The way I explain how asteroid mining would work is: The price of gold on the earth is $22k per pound. The price of water on the moon is $100k per pound.
i imagine billionaires will one day flex their "space gold" and will have the ingots verified upon arrival and it will only be handled by a few people and sold at a ridiculous price that could service whole cities.
It's Cobalt and helium 3 that's going to be needed here on earth. We'll probably have to learn how to bring an asteroid into earth's orbit first. Inflatable heat shields and spin launcher could make bringing stuff to earth much cheaper.
@@Bryan-Hensley By the time mass importation of ANYTHING is commercially viable, only what is not present in extractable quantities anywhere, or not synthesizable, on the planet will be imported- it would take hundreds of years to even begin to reach that point, by which time 3He won't be an issue, if still used in appreciable quantities. Until then, the 3He is going to be even MORE important in space than anywhere else.
You can often reconstruct a galaxy that is being gravitationally lenzed, and I've done it many times. Often the galaxies are smeared by roughly circular sources of gravity. You can just hold up a mirrored cylinder along the galaxy you chose to "reconstruct" and look at the reflection in the cylinder. A glass with straight sides can work ok. It may not be perfect but you can definitely get close to seeing the galaxies "unsmeared". The old masters used to use this trick to hide secret images in their paintings.😮
I have a question that has stuck with me since it came up. The Cassini-Huygens probe used the same celestial body for multiple gravity assist maneuvers. Assuming you have as much time as needed, could you increase the velocity of a probe further and further by doing gravity assists over and over again or is there a limit in velocity a probe can get by such maneuvers?
At first, I thought the answer would be straight forward, but when I looked at the probe's trajectory, I realized it's quite complicated. It's orbital mechanics after all and I'm no Scott Manly 😅 I still thought about it really hard and here's my take. First, if you want to keep bouncing off a planet, you need to keep aligning your trajectory to be where the planet will be around the sun, and I don't know if both the gravity assist trajectory and the planet's orbit can KEEP aligning together with every bounce. Even if we solve this problem, my hunch tells me that as your speed increases, the amount of fuel you need to burn to maneuver into the gravity assist trajectory keeps increasing. Remember, gravity assists aren't completely free. You still need to expend some energy for it to work. At some point, you'd reach the Milky Way escape velocity (think Oumuamua), so turning back for another bounce would be very expensive. So, I think there's a sweet spot for how many times you can bounce off as the amount of energy needed for trajectory adjustments increases and as the time needed to complete each orbit also increases (because the orbit around the planet would keep getting bigger) Finally, if it were possible, I'm sure the smart guys at NASA would've done it to make missions like New Horizons travel much faster.
@@Mr.Anders0n_ There comes a point where it would be going too fast to ever reach the planet you want it to bounce off with the fuel you have, then you have to choose another until you run out of planets by which time it's leaving the system. So yes, there is a limit to the velocity you could attain. I don't think Oumuamua's velocity is greater than the Milky Way's escape velocity - it's greater than our Sun's but there are far far bigger stars with higher gravities. It'll most likely stay within our galaxy, unless it finds a really improbable sequence of gravity assists instead of gravity brakes.
The limit is provided by either the surface or atmosphere of the celestial body and diminishing returns as the velocity gains decrease with each pass at a certain altitude.
“How much more dark can space be? None. None more dark.”-Spinal Tap joke. But seriously, one of the Apollo capsule astronauts told of traveling the dark side of the Moon. No sun. Moon shadow. Looking out the portal, lights down in capsule, into space. What he said was that it was like a white mist. So many stars so close. A level or two of darkness, night sky, than we’d ever see on Earth. I like to imagine seeing that.
If I would do space mining, I wouldn't bring it to earth. It has more value in space (becsue you don't have to shoot it to space yourself). I would name it "space metals (TM)" and use it for space stations and such.
There are the obvious downsides that a) everything in the universe moves, which introduces the problem of "What has happened in the gap between my measurements?", and b) not everything we observe last long enough to be observed from both extremes; having two satellites on opposite sides of the Sun at all times would let us take a snapshot of whatever we're looking at at the exact same time. The longer the single-satellite's orbit is, the higher the risk of c) the satellite having a major malfunction between the extremes, making its obsvervations less-than-optimal (or worse); increasing the number of satellites will of course increase the risk that one will malfunction, but conversely decrease the risk of the whole programme's failure.
21:02 DNA is not made up of amino acids (they are made up of Deoxyribonucleic acids)! It is proteins that are are made up of long chains of amino acids. Also, while amino acids are important building blocks for life, they are not the only building blocks that are necessary for life, in fact very early life might not have had any amino acids, as it is thought to have contained only RNA within a fatty membrane, with RNA taking the role of both DNA and proteins in later life.
Love your show! One minor correction: In the amino acids on astroids part you said DNA is made of amino acids. This is wrong. Amino acids make up proteins, but DNA is not a protein.
Love your content.....on RUclips, Patreon and the email newsletters!!! I've learned SO much...from you and from further researching topics you bring up ! 🤟
Wouldn't the better question about antimatter be whether it would curve spacetime in the opposite direction of normal matter, rather than having negative mass?
