Resources from outer space?

[Narz]

El_Machinae got me thinking about this.

Are there any resources in outer space that would be worth the expense and effort to cart them back to Earth?

If so, what and why?

Just curious, this is something I never really thought of before.

 

[The Last Conformist]

Today? No.

In the near future? Maybe - the best candidate is probably He-3, a helium isotope that would be useful for fusion plants, which is rare on earth but comparatively abundant on the moon and on near-earth asteroids.

 

[Bluemofia]

Today, obviously not, but in the future assuming that space becomes a higher priority, yes.

There is an asteroid in the asteroid belt, a minor one, that contains more metal than humanity has ever mined in the history of the planet.

The moon has plenty of Helium 3, used for efficient fusion reactors, and not to mention bunches of other things that can be used for a moon base.

 

[El_Machinae]

TLC is close. Actually there are a host of valuable resources because a) they're already in space and b) asteroids are the inside of planets too.

You'll note that we have a cornucopia of metals deep in our planet, right? However, getting them is a pain, because we have to drill so far down. The right type of asteroid has those metals as its main constituent, so it's like finding a mine on the surface.

The trick would be to nudge an asteroid into Earth orbit. Instead of going to get the materials, bring it here. There are some asteroids that are only 4 lunar distances away and are a few hundred tons of materials. The delta V to move them is high, but people have to remember that baby steps matter.

www.permanent.com is a really good website on this topic. I spent a few hours reading it for fun a couple years ago.

This is a page specifically regarding what asteroids are made of.

This is a page talking about the delta V required to move an asteroid to where we could use it.

 

[El_Machinae]

Remember, getting an asteroid made of ANYTHING into Earth orbit means that space becomes massively cheaper, because enterprising engineers will figure out a way to turn dirt into something useful (better than shipping the end-product upwards)

 

[Elrohir]

As has already been mentioned, Helium 3 exists in large quantities on the Moon, and could be very useful in nuclear fusion. The Astroid Belt contains incredible quantities of metals, and Saturn's rings contains both asteroids and water ice. To put it in perspective, compared to the rest of the universe, the Earth is a poor little mudball of a planet whose inhabitants are squabbling over tiny amounts of resources.

Makes you feel kinda small, doesn't it?

 

[Dida]

yes, such as antipower or blackhole mines.

 

[The Last Conformist]

Tangential, but what's, in the short run, will be more interesting than shipping stuff back to earth is building space stations, spacecraft, etc, from materials found on asteroids instead of paying thru your nose to get the stuff up from earth.

 

[Babbler]

Depends on how quickly minerals and ores are being mined. If the easily accessible sources for a mineral become depleted and the mineral is valuable, then I can see people investing money into such a project.

Besides mining, the only other economic incentive for the development of space would be solar power satellites, where massive solar panels would collect solar energy outside the nights and clouds and beam it back to the Earth as microwaves. It like SimCity 2000's microwave plants, but with out the "microwave laser misfiring".

 

[Shaihulud]

We can just build automated spacecraft to "guide" the asteroids into Earths atmosphere, we can use Iran as a landing pad for the incoming minerals.

 

[sanabas]

El_Machinae got me thinking about this.

Are there any resources in outer space that would be worth the expense and effort to cart them back to Earth?

If so, what and why?

Just curious, this is something I never really thought of before.

Right now, no. Once the effort & expense required drop, yes.

 

[Irish Caesar]

I do see it happening eventually, but probably not in my lifetime...

 

[SoCalian]

I'm reading Green Mars(second in the Red Mars trilogy) by Kim Stanley Robinson. It's an incredibley detailed book(and series), and most of the science in it seems plausible at least to the casual reader, and in it he suggests that is would be possible to pull an astroid into Mars' orbit and use automated robots to turn the astroind into a space elevator, with some of it left on top as a space station. any idea if that is possible.

 

[Secular]

most of the science in it seems plausible at least to the casual reader, and in it he suggests that is would be possible to pull an astroid into Mars' orbit and use automated robots to turn the astroind into a space elevator, with some of it left on top as a space station. any idea if that is possible.

plausible yes. possible as of now or the immidiate (say fifty to a hundred years) no. The problem with a space elevator is simply that we can't make a material with the tensile strength to make it feasable. Keep in mind it has to be relativly light weight as well. A Bussard ramjet makes perfect sense in theory too, its that damn science that screws us.

 

[brennan]

The principle there is to place the asteroid in orbit, then build your elevator down towards the earth, balancing with some sort of construction going outwards - essentially the construction is always 'in orbit' because the centre of mass is unchanged, but you change the shape of it so that it reaches the ground. The orbit itself has to be geostationary of course. The materials needed to take the stress/strain forces are currently in the realms of science fiction.

 

[El_Machinae]

There is one material that would be extremely valuable to mine in space. Platinum.

Right now, platinum is a precious metal, and it's used heavily in jewelry. That's nice, but I don't care about that.

The other property of platinum is how useful it is in precision instruments. Various medical and scientific devices use platinum, and in fact, the platinum is a significant portion of the price. If we get a new supply of platinum, the price of platinum will go down. This means that these instruments will become cheaper (by default) - meaning scientists and hospitals will be able to afford more of them. And that's a good thing. As well, new types of instruments would be made, since the perceived benefit of the instrument would come in line with the price.

Cheaper platinum = good.

 

[The Fjonis]

I heard somewhere that the moon is full of some chemical compound that is very rare on Earth which reacts readily with CO2 to form some harmless compound. Apparently this compound is used to some extent to filter out CO2 from factories and such, but since we don't have much of it here, it isn't really going to solve any great problems. But if we had access to all that stuff on the moon, this could quite possibly provide a very cheap and efficient way of solving most of our CO2 problems. That would be cool!

 

[El_Machinae]

H20 combines very nicely with C02 to make sugars/plants, etc.

The beauty is that both H20 and C02 are greenhouse gases. The problem with our current system is that we're using water that's locked underground to grow our plants - so we're increasing the water supply in the air too, instead of decreasing both.

 

[EdCase]

H20 combines very nicely with C02 to make sugars/plants, etc.

The beauty is that both H20 and C02 are greenhouse gases. The problem with our current system is that we're using water that's locked underground to grow our plants - so we're increasing the water supply in the air too, instead of decreasing both.

You do need to tell the full story regarding water vapor though...regarding cloud formation and the fact that nobody really knows how these interactions truely work.
Read any body of work on the subject and it will pretty much state..."we kinda know how it works, but this is really a best guess"

 

[El_Machinae]

My mistake. I shouldn't have introduce the Greenhouse effect.

BUT, another resource we can use from space is manufacturing. Done right, there will not be any problematic pollution, since (done right) it doesn't matter if we pollute into space. We won't be wreaking any ecosystems, just hindering where we can expand to (since we won't move where the pollution is). That means that the cost of goods that's normally devoted to pollution cleanup will go down, making goods cheaper.

Who cares about sound pollution in space? Who cares if we displace a bunch of soil on the moon? No one, and that's good for us down here.