The first two parts are great. Rip out the third one.
But Seveneves was about using the resources of the broken up moon, which is pretty much like hopping onto the bus (on the middle lane of a three-lane-highway) compared to the challenges of getting an asteroid into earth orbit
Sure, but tbh, if he had split it up into three novels and give more time to the second and third part it might climed up to the hill-top from which, in my opinion, The Long Earth rules this decade of SciFi writing.
In my view he should have written a fourth part. I would have been very curious how the people who stayed on earth survived in their caves and under water.
From my limited understanding of the subject, unless we build something like orbital elevators, it will not make financial sense to bring the mined raw materials back to earth. However, as the linked article states, there are plenty of uses for water and hydrogen and oxygen in space.
In the very long term, I could imagine automated processing of metals on asteroids leading to 3D printing of giant space station parts. Then one could attach an ion thruster and send the parts to the their destination for final construction.
I'm pretty sure the Tunguska event was an asteroid aero-braking into the ground. Where are you going to put the kinetic energy? Once it hits atmosphere there's not a lot you can do. Maybe attach a really big parachute.
The speed at which energy is released varies by altitude and speed. The Tunguska asteroid managed to reach just 10 km over the Earth's surface before exploding where the air is getting quite thick. What you want to do is rather than dive in head first just skim the atmosphere and drain your energy bit by bit. Once you're going slowly you can afford to go lower without burning up.
When astronauts return from space they have to carefully control how they descend and make sure that they don't get too low while they're traveling too fast. Otherwise they'd burn up.
Gliding/skipping entry is not feasible for such a massive, unpredictable and uncontrolled object. Both due to accuracy and aerothermodynamics. Thermodynamically speaking, entry angle is a trade-off between the peak heat load and the total heat received, and for the prolonged reentry the object has to be engineered to radiate much more heat away than with a steeper angle entry. Also, skipping entry is extremely inaccurate, and must be precisely controlled to achieve the desired result.
This all assumes that for some strange reason you’re dropping the whole asteroid rather than packets of pre-processed material which is what you’d actually do. As a bonus you could use some of the cruft from the original body to make heat shielding for the “parcels” to be used on reentry.
Landing asteroids in the sea is a really bad idea if you care at all about either the ocean ecosystem, or anything you have on the coastline anywhere in the region.
There's nothing like the unique joys of spending tens of billions of dollars and decades to have your metallic asteroid burn up 90% of it's mass on reentry, the rest explodes over a wide area or sinks into the sea, and being arrested for use of a WMD.
Landing the space shuttle was hard because it used a crappy design for secret reasons. Technicians at the time tried to propose a sensible design instead, but obviously could not override this.
Also hard because of the requirement to have crew and not kill them, both of which go away when all you’re doing is dropping e.g. one ton cylinders of mildly purified gold wrapped in a steel tube.
By not flooding the market. Sell at a rate which still turns a profit. Only issue is if there's so much mineral that it exceeds demand. But if that's the case, back to my initial point: refuse to sell at a loss; sell slower
Kinda like the glut of oil reserves in the world. Everyone knows the time of internal combustion engines is drawing to a close and so they are trying to sell every barrel they have before barrels of oil become worth pennies.
Once enough people have asteroid material in orbit, the material cost will drop as sellers try to recover any value out of the market.
That’s only possible if there’s a bubble that causes total production to exceed demand-at-zero-profit. As this thread forked off a suggestion of nickel production, I looked that up — around 2,0000,000 tons per year right now.
If there’s enough production going on in space to bubble-and-pop at that kind of scale, I’d expect overcapacity to be used for construction of space habitats, not lowering prices below cost in a fire-sale.
Remember you likely have investors to answer to. They may sacrifice long term goals for short term ones. If you delay moving volume to capture as much profit as possible, you risk a competitor catching you and then you may not be in control of prices.
So you have enough of a material to flood the market and wipe out any competitor. What competitor is going to invest billions in trying to compete with you? To kill them stone dead all you have to do is turn on the tap. I think investors are going to understand the idea of maximising return on investment. It's not an unheard of concept in business.
Right now the world's entire mineral supply is worth X dollars.
