The earth would be so beautiful if all that crap was gone..

No.

you'd need vast amounts of oxygen and power to smelt metal in space. I used to work for a precious metals reclamation company.
the stories I heard about furnaces suggest to me that's it's not something you'd wanna do in space where structures are fragile.

I've considered even using robots being much closer to the sun using the heat and radiation and also using the atmosphere burn of a planet as part of the process.. some form of ion blaster?

Collect lots of materials into space and drop it into the atmosphere at particular gradient, while in the process an atmosphere will develop?

the closest thing I've heard to any of this is asteroid / comet mining. there are enough minerals floating around the solar system to fill our needs for eons.

one problem is that you'd destroy the value of say diamonds or gold by harvesting them, you'd spend more mining them than they'd eventually be worth.

I think with this level of activity monetary value becomes a side issue, or will do in time to come.. if we're smart enough we can develop tech that will provide all that we require so long as we provide it with the materials if that makes sense.. when the greedy are no more amongst us..

There were some ideas being floated about trying to 'capture' small asteroids by 'nudging' them into orbit around the moon, using small spacecraft to attach either rocket thrusters or plant explosives on them. The theory being that it would be much easier to mine and retrieve the valuable materials in a steady predictable orbit then it would whilst still whizzing through space at who knows what km/sec. It all sounded a bit too fanciful to me though.

In the purely theoretical it would possible. Essentially that is what all stars are. But as it's not yet(or ever likely to be, if we're brutally honest) possible for us to build a Dyson Sphere around the sun, then no it's not.

If there was enough material in the asteroids to provide the resources I would probably go with that first obi_jon.. I have my eye on materials like titanium or something stronger we don't know of yet, and more of It we could ever produce here on earth..

How close in terms of orbit to the sun would robots need to be that would make metals melt? It's all hypothetical lol

1 mile

Jus checked it would need to be closer than the planet mercury titanium melts at 1.668c where as the surface of mercury is 430c

But!!......

The temperature of atmosphere entry burn is around 1.649c.. making this head towards the idea of a space 'drop' forge.. however I'm not comfortable with doing this on earth unless it somehow burned air pollution in the process..

we'd need Obi to weigh in on this maybe but I'm not to sure there are elements as yet undiscovered out there.

It's thought there may be certain very rare elements that will be found to be more abundant around binary systems etc. Conversely there could be elements found here which are rare elsewhere.. it's interesting to think about.

We are finding them by smashing atoms together.. as they get heavier they're increasingly unstable. Then there are ''Islands of Stability'' further up that scale.. this was all hypothetical years ago.

new subatomic particles yeah, but new elements for the periodic table ?

''Undiscovered'' meaning we haven't seen them in nature as yet, they have only been predicted.