Most asteroids are worthless chunks or carbon, another significant portion are sort of dirty balls of sand and rock. The smallest portion are composed of any metals. Metallic asteroids are mostly iron and nickel and unlikely to be loaded up with precious metals. Any that would be interesting for mining would be in the asteroid belt which requires significant amounts of energy to reach in a reasonable time frame.
You also don't seem to be aware, Ceres does not currently have a space gas station on the surface. If you intend to refuel and resupply there such a thing would need to be build...for hundreds of billions of dollars because it's super difficult and none of the technology to do it currently exists. So that would need to be invented, developed, built, and put into space.
Also raw ore amounts don't mean anything without refining capacity. There's roughly zero of it currently anywhere off the surface of the Earth. Again, in-space ore refining is something that exists pretty much only as concept drawings and some PhD thesis. So that would need to be invented, developed, built, and put into space.
Even if we could reliably get people out to the asteroid belt and keep them alive, the volume of the belt is absolutely enormous. Worthwhile asteroids are vast distances apart and far away from any larger asteroids you might want to use as bases. It would require enormous expenditure of resources to get some mining equipment to a worthwhile asteroid, mine it, and get that raw ore somewhere it could be processed.
The lack of gravity and atmosphere makes space mining far far more difficult than mining on Earth. If you kick up dust on Earth it blows away in the wind or settles quickly. Kick up dust on an asteroid and it goes into orbit around it and takes potentially centuries to settle. Asteroid dust also has no weathering so it would be extremely harsh on all the equipment. That all just makes the venture more difficult and more expensive.
Then you've got some iron and nickel, something the Earth literally has tons of. Even if you manage to find the Comstock Lode asteroid you'll spend billions to mine precious metals which will cease to be precious thus lose their monetary value.
The differences between crossing the Sahara to find gold and looking for it in an asteroid are when you cross the Sahara there's air at the destination. You don't have to make the crossing in a tin can containing your own personal universe. At any point along the journey you can take a deep breath. If you tear your shirt you don't suffocate and die. If you trip and fall you don't float away unable to be recovered. If you drop something important it lands on the ground rather than float away never to be seen again. A solar flare isn't likely to kill your entire crew or destroy the only space gas station for tens of millions of miles. The Sahara is inhospitable and will kill you if unprepared. Space is downright hostile.
You can't really be taken seriously when you sort of hand wave the challenges doing anything in space. It just sounds like you're pointing to some sci-fi books as if those are the answer to everything. Space is hostile and doing anything in it is dangerous and expensive. Any resources that exist there are orders of magnitude more difficult to access let alone exploit than any on Earth.
Your every response to very real engineering challenges is "just do the thing" or hand wave it away. I don't think you actually understand the difficulties. You have read some pop science books and some "hard sci-fi" and think you've got it all worked out.
Everything seems easy and straight forward when you don't understand the actual problems. Deep space is hostile and unforgiving. Asteroid and cometary landing/sample return probes have had a rough track record because despite a lot of great engineering and effort the task is extraordinarily difficult. You're talking about mining asteroids like it's a solved problem and it's just a question of willpower.
Be interested in spaceflight, manned or otherwise. It's awesome and there's tons to learn. It's great to explore. But if you're serious about the endeavor, don't pretend it's not immensely difficult. Many things in pop science books or science fiction are simply not practical and many more aren't even possible. Also while space is awesome, Earth is right here. It's the only place in the solar system humans can live without being wrapped in massive amounts of technology. There's much better odds of Civilization B being destroyed by a catastrophe than Civilization A here on Earth.
> I don't think you actually understand the difficulties.
I understand the difficulties perfectly well (or at least recognize that there are numerous difficulties far beyond my expertise, let alone that of people far more knowledgeable about space exploration than I am). That doesn't mean they cannot be overcome in the coming decades, nor does it mean that they cannot eventually be overcome in a way that's economically viable, no matter how much you strangely want to pretend otherwise, nor does it mean we can't discuss how we might try to overcome them. Technology marches on, and naysayers like you get left in the dust.
> You have read some pop science books and some "hard sci-fi" and think you've got it all worked out.
"pop science books and some 'hard sci-fi'" indeed. But no, apparently you've got me all figured out. Just some starry-eyed nobody who watched Dune a few too many times instead of someone who, you know, actually pays the slightest bit of attention to what NASA (let alone other space agencies) is actively researching and around which it's planning missions.
(As a disclaimer: I have watched David Lynch's Dune a few too many times, but I assure you that has no bearing on my perception about what's feasible in the coming decades in terms of actual real-life space technology, at least not until we get people so hopped up on drugs that they figure out how to fold space)
> You're talking about mining asteroids like it's a solved problem and it's just a question of willpower.