If I acquire a bunch of asteroids and double the size of that supply, I now own X/2 dollars worth of minerals, instead of the zero dollars worth that I did before.
Maybe not. If the worldwide demand is N tons and the worldwide supply is estimated at 0.75 * N, then doubling the supply to 1.5 * N is likely to reduce the unit price by more than half.
For a simple example, consider the case of decorative diamonds today.
I think it’s an excellent example and the artificial scarcity is irrelevant to the point being made: total market value of all $substance is not constant when quantity of $substance changes.
The formal term for how the price of something changes when the supply changes is the elasticity of demand. Well, really that's the term for how the amount people buy changes with the price but if we assume the person with the asteroid lowers the price enough to sell all the metal it comes to the same thing. It's known to be different for different sorts of goods and different circumstances. For instance platinum is mostly used in catalytic converters and people don't tend to make more or less of those as platinum prices change so the price would probably go down quite a bit as more supply becomes available. I got that by googling "price elasticity platinum" and you can do the same for the other asteroid components you might want to sell.
I think that if you were to make something like platinum group metals more easily accessible/cheaper, then there would be a lot more uses for them discovered as well. So while you would reduce the price for them massively, I think you could potentially create more demand for them.
As sibling comments have pointed out, you don't necessarily have to flood the market; but there are price regimes where it would make economic sense to do so.
Suppose it costs a terrestrial mining company $1000/ton to extract a material, and the price is $1005/ton, and you can bring the same metal down from space for $100/ton, and sell at $110/ton. Under this set of facts you can make a better margin than the terrestrial miners make, take over the whole market, and everybody except the terrestrial miners will be better off.
Your only competitors would be other space miners, and the capex/research investment required to set up a space mining operation would constitute a significant moat (though certainly not a permanent one).
Who knows if these hypotheticals are remotely close to how this will play out, but I think this is an interesting scenario.
Why the hell would you sell it for $100 when your nearest competitor cost is at a $1000. You would sell it for $990 and keep lowering the price slowly as you are able to satisfy demand at each price point.
Yes, there are strategies around how to optimally milk the period of price change. I was talking about the equilibrium state here.
The point I was making was that even if you cause a price drop by flooding the market, it might not be a bad outcome; you could end up making more profit than was being made by your competitors before you entered the market.
To your point, it's true that even if the equilibrium state isn't more profitable for an actor, they would still be incentivized to increase the supply if they could temporarily widen their profit margins while the price is changing (e.g. until the competitors can catch up). But I think that the equilibrium state provides a simpler working example of the general point I was making.
The derivatives market only has quadrillions of dollars if you do silly things such as counting a $1m transaction buy followed by an identical sell, each performed every hour of the year, as being worth 2x24x365x$1m = $17,520 million. You can’t just cash out a quadrillion dollars from the derivatives market and buy everything else in the world economy — apart from anything else, there isn’t enough currency around to do so.
I’d like to see research in bringing captured small asteroids back to earth cheaply for processing. Maybe attach a large ballute. Or the bfs payload version could land one.
The cost to do so would be so prohibitively high that it would never be worth doing. Whatever gains you got from "cheaply processing" it here would be completely eclipsed by the cost of bringing it back.
The simple rule of space is that changing the velocity of anything is the most expensive thing. Getting an asteroid from whatever orbit around the sun it's currently in and bringing it to earth would cost far more than it would to instead bring an entire mineral processing plant to the asteroid, and just sending back the bits worth a lot of money.
Alternative: crash the asteroids into the moon, have robots recover the valuable minerals. Use a rail gun system to fire it back to Earth, processed, while enjoying the low gravity of the moon.
You can fire it relatively slowly because of the low gravity of the moon, and take plenty of time bleeding v. Ideally there would be a space elevator and capture system to bring them back, but other methods work. You’re not just firing “at” Earth. Even if you were, Earth is mostly covered by oceans, and landing them there would be acceptable.
The low gravity of the moon isn’t the problem, it’s the high gravity of the earth: it will hit hard even if you had a lunar space elevator and gave it the minimum possible delta-v to reach Earth from that Lagrange point.
