[ExI] Mining the Sky SL Talk I gave today

samantha sjatkins at mac.com
Sun May 2 21:24:10 UTC 2010


Adrian Tymes wrote:
> --- On Sat, 5/1/10, samantha <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:
>   
>> The precious
>> metals are mainly, in my mind, a way to quickly fund more launches and
>> amass a lot of working capital while the groundlings come to understand
>> the huge future value of what you are gathering in orbit.
>>     
>
> Quite.  Say it takes 10 years, including all design and engineering and
> financing/business development (yes, that's going to take non-trivial
> time), until we get first sale of platinum from an asteroid in orbit.
> Say it's a small one, so even working slowly, we consume it entirely in
> only 2 years (selling metal on the ground, maybe a little early space
> manufacturing to build stuff in orbit - whatever, it's all used).  Two
> things then happen:
>
> 1. Whoever did it presumably has more than enough money to do it again.
> Not to mention, designs, talent, and other things needed to build the
> probe, machinery, and other things needed to do it again.  They'll
> quite probably go get another asteroid.  With a lot of the development
> (and financing) already taken care of, not to mention knowing some ways
> to refine the process, they can do it faster.
>
> 2. Other people, capable of doing it but not believing it could be
> done safely & profitably - or just not taking space industry seriously
> - sit up and take notice.  Most likely, some of them go get their own
> asteroids, some of them openly imitating the original project.
>
> This starts to feed on itself.  What happens if this causes an
> exponential curve - something like Moore's Law - to apply to the amount
> of raw material humanity harvests from asteroids each year, after the
> first asteroid is done?  And, as a consequence, to the amount of solar
> energy harvested each year?  (If building another solar power
> satellite is substantially cheaper than building another coal plant -
> or even about the same, since solar energy is effectively free, so the
> ongoing cost is much less - then simple economics can displace fossil
> fuels, at least for non-mobile power generation.  If energy gets
> cheap enough, synthetic gasoline eventually gets cheaper than the real
> thing, even assuming no further progress in electric vehicles.  And so
> on.)
>   

Hell yes!  That is the general idea.

I think with plentiful solar power from space that most current energy 
sources will eventually be displaced except for usages we can't quite 
convert yet.  Plentiful cheap energy and abundant materials are key to 
continuing progress toward the future we dream of.

- samantha

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