Your Q&A's are awesome. Maybe placing Psyche in orbit around Mars would be like two birds w/one stone, giving Mars enough oomph to form an atmosphere and mining materials for Earth and Mars colonies. If Man can't go to Psyche bring Psyche to Man.
How about robotic ships in the rings of saturn redirecting larger ice fragments out of order to collide with mars? Or finding ice asteroids / comets and redirect their orbits.
@@Joe-lb8qnIsaac Arthur's channel has some calculations - that'd be not enough, also it'd bring the gravitational energy (like fireball) of each ice fragment as heat, even theoretical limits and mass that's available (to good measure add Saturn's rings and whole asteroid belt) won't do but a little.
For parallax/astrometry, you could overcome the waiting issue at distant orbits by launching a pair of satellites in orbit around the sun offset by 180°. Would still have the data rate issue at large distances though
Or even easier, you could just send one telescope into deep space and use a telescope on or near Earth to act as your second position. They don't have to be on opposite sides of the Sun, they just have to be far apart.
Mining Psyche for metals for return to Earth probably makes no economic sense. For now. But mining Psyche makes excellent sense if your objective is to make space habitats, ships or Von Neumann robots, for further exploration in the solar system. You'll need energy. Between fission, solar and perhaps eventually fusion, you can get it. You'll need labor. Robots, of course. You need to remember that today's tech level is not tomorrow's tech level. AI is coming on strong. So is robotics. Fast forward 50 years and tell me we won't need metals in a microgravity environment. We will eventually regard metals and volatiles in the Belt and inward to be very precious to our ambitions - and pretty easy to access and exploit.
regarding parallax, couldn't you use two identical craft in a very large solar orbit and place one on each side of the sun? Eliminates the waiting? Would allow nonstop research?
+ @@douglaswilkinson5700 Sure. But Inflation stretched it exponentially, thus the question if the original gravitational waves suffered inflation as well.
Semantics is important in astrophysics, cosmology, etc. and science in general. Inflation created new space. What effect this had on gravity I don't know. My field is stellar astrophysics.
If gold mined off an asteroid and returned to Earth is more expensive than gold mined on Earth, would it devalue gold? Wouldn't it need to be cheaper to devalue gold?
Hm... Not necessarily. You're assuming that price is the only thing that makes something worthwhile. What if there wasn't enough gold on Earth to satisfy a hypothetical new industry? Then it might be worthwhile for them to mine an asteroid even though it is more expensive, just so they could meet their demand. Of course, in such a scenario the price of gold would probably go up so it might end up being cheaper to mine an asteroid after all.@@norml.hugh-mann
Hi Fraser, you regulary say if you have a question, write it in the comments. So here is my theory and a somewhat combination questions, maybe for a QA show. The theory of timedelation, the theory of the Big Bang, the way to measure distance. And the maximum speed of something or somewhat can travel in the universe, and the speed of light (the maximum speed of our observations) Due to the gravity of objects, and (in my oppinion) also the speed at which the clock&observer travel through universe, the measurement of time differs. If we measure time with the most accurate tools we have now, atomic clokcs. Due to that the electro magnetic waves, (which make up the bouncing, and the counting of bouncing we use to measure the passing of time), have a longer distance to travel to keep up with the atoms in the clock, in motion. Versus an atomic clock which does not move. In my opinion, this means if the clock&observer travel at the speed of light, the measurement of time, (the counting of the electro magnetic waves bouncing), will approach or become zero, null. Same for an clock&observer at the center of an infinite mass, time measurement (for human observation) will become zero. Now for argument sake, i only measure full seconds. The Big bang, when our universe expanded from a 'nothing', from an infinite mass with an infinte small size, to where it is today. Travelled distance= speed * time. So im at the beginning of the big bang, measuring time, the big bang happens and i travel along the edge of the expanding universe outwards from center, during 1 second (at the maximum speed we, now think ,is possible, approx 300000 km/second.) After 1 second i am 300000 km away from center, and the universe has a diameter of 600000 km. But, this is only valid for the time and speed of light we measure today on earth. Me standing at the edge of expanding universe, and traveling at 300000 km/sec, thus my measurement of time is null, or close to zero/null. travelled distance (300000 km, according to today earth seconds) = Speed * time (close to zero or null) 300000 = Speed * 0.0etc0infinite row of zeros 01 >> Speed must be higher then 300000 km/sec, for the observer travelling at the edge of the universe expanding, IF we take our today earth second as basis. So there is difference between the 'second', the time measurement today at earth. And the second which was measured in the beginning of the Big bang and expansion start of our universe. In theory , if the universe is still expanding at the speed of light at it's edge, the passing of the first second, for the clock&observer standing at the edge of expanding universe, has not finished yet, and that combined with what we assume is the max speed of things 300000 km/sec, that would mean for the clock&observer at the edge of universe in his observation he is travelling faster then the speed of light. In our observation of the clock&observer at the edge of universe expansion, the universe