All things are a "question of willpower". Nobody (least of all myself) is under any illusion that it's easy or that it's a "solved problem". The only claim is that it will someday be possible, and that for that to happen we need to be figuring out how to solve those problems, and in general what we need to do to make it possible.
Meanwhile, you're talking about mining asteroids like it's some impossibility that we'll never achieve. Too hard with today's technology and economies of scale, so let's not even talk about it, right? What a bleak and pathetic outlook on humanity's technological progress.
> Many things in pop science books or science fiction are simply not practical and many more aren't even possible.
And this ain't one of them. There is nothing being discussed here that is entirely outside the realm of physics. We ain't talking fucking warp drives and replicators and Vulcans here. We're talking about very real plans and very real research by very real space agencies and very real companies trying to figure out exactly how they can make use of the vast resources beyond this single planet.
Yeah, obviously it's expensive now, and we don't have all the necessary technologies now. What about 20 years from now? 50? 100? That's the target, and that's where we're fundamentally at odds: you're going off on this tangent about how it's so expensive and impossible in 2020 (and needlessly insulting me in the process - thanks, buddy) while entirely ignoring that we ain't talking about 2020 at all. And in that equation is the fact that Earth's resources are - whether you like it or not - finite. Earth cannot sustain humanity's continued economic and industrial growth even in ideal conditions (and let's face it: we ain't in ideal conditions). As resources become scarcer and scarcer, so too do those asteroids become not only more and more economically viable to mine, but more necessary.
Baby steps. Now is the time to start building out that infrastructure, bit by bit. First LEO, then the Moon, then beyond (including Ceres and the rest of the asteroid belt). We'll get there eventually, assuming we don't drive ourselves to extinction first.
> Also while space is awesome, Earth is right here. It's the only place in the solar system humans can live without being wrapped in massive amounts of technology.
Not forever it ain't.
And that's another key point there: you do realize how destructive Earthside mining is to that very environment that makes Earth friendly to us humans, right? How it poisons our soil and our water and trashes ecosystems? Earthside mining at modern scales is "cheap" only if you ignore the countless externalities thereof. Such concerns are not an issue with asteroids; there is no ecosystem to destroy, no rivers to poison.
The sooner we're mining asteroids instead of Earth, the better the prospects for Earth to continue to be a place where humans can live without being wrapped in massive amounts of technology. And if we're too late for that, well, hopefully we've figured out the technologies with which we need to wrap ourselves, eh? If we can survive in space, we can survive on even the most human-hostile Earth imaginable, and between mining and carbon pollution and deforestation and the myriad of other short-sighted things we as a species have done to our home, that human-hostile Earth is not only an inevitability, but one that's coming sooner than you think.
You also don't seem to be aware, Ceres does not currently have a space gas station on the surface. If you intend to refuel and resupply there such a thing would need to be build...for hundreds of billions of dollars because it's super difficult and none of the technology to do it currently exists. So that would need to be invented, developed, built, and put into space.
Also raw ore amounts don't mean anything without refining capacity. There's roughly zero of it currently anywhere off the surface of the Earth. Again, in-space ore refining is something that exists pretty much only as concept drawings and some PhD thesis. So that would need to be invented, developed, built, and put into space.
Even if we could reliably get people out to the asteroid belt and keep them alive, the volume of the belt is absolutely enormous. Worthwhile asteroids are vast distances apart and far away from any larger asteroids you might want to use as bases. It would require enormous expenditure of resources to get some mining equipment to a worthwhile asteroid, mine it, and get that raw ore somewhere it could be processed.
The lack of gravity and atmosphere makes space mining far far more difficult than mining on Earth. If you kick up dust on Earth it blows away in the wind or settles quickly. Kick up dust on an asteroid and it goes into orbit around it and takes potentially centuries to settle. Asteroid dust also has no weathering so it would be extremely harsh on all the equipment. That all just makes the venture more difficult and more expensive.
Then you've got some iron and nickel, something the Earth literally has tons of. Even if you manage to find the Comstock Lode asteroid you'll spend billions to mine precious metals which will cease to be precious thus lose their monetary value.
The differences between crossing the Sahara to find gold and looking for it in an asteroid are when you cross the Sahara there's air at the destination. You don't have to make the crossing in a tin can containing your own personal universe. At any point along the journey you can take a deep breath. If you tear your shirt you don't suffocate and die. If you trip and fall you don't float away unable to be recovered. If you drop something important it lands on the ground rather than float away never to be seen again. A solar flare isn't likely to kill your entire crew or destroy the only space gas station for tens of millions of miles. The Sahara is inhospitable and will kill you if unprepared. Space is downright hostile.
You can't really be taken seriously when you sort of hand wave the challenges doing anything in space. It just sounds like you're pointing to some sci-fi books as if those are the answer to everything. Space is hostile and doing anything in it is dangerous and expensive. Any resources that exist there are orders of magnitude more difficult to access let alone exploit than any on Earth.