[ExI] Millions of tons to space

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Apr 06, 2011 at 11:00:12AM -0700, Dan wrote:
> Given the likehood of Uranus and Neptune having rocky metal cores about an Earth 

Please do not top-post (message unchanged below).

> mass or so, this still means most of the rock and metal in the solar system is 
> off Earth, no? Of course, it'd be really hard to access much of it, but the same 

Exactly.

> applies to the rock and metal not in Earth's crust. (And, once you're off world, 

Absolutely not, asteroids, rocky planetesimals, Mercury, Moon are all
fair game for stripmining. Once you run out of these you can e.g. blow
off the atmosphere off Venus, which is frankly quite useless as is.

> it seems like the rock and metal available on Luna and smaller bodies would be 
> far more accessible and useable than the stuff packed into the Earth or any 
> terrestrial planet.)
> 
> I just don't see, at this time, such a shortage of these materials, that the 
> only possible attitude to take is Earth must be gobbled up for resource 
> extraction.

Self-replication has exponential dynamics, so you'll run out of stuff
before you run out of flux (4 MT/s, you'll need to build a cloud of
nodes at about ~AU), and of course if you run out of flux before you 
run out of stuff there's fusion.
 
> Regards,
> 
> Dan
>  
> From: Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org>
> To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> Sent: Wed, April 6, 2011 11:30:09 AM
> Subject: Re: [ExI] Millions of tons to space
> 
> On Wed, Apr 06, 2011 at 07:52:34AM -0700, Dan wrote:
> > You speak as if Earth contained most of the rock and metal in the solar system 
> 
> > if not the galaxy. There's plenty of rock and metal around to play with.
> 
> Most of the metals in the solar system are locked in the inner
> planets. There are 4 MT/s of flux to work with, and more if you
> use fusables for fuel.
> 
> -- 
> Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
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