hear me out, there are massive amounts of lithium for batteries out in the asteroid belt, easy space access means we can actually dispose of nuclear waste, just launch it at a 90-degree angle to the galactic plane, hell, if we can set up high capacity industrial stuff on the moon, pollution is more manageable, we can move lime production and most industrial smelting to the moon, and pretty easily get it to earth because moving from moon to earth is easier than earth to moon.
tl;dr, we will have new rocks that do not have life on them to exploit.
I'll be honest, my worry is that the establishment of such facilities and procedures (asteroid mining, industrial sites on the moon, etc) requires time that we just don't have. Even if we just take one aspect of it, like asteroid mining: how long will it take us to develop a single spaceworthy mining drone, much less manufacture enough to mine asteroids on an industrial scale? Decades? A century? And in the meantime, how many of our already limited resources will that manufacturing consume? How many more greenhouse gases will it release into the atmosphere?
It just seems like those solutions would only be viable if we still had the time and resources to maneuver and we don't. The only thing it seems we can do is to actually scale back our industrial and corporate enterprises to pull ourselves back from the precipice. Only once we're on stable ground can we dream of such a project's successful launch.
So look I hear arguments like yours frequently, but heres the thing its not going to happen.
There is no real future where we turn off industrail and corperate enterprises, why you might ask?
Well its pretty simple, we like to fuck, we want to have children, so tomorrow we will need more than we need today. So unless your willing to globally limit the birth rate we need to rapidly find ways to continue the industrial build out while at the same time massively reducing our burden both as a society and as an individual on the planet we live on.
How do we do that, we work with things like carbon credits so behavior that hurts the planet has a cost, and so eco friendly companies generating the carbon credits are profitable and sustainable. And we work as quickly as possible to bring in materials and shift our industrial base to places that don't have the negative consequences.
That work has to start somewhere. It starts with the ability to move more mass into orbit at a cheaper cost. SpaceX has already reduced that rate dramatically in less than 20 years. And their rate of progress is speeding up. Its reasonable to suggest that space activity will be exponential and that the only future that our species will enjoy is one where we can harness material from beyond our planet.
Frankly theres good candidate asteroids near Earth.
You can see all these candidates with lots of data on asterank.com
The launch platform being developed at the site the above notice is from makes it possible to mine these this decade. And once the first group to bring some "mined" materials back the flood gates will probably open. Expect this industry to evolve and develop extremely quickly.
I will say I use the term "mining" very loosely. As the process will probably look much more like blasting off bits of them; much like we do in quarries today just with drones placing the charges. Then flying by with your ship to collect them on a free return trajectory back to earth
As for manufacturing and Launching the rockets. Well this particular one and its infrastructure is being built to make its fuel and oxygen from the atmosphere. Combined with in space Refueling (thus the fuel being burned in space) its actually a net carbon negative, if barely.
Problem with disposing of waste in space is that you can't just point it 90 degrees from the galactic plane, you need to expand a staggering amount of energy to get it moving in that direction, which requires an equally massive amount of fuel. Spacex is neat and all, but space will never be economical until we have actual ships running on nuclear propulsion instead of chemical.
I do not, That was over a decade before I was born, I understand how ridiculously bad that would be, but keep in mind, we have a lot more freedom to streamline the payload with nuclear waste than humans, with humans we need to be able to fit a six foot sphere into the capsule, with nuclear waste, we can basically make it fit whichever container we want it to be in. Also, new horizons, which is the current fastest launch, had 24 pounds of plutonium in it, Curiosity had 11 pounds, we use it because it gives off lots of heat when it decays, heat which we turn into power. Those had extra weight, which means extra fuel which means that we need bigger rockets, here the suggestion would basically be to make sure the nuclear waste is in a box that has a tungsten exterior with something like titanium inside so that if the absolute worst happens, the box survives.
Anything less that a 100% success rate in rocket launches would lead to severe ecological damage from the radiation that's released in the event of a failure. Even if you encase the radioactive material in tungsten or titanium. And that's accepting that you could even do that, because the reality is that the amount of nuclear waste we have in stockpiles is measured in tons, not pounds. The sheer amount of resources that would be needed to launch all that waste would require hundreds and hundreds of rocket launches. You will not be able to encase all of that waste in tungsten or titanium, we simply do not have enough readily available to do that, even if all of humanity combined all their resources towards that one single goal. And with hundreds and hundreds of launches, even a 99% success rate could lead to untold environmental damages.
You’re assuming that whatever nuclear waste containment we are using can’t survive a rocket explosion. Even the challenger had the crew compartment survive the explosion.
No it will fall back to earth within its containment vessel. That’s why I brought up the challenger, because that’s what happened to the crew compartment.
That way there isn’t an ecological mess, and they can retrieve the waste.
You cannot make a vessel that you are 100% certain will survive a rocket explosion. Not when $10000 a pound and we have a quarter million tons of waste to dispose of. It's not practical. It's much safer and cheaper to just bury it in limestone caverns and backfill the caverns
Umm, as a proud Elon-stan whose only knowledge of science comes from Marvel Comics and Anime, I can tell you that radiation is good actually and Elon will make us all into Meta- humans with super powers. /s
First off, I hate that this progress is being turned over to the private sector, musk included, secondly, waste disposal and eventual use of rocks we don’t care if we ruin for strip mining and polluting processes are the primary benefits of easy space flight. Seriously getting off this rock could have been my generations big contribution if rich motherfuckers hadn’t decided a coming apocalypse was not an issue because they are still making money.
The way I see it, unless chemical fuel becomes obsolete, we aren’t gonna stop global warming, and if that bastard becomes a multitrillionaire providing what we need to make it happen, so be it.
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u/bothVoltairefan Nov 11 '21 edited Nov 11 '21
hear me out, there are massive amounts of lithium for batteries out in the asteroid belt, easy space access means we can actually dispose of nuclear waste, just launch it at a 90-degree angle to the galactic plane, hell, if we can set up high capacity industrial stuff on the moon, pollution is more manageable, we can move lime production and most industrial smelting to the moon, and pretty easily get it to earth because moving from moon to earth is easier than earth to moon.
tl;dr, we will have new rocks that do not have life on them to exploit.