Wouldn't it be easier just to smash hydrogen atoms into helium atoms to produce Lithium?

Nuclear fusion seems much more achievable than interstellar space travel.

So what does lithium have that other elements don't, to be so populair with the battery crowd?

I see a couple comments here that don't understand why Lithium is a good choice.

Batteries push electrons around a circuit. This is powered by a redox reaction, with half of the reaction occurring on each terminal. One half of the reaction produces electrons, the other half consumes electrons, and these electrons travel from where they are produced (the oxidation half-reaction) to where they are consumed (the reduction half-reaction).

However, one half reaction simply produced electrons forever, it would accumulate a positive charge. So something inside the battery has to also move charge around to balance things out. This thing that moves should have a positive charge, and move in the same direction as the electrons, except through the battery instead of through the circuit. Your electron moves from the battery anode (-) through the circuit to the battery cathode (+), and something else with a positive charge also moves from the battery anode (-) to the battery cathode (+), except it moves through the battery instead of moving through the circuit.

In other words, a positive ion. Lithium is the smallest positive ion you can normally work with.

You'd think hydrogen would be smaller, but it actually forms a hydronium ion in aqueous solution. Hydrogen fuel cells are a lot like batteries that use hydrogen + oxygen, but the chemistry of hydrogen fuel cells make them not suitable as batteries, and hydrogen is hard to store. I'm sure I'm getting some of this wrong, I did study some very basic electrochemistry in college, so I would encourage people interested in electrochemistry to read more about it or even do simple experiments at home (it's surprisingly easy).

This is a great description. The one thing that's missing is /why/ a smaller ion is better. Is this because of energy lost by some equivalent of drag as the ion travels through the solution?

Smaller is better because you want your battery to be small. If you want a small battery, you need to use fewer atoms or put the atoms closer together (smaller atoms). Weight is also important. Lithium is very light and very small.

Well, for one thing it weighs less for every unit of positive charge.

One free electron, in a nice stable element that makes molecules easy to handle at room temperature.

It is very reactive (as it is in the first column of the periodic table - Alkali metal).

Other group of very reactive elements are in the second-last column such as Fluorine but they can't be as easily used in batteries for other reasons.

Lithium is also very light - 0.534 g/cm³ compared to copper with 8.96 g/cm³.

It’s in the name of the battery, so many seem to think that it’s the main ingredient.

It is though? I mean chemically speaking, how are lithium ions not the main / active ingredient?

A small note, just to descend from the dream to reality: lithium is already expensive. Mining lithium in space means making it more expensive than gold. Even if we can source a hyper-abundant source of lithium just on the Moon it's price would be so expensive that's useless. Not only, the quantity we can mine will be ridiculously small.

Space mining might be an option in 200y IF we are able to find ways to escape Earth gravitation with cheap and easy manners, otherwise is just a dream game of some who dream a "private space" to start a new "Alaska-like Gold Rush". Such dreams must be annihilated from the start for the sake of humanity.

Just the dream of private Moon/Mars colonies should be allowed only when single individuals can form a small society, buy a transport means, start a colony independently under their own State's laws. Otherwise those colonies will NOT be colonies like the west rush in the USA but dictatorship where the private holder can do essentially anything shielded by the fact that State's laws we have are valid only on Earth. That must not be happen.

Beside that: we can't even really know how much minerals in general we have in the Earth crust. We have estimation, reasoned, tried a bit, but nothing really certain so before working on something we should have been framed the scalability up front or live them as experiment.

We will probably come up with alternative chemistries. NiFe while not portable, is great for stationary applications. I would prefer to have a bank of NiFe batteries at home than a tesla wall. And probably my insurance company would think the same.

I love articles like these for their optimism — as they imply we will not be mining it in the metaverse for schrute bucks, or scouting new vegas for bottle caps.

I've always been amazed (despite being someone who's not easily amazed by Science Facts) that helium and lithium (and, less amazingly, hydrogen) were produced in large quantities in the early universe, long before there were stars.

So I'm envisioning a market for boutique "Big Bang" lithium, guaranteed not to have been produced in a star. It makes your engine run so much more smoothly.

Gourmet batteries, for the discerning audiophile, er... automophile.

Space mining is fun to speculate about, but surely it's going to be more practical to just reuse the Lithium we already have on earth? When we "use" Lithium in batteries, etc... we're just converting it to a less chemically convenient form - it's still the same element (barring nuclear processes).

Chile, Bolivia are the easiest to mine. It really is trivial, and incredibly cheap. See https://blog.grabcad.com/blog/2018/02/20/how-does-lithium-mi...

Once the question turns into star systems instead of asteroids, the answer is: lift hydrogen out of stars and transmute it into lithium as needed. Resources are heterogeneous only for civilizations significantly below level of 2 on the Kardashev's scale. Above it's all just matter-energy.

by the time we are able to move from planet to planet, i don't think we'll need lithium anymore

On the one hand, I think it's sensible to assume we'll find something better or more suitable, but in the other hand, we're dealing with fundamental physics, not consumer preference or any sort of abstraction away from function.

To produce food, we will need carbon. Structural materials will likely be steel or iron alloys. Energy storage works best with lithium for practical engineering reasons, and it's highly unlikely some other element will replace it.

The advantage of basic, high availability elements is you can pick up the raw material and process it almost anywhere. The distribution of elements is predictable, so unless you have a huge supply of unobtainium, it's better to use things you can scrounge on the way to or where you're going.

