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@cleancut | 23 June 18 | |
@ seifer - 4.05.18 - 06:58pm The world's first trillionaire will come from asteroid mining How to Become Humanity's First Trillionaire that's bo11ocks |
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@obi_jon | 23 June 18 | |
@ cleancut - 23.06.18 - 02:38pm that's bo11ocks Not exactly, but close. Whilst it's true that some asteroids could well be worth trillions if the rare and precious elements and minerals they potentially contain could be mined or extracted somehow but the technology needed to do that is still a looong way off. In fact it's not far past the science fiction/theoretical possibility stages at the moment. There is a current ESA mission which is on route to rendezvous with a nearby asteroid, where it will hopefully be attempting to collect and return a small sample of material from it back to Earth but to do this on an industrially viable scale would be, if you'll forgive the obvious pun, astronomical. |
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@cleancut | 23 June 18 | |
the earth has more mass than all the asteroids combined, and contains more precious elements apart from iridium. most are just iron and nickel. not really worth it, using them to build stuff in space tho would be worth it. spaceships and that stuff
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@obi_jon | 19 July 18 | |
@ cleancut - 23.06.18 - 05:16pm the earth has more mass than all the asteroids combined, and contains more precious elements apart from iridium. most are just iron and nickel. not really worth it, using them to build stuff in space tho would be worth it. spaceships and that stuff True enough, but resources of some vitally important elements like lithium and helium are rapidly running out, so things may change as global supplies dwindle. Plus they haven't figured out how to reliably identify which, if any, asteroids might contain enough of such precious substances that it would be worth the expense of going after them. They can detect traces of elements remotely using various spectrometry instruments but they currently have no way of knowing exactly what quantities of them they might contain, without physically visiting each potential target individually and taking material samples. One article I read about this detailed various proposed ideas for future mining missions, including attempting to 'nudge' an asteroid's orbit by attaching maneuvering rockets to it and altering it's flightpath so that it becomes captured by the gravity of one of the other planets, likely either Saturn or Jupiter, and enters orbit around it. |
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@obi_jon | 19 July 18 | |
@3mel | 19 July 18 | |
so it's blue sand ? do we have theories about where it's come from ?
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@3mel | 19 July 18 | |
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@mikeymk | 19 July 18 | |
Or what it could be made of..?
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@obi_jon | 19 July 18 | |
I might have got the images mixed up, one is colourized, one isn't. http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/once-in-a-blue-dune |
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@shadow27 | 19 July 18 | |
Blue dune
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