The other problem is that even if you intend to use it safely, you have just built a massive gun which is too far away to shoot back at and which has the capability to target specific locations on this planet.
I get the impression it would be harder, because ICBM launches are really obvious (to current equipment) and you can at least make a good guess about their ballistic path, while anything of that size launched from the moon would be invisible until it had almost hit you.
While it is often said that stealth is impossible in space, that tends to assume the appropriate tech has actually been manufactured rather than sitting in a lab somewhere waiting for a purchase order. Radar, even lidar, is going to have awful signal-to-noise ratios and almost all of the return signal will be stuff that bounced off the moon rather than any projectile. Even the lunar retroreflector turns 10^17 photons out into one photon back, according to Wikipedia, and that’s about as far from stealth as you can get.
Edit: I suppose one could reasonably argue that any industrialisation of Luna would, as a result of my own argument, make governments choose to put loads of effort into appropriate defence technology. On the other hand, I’m told trench warfare was more accident than deliberate planning in WW1, so perhaps governments would be as myopic as ever even with a massive space gun on the moon.
Once it gets within a few tens of megameters, pulsed radar systems could easily distinguish an incoming projectile thanks to the 2.4 second round-trip-time to the moon. Metallic objects have ideal visibility. If you are concerned about solar thermal radio emissions bouncing off the moon and reducing SNR, that could be an issue -- a phase-of-the-moon bug in the system, if you will. But based on what I’ve overheard from friends working on 21-cm radar teaching telescopes, I doubt the luminosity of the continuous background is high enough to pose a big problem, assuming you have a decently large antenna.
I’m more concerned that there’s nothing much you can do to redirect such an object in the few hours it takes to fall on your head. By that time it will have reached 4km/s.
Good to know. In that case, I’m not concerned by the first n (n<5000 ish, varies by nation), but the relative ease by which an attcker can just keep going until the target run out of missiles to shoot at the attacker’s projectiles.
There is no significant advance in tech regarding colonization, mining, and manufacturing in space without significant dual uses. If “that could be a weapon!” is the end of it, then we’re stuck on this rock until we all die. It’s all pretty moot, since dropping rocks on a country won stop a proportional nuclear response.
Nuclear responses aren’t possible if the rocks were dropped by unknown attackers who hacked or invaded the launch site, if the target isn’t a nuclear nation or in a defence treaty with one, or even if the attackers are the legitimate owners deciding to do a Sea Of Tranquillity Tea Party in a fight for independence because the nukes can’t easily get up there and are surprisingly rubbish in space anyway.
First line of the story, “…The first trillionaire will be made in space”. At that scale, do you think it isn’t worth privately funding some mercenaries and your own BFR clone (or even Saturn V if the BFR isn’t copyable for whatever reason) for an incredibly hostile takeover of any infrastructure placed on the moon? And that’s Earth launch where it would be obvious who was behind it. If the same wealth leads to significant numbers of people going up, they don’t need anything like that kind of propulsion to do what has happened a thousand times before on land and sea, in the general area of strikes, secession, and mutiny.
As for hacking being possible, that’s just the observation that basically everything is hackable. Even things that were given as examples of clueless parents fretting over nothing when I was a teen, such as making JPEG files execute when opened, turned out possible due to exploitable bugs.
Ah, I see. Well, almost. Plausible deniability is good enough for direct launch from the ground, but answering your question would require me to know a lot of (I hope) classified information about the national security of multiple nations. So I don’t know.
However, my main focus was supposed to be other people who are “legitimately” in space, because of the aforementioned trillion dollars, and of hacking. Because both hacking and mutiny/secession haves happened lots already, even in situations where one might expect them not to.
That's like saying "It's too far to travel from France to my house, so instead we're going to travel from France to my neighbour's house, who is slightly further east".
The moon is, astronomically speaking, as near to Earth as you can get. The problem is that everything else, including asteroids, are many thousands of times further away.
Has anyone made predictions on the implications of "rare-earth" minerals becoming "not-so-rare-anymore"? What, today, costs a fortune due to the requirement of certain matter that we don't have much of? Jewelry is obvious, but what else in my home right now is expensive to replace just because of the matter it's made of?
