[ExI] Mining the Sky SL Talk I gave today

[Adrian Tymes]

--- On Mon, 4/26/10, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> OK, I thought about it longer.  Now I will now explain
> my thoughts in a
> parable.  This one's free, you don't even need to call
> me Jesus.

It is also flawed.  I have already explained most of the
errors (like your assumption that platinum has no
non-financial value on the ground, or even that the
value in orbit necessarily dwarfs the value on the
ground*).  Here you also imply that there is only one
asteroid.  There are hundreds of thousands of "minor
planets", not counting the Oort Cloud, Kuiper Belt,
stuff too small to be registered, and as-yet-undetected
rocks.

If you mean, grabbing an asteroid is so hideously
expensive that we should plan on only ever doing it
once - nope.  Once you have launched an asteroid tug,
you do not need to launch it again to capture the
second asteroid, and that is a major part of the cost
of capturing the first asteroid.

* Another way to think of it: even if the eventual
value in orbit is extreme, that's still eventual.
We can "borrow" the platinum down to Earth in the
mean time, earning interest.  Once we become able to
use the platinum in orbit, we can pay the launch
costs out of that interest, which also covers the
cost of the iron used up in the process.  (When the
price per ton of the raw material exceeds the price
per ton of launching stuff into orbit, the interest
payments really can get that high.  Also, by the
time platinum is useful in space, launch costs may
have come down a lot - say, if there's a working
space elevator by then - so there wouldn't be that
much to pay back.)

> My childish intuition tells me that retrieving
> platinum from
> interplanetary space is a Bad Idea, one which will be
> bitterly regretted
> henceforth forever.

If one's intuition flies in the face of the facts, then
one's intuition is wrong.

Also: why will anyone care that much?  The Exxon Valdez
spill wasted a lot of oil; do most people - even most
people who were involved - bitterly regret it forever?
Clearly not: most people barely remember it, if they
even heard about it, and all those who were involved
have moved on to other things.  Same here: even if it
is a mistake, the magnitude is far smaller than you are
claiming (since, again, there are many other asteroids
around).

> Nanotech is coming, but a good way to get stuff out of this
> deep gravity
> well is not.

Space elevators, laser launch, fusion rockets...and those
are just off the top of my head.

You appear to be in the grip of a meme that declares that
anything in orbit is inherently infinitely more valuable than
anything on the ground, whether or not that can be proven
today.  This meme is persistent because it gives an immediate
way to defy evidence: it posits that future conditions will
change to justify it, regardless of any and all facts that
can be observed and measured at the present time.  In this,
it is similar to belief in the Second Coming (and dissimilar
to the simplest beliefs in the Singularity, which are simply
observations on what happens if current observed trends
continue).  Please do try to free yourself from such memes.

If, for instance, there is such an overwhelming future
value for iron in space, then why is there a complete lack
of speculators in that market today?  The concept is not
beyond what Big Money is capable of wrapping its mind
around.  In these times, if that valuation really is so
guaranteed, the risk/reward ratio would surely cause some of
today's paniced investors (who, not that long ago, were
willing to buy treasury notes with negative interest rates)
to shelter their money in buying up scrap iron in space.
Buying the salvage rights to junked satellites, if nothing
else: that iron's already been delivered.  And yet, despite
the existence of such scrap iron, no one is buying.