In a multi-species interstellar civilization, it's also reasonable to think that other starfaring technology will share similarity with your own - having a stockpile of lithium might mean you have a basic trade good.

Isn't phosphorus the true essential trade good? Necessary for life as we know it, but rare outside the solar system.

Probably - I think asteroid mining will give us the best picture of what's valuable in an interstellar context. If we figure out warp drive or wormholes for effectively ftl travel, the notion of value changes significantly.

Wouldn't it be terrifying if we had the galaxy all to ourselves?

Lithium is pretty useful in various fusion applications, which are likely to fuel the interplanetary economy.

The answer is The Salton Sea of course

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/can-salton-sea-g...

Article has spoilers for expanse, Star Trek discovery, for all mankind

If we get access to portals or wormholes, this might come in handy:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.04749

We'll figure out fluorine before space mining is even viable. They will probably have a fluorine-based battery on the market within the next decade.

Hopefully nowhere, because we will have moved on to organics we can synthesize or high density metal-air fuel cells or something.

And if not, I'm sure the entire dystopian horror that a space colony would be will have wireless charging everywhere... maybe they can just beam power everywhere in their mostly indoor world.

isn't it supposed to be in shale outcrops all over the ocean floor?

Ilus, of course

Gonya be rich, ke?

Is it Earth? I think we mine all of our lithium on Earth right now.

1. Electricity is not an energy source, you need to burn something else to create it.

2. Wind, Solar, Nuclear and Hydro can not be built with electricity at scale, you need coal, oil and gas to melt steel and burn lime stone for concrete.

3. You cannot make food with electricity at scale; tractors, trucks and fertilizers need hydrocarbons.

4. The tree is the best solar panel and battery in one, it created all coal, oil and gas on the planet. Only snag is that it takes a couple of hundred thousand years for the trees to become coal, oil and gas!

5. Going into space is a completely meaningless exercise until we can establish that we can colonize another planet self-sustainably. We are very far away from making that happen because it would need trees and an atmosphere which take more time to terraform than we have hydrocarbons left on Earth to still reach Mars f.ex at scale (enough people to bootstrap the new planet) when it's fully terraformed.

These combined make it pretty clear that the only realistic option is to consume less energy. Stop driving. Stop flying. Live in a smaller space. Work from home. Consume less of everything and try to produce something meaningful with what you allready have!

Find a purpose in quality, instead of quantity.

Please use arguments instead of only the down button?

Just because you don't like the truth doesn't make it less true.

> you need coal, oil and gas to melt steel and burn lime stone for concrete

Flat out factually wrong.

> 3. You cannot make food with electricity at scale; tractors, trucks and fertilizers need hydrocarbons.

Flat out factually wrong.

> 4. The tree is the best solar panel and battery in one

Show the math on this.

> Going into space is a completely meaningless exercise

Matter of opinion.

Not sure an argument needs to be made? I googled 3 of your 5 statements and they didn't appear true. Plus, you don't seem to take future breakthroughs into account. Technology progresses exponentially.

Tech. optimism is predatory on the generations that follow if they turn out to not happen.

And I don't know how many cameras on the back of your iPhone before you realize it still only takes 2D photos?

I think you need to understand the "at scale" I added everywhere. All the solutions you googled are by companies that can make it work in a prototype... but when they try to replace dead trees they all fail...

if 100% of hydrocarbons are used to make things vs. power things then they would last a lot longer than otherwise.

Try going into space with a lithium battery powered rocket.

Few small notes:

- personally I think agriculture is one of the few (semi)industrial sectors who can really run on solar: we do not need tractors, we use them just because we have invented them as a replacement for animals used for similar "traction" works, nowadays we can lay out rails (like we have for certain irrigation bot on scale) [1] with enough self-orienting solar panels on top to power slow motors and slow pumps to slowly traverse a field for irrigation, fertilization etc. It's already a bit doable a step at a time;

- we can't use only natural fertilizers (manure, ammonia from urine etc) just because we are too many, but a less giant population can. For instance Canada, Russia probably can live well enough with only natural fertilizers;

- nuclear, fission since it's the sole operational on scale we have, go well enough with industry since modern industry have almost constant loads and NPP easily produce constant energy, surely they are not really renewable BUT so far they are the lest polluting and more effective mid/long term solution usable on scale, with enough heat and electricity we can't replace mineral coal for steel production, we can't fly airplanes [2] but we can reduce much their demand so buy 50-10 year of time to develop something else;

- about consuming less: I've built a new house, with good insulation, VMC, p.v. etc so now I consume much less and live better than before, BUT to build it I've used many resources and the same apply to us all. It's easy to say "we can consume less" when to reach that goal we need to consume much more... It's not much different for food: if I buy a bit of land and build a kind of plant for poultry, trouts, a bit of crops, freezers, oxygenation systems for the water, auto-cleaning and recycling systems for poultry rooms to make fertilizers etc I'll not be self-sufficient in food but can probably produce enough to survive in a no such bad manner. Unfortunately that demand a gazillion or resources just to nourish a small family for a not that big timeslice (plant do not last more than few decades and nothing makes possible rebuild them with local resources). That's to say: we are a society, we are interconnected, we can't progress alone, we can't survive without a certain critical mass of humans working together spread around the planet. That's the hyper-big issue.

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/media/9165/june17_datafeature_schai... or simpler https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/wheel-line-irrigation-s...

[2] yes, few nuclear airplanes have been experimented with limited success in the '70s but they were left in the oblivion since they are just too dangerous and barely capable of fly themselves without any load.

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