But is it really? Most gemstones can be made artificially these days and the price has dropped dramatically so it seems unlikely to me that mining asteroids would have much effect. The price of jewellery is much higher than the value of the materials already.
One example of this from the past is aluminum. In the 1850s, it was extremely rare and difficult to produce - costing more than gold, used as serving utensils in Napoleon's court, and as the capstone of the Washington monument. Now it's one of the cheapest metals.
I have been looking into this, and one of the few commodities that has value at scale is Nickel, there is a large demand for it and the prices have been generally high.
> There would seem to be more danger to the economy by being flooded with rare metals
I think that this case is not directly comparable to the price revolution; in the cases you've linked, Gold==Money, and so by bringing back gold the Spanish massively increased the money supply (from the first article, "Prices rose on average roughly sixfold over 150 years. This level of inflation amounts to 1–1.5% per year, a relatively low inflation rate for modern-day standards, but rather high given the monetary policy in place in the 16th century").
In the case we're discussing, Metal!=Money. The more metal you bring back, the lower the price falls, until it reaches a new equilibrium where it's no longer economical at the margin to bring back more.
This would significantly affect certain markets (i.e. mining, industrial processes that consume these metals), but it's not the same thing as creating money; you can't spend nickel, you need to find someone who will buy it from you in order to turn it into money.
That was the point I was trying to make, seemingly not very well. That Nickel is a metal commodity that would probably be able to soak up much of the production.
I need to work out how to deal with too many ideas hitting me at once.
Move the nasty industrial processes out there, factories in space and only ship high end processed materials.
Once there is rocket fuel in large quantity "boost backwards". Slow a well designed space plane to a safe entry velocity and fly to a regular airport. It's and idea that can not even be imagined until there is a filling station in space but should be standard after the first water asteroid.
Are there any regulations preventing "asteroid collectors" crashing them in the middle of sahara or where they own the land?(i.e. only redirecting the asteroid to the place)
We'll need "commerical astronomers" to help find promising asteroids.
At last February's AAAS meeting in Austin, Martin Elvis (quoted in the article) noted that over the next several years, a number of larger (20 to 30 meter) terrestrial telescopes will be coming on line. That will free up some the smaller 10-15 meter instruments, some of which could be used to search for watery and/or metallic asteroids.
82 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadBut Seveneves was about using the resources of the broken up moon, which is pretty much like hopping onto the bus (on the middle lane of a three-lane-highway) compared to the challenges of getting an asteroid into earth orbit
In the very long term, I could imagine automated processing of metals on asteroids leading to 3D printing of giant space station parts. Then one could attach an ion thruster and send the parts to the their destination for final construction.
Though possibly the asteroid would be more valuable in orbit than on Earth. It's hard to get materials up there!
When astronauts return from space they have to carefully control how they descend and make sure that they don't get too low while they're traveling too fast. Otherwise they'd burn up.
Or even a hollow sphere.
Easier solution - park the asteroids somewhere and have the nations of the world pay you not to.
Kinda like the glut of oil reserves in the world. Everyone knows the time of internal combustion engines is drawing to a close and so they are trying to sell every barrel they have before barrels of oil become worth pennies.
Once enough people have asteroid material in orbit, the material cost will drop as sellers try to recover any value out of the market.
If there’s enough production going on in space to bubble-and-pop at that kind of scale, I’d expect overcapacity to be used for construction of space habitats, not lowering prices below cost in a fire-sale.
If I acquire a bunch of asteroids and double the size of that supply, I now own X/2 dollars worth of minerals, instead of the zero dollars worth that I did before.
For a simple example, consider the case of decorative diamonds today.
Suppose it costs a terrestrial mining company $1000/ton to extract a material, and the price is $1005/ton, and you can bring the same metal down from space for $100/ton, and sell at $110/ton. Under this set of facts you can make a better margin than the terrestrial miners make, take over the whole market, and everybody except the terrestrial miners will be better off.
Your only competitors would be other space miners, and the capex/research investment required to set up a space mining operation would constitute a significant moat (though certainly not a permanent one).
Who knows if these hypotheticals are remotely close to how this will play out, but I think this is an interesting scenario.
The point I was making was that even if you cause a price drop by flooding the market, it might not be a bad outcome; you could end up making more profit than was being made by your competitors before you entered the market.
To your point, it's true that even if the equilibrium state isn't more profitable for an actor, they would still be incentivized to increase the supply if they could temporarily widen their profit margins while the price is changing (e.g. until the competitors can catch up). But I think that the equilibrium state provides a simpler working example of the general point I was making.
The simple rule of space is that changing the velocity of anything is the most expensive thing. Getting an asteroid from whatever orbit around the sun it's currently in and bringing it to earth would cost far more than it would to instead bring an entire mineral processing plant to the asteroid, and just sending back the bits worth a lot of money.
The other problem is that even if you intend to use it safely, you have just built a massive gun which is too far away to shoot back at and which has the capability to target specific locations on this planet.
But how difficult would it be to intercept the payload safely outside the atmosphere? Seems it would be easier than intercepting an ICBM.
While it is often said that stealth is impossible in space, that tends to assume the appropriate tech has actually been manufactured rather than sitting in a lab somewhere waiting for a purchase order. Radar, even lidar, is going to have awful signal-to-noise ratios and almost all of the return signal will be stuff that bounced off the moon rather than any projectile. Even the lunar retroreflector turns 10^17 photons out into one photon back, according to Wikipedia, and that’s about as far from stealth as you can get.
Edit: I suppose one could reasonably argue that any industrialisation of Luna would, as a result of my own argument, make governments choose to put loads of effort into appropriate defence technology. On the other hand, I’m told trench warfare was more accident than deliberate planning in WW1, so perhaps governments would be as myopic as ever even with a massive space gun on the moon.
I’m more concerned that there’s nothing much you can do to redirect such an object in the few hours it takes to fall on your head. By that time it will have reached 4km/s.
As for hacking being possible, that’s just the observation that basically everything is hackable. Even things that were given as examples of clueless parents fretting over nothing when I was a teen, such as making JPEG files execute when opened, turned out possible due to exploitable bugs.
However, my main focus was supposed to be other people who are “legitimately” in space, because of the aforementioned trillion dollars, and of hacking. Because both hacking and mutiny/secession haves happened lots already, even in situations where one might expect them not to.
The moon is, astronomically speaking, as near to Earth as you can get. The problem is that everything else, including asteroids, are many thousands of times further away.
But is it really? Most gemstones can be made artificially these days and the price has dropped dramatically so it seems unlikely to me that mining asteroids would have much effect. The price of jewellery is much higher than the value of the materials already.
The Spanish brought back gold and silver from the New World, and crashed the markets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution
Mansa Musa of Mali splashed gold on his trip to Mecca in the 1300s and caused economies to falter for several years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_I_of_Mali
There would seem to be more danger to the economy by being flooded with rare metals than from an actual meteorite impact.
I think that this case is not directly comparable to the price revolution; in the cases you've linked, Gold==Money, and so by bringing back gold the Spanish massively increased the money supply (from the first article, "Prices rose on average roughly sixfold over 150 years. This level of inflation amounts to 1–1.5% per year, a relatively low inflation rate for modern-day standards, but rather high given the monetary policy in place in the 16th century").
In the case we're discussing, Metal!=Money. The more metal you bring back, the lower the price falls, until it reaches a new equilibrium where it's no longer economical at the margin to bring back more.
This would significantly affect certain markets (i.e. mining, industrial processes that consume these metals), but it's not the same thing as creating money; you can't spend nickel, you need to find someone who will buy it from you in order to turn it into money.
I need to work out how to deal with too many ideas hitting me at once.
Once there is rocket fuel in large quantity "boost backwards". Slow a well designed space plane to a safe entry velocity and fly to a regular airport. It's and idea that can not even be imagined until there is a filling station in space but should be standard after the first water asteroid.
At last February's AAAS meeting in Austin, Martin Elvis (quoted in the article) noted that over the next several years, a number of larger (20 to 30 meter) terrestrial telescopes will be coming on line. That will free up some the smaller 10-15 meter instruments, some of which could be used to search for watery and/or metallic asteroids.
Isn't that what Planetary Resources are doing?
https://www.planetaryresources.com/