has been expanding 14 billion years. (and i say for argument sake, at the speed of light) In the observation of the clock&observer traveling at the edge of expanding universe, not even 1 second passed in time, while the distance traveled is the radius of our universe today. For argument sake, lets say, the universe just now stopped expanding at the edge, and clock&observer just measured their first second. Their speed then was, 14 billion year * speed of light = 1.324512e+23 kilometer/second. According to the measurement of time for the clock&observer at the edge of universe, the speed of travel is 1.324512e+23 kilometer/second. Now my theory/question 1: Is the measurement of time subjective, depending on place/speed in universe? And if so, that means our measurement of speed of light, is also subjective. And therefore not a constant, but depending on the location and/or travel speed of the observer in the universe. Theory/question 2: When we made up the theory of the Big Bang, did they also take into account, timedelation? Because we interpolated back to the beginning of our universe, in the Big Bang theory. Or is it all interpolated on the second we measure on earth today? Extra comment/theory: Time is made up by humans. Theoretically for the clock&observer travelling at the speed of light, at the edge of the expanding universe. Time does not exist, no measurement/detection of passing of time has ever occured there. Well, this hopefully gives you some food for thoughts, and maybe a Q&A question idea for one day. Thanks for your videos, i enjoy them. 💥 💫 🧭 🌎🕚 🕦 🌚🪐 🌠 🌀
Fraser, Boötes is a Greek borrowing. It's pronounced not like “boots,” but rather bo'-OH-tis. There is a pharyngeal stop between the two "o"s, akin to one in “uh-oh.” only not as pronounced. More like Hawai'īan “a'a” term for a lava type, which ls like two distinct “a” sounds separated without a strong constriction of the glottis. Like “coöperative” is not pronounced like the last name Cooper, neither like "coh operative.” Try the middle ground between the two.
You've just said, "No way... ever..." I will postulate that your chances of being correct approach being identically zero. Consider that nickel, mined in the Sudbury basin, is in fact mining what was once an asteroid.
Q. What process during a Supernova can accelerate a Star, and eject it out a Galaxy. I read there was a kilonova, and it was 120,000 Light Yrs from the closest Galaxy. How did the Neutron Stars get there.
Okay, so it's 1980. There is no way people will EVER carry a wallet sized movie theater in your pocket with Star Wars and a library of other movies stored on it, making VHS rentals obsolete. That can't happen because it would cost $100,000 just to store one movie, and there's no way in hell it would fit in your pocket! Okay, so transporting precious metals from psyche to earth would cost a few orders of magnitude more than it's worth on the surface of Earth. Buy why exactltly? Fundamental physical laws? I don't think so. The reason it's expensive to transport material from the asteroid belt to earth is lack of space infrastructure, not first principles. As mentioned in the video, there would be incentive to mine psyche for material to be used in space. When we've been doing that for a while, perhaps a few decades, voila space infrastructure, and massive ubiquitous asteroid mining. Now metal in space is suddenly really cheap, so we deorbit a bunch until market forces equalize.
RE: Mining Psyche: We could actually do it on the cheap, it would just take a long time, and require building a bit of infrastructure on Psyche. Direct transfer is on the order of 4kps; if you use a Jupiter gravity assist, you get down to 2kps. That is between half and a quarter of the delta V to reach LEO, so, for near earth industrial uses, it probably makes more sense to mine Psyche than to lift from earth, purely on a delta v budget basis. Required infrastructure: Psyche: Mining and forging; light sail, solar panel, thermal nozzle, and mirror manufacturing; return package railgun (needs about 3kps for non optimal returns); LEO/Luna: A lot of solar panels and lasers to provide breaking energy to actually capture the packages (you can use waste material for reaction mass but you likely want to go with the less efficient light sail for a good chunk of the delta v, reserving the thermal nozzle configuration for capture where a high thrust maneuver is required)
Questions - How is an object given co-ordinates for its location, Is there a general system or relative to each telescope? Is there a map of all Stars in our Galaxy. When will the Universe be all Mapped? Where is Earth located compared in relation to the Universe. In the middle or more on the edge? The Universe is about 13.9 Light years old - is the universe 27.8 Light years wide? What would be the best way to learn(free) about Astronomy. How can I contribute (as an amateur) to Astronomy. Fraser, have you named a star after yourself and have you found anything in space.
You didn't answer the question about mining 16 Psyche. The question was, "What do you think are the chances of actually mining Psyche?" You answered the question, "What do you think are the chances of mining Psyche for precious metals and then bringing those materials back to Earth?" Then you acted like the person asking the question excluded the possibility of using resources from Psyche out in space when in reality, they just asked if we will ever mine Psyche. Then you doubled down on your 0% answer. Assuming we continue with our plans of moving out into space, we absolutely will mine asteroids for all of their resources and 16 Psyche has a ton of those resources. So, that might be your honest opinion, but you're absolutely wrong. Chances are pretty high. Given that the question made no mention of any time restrictions, I would say the chances are about 50% that someone will mine 16 Psyche at some point.
I have a question. So it's not worth it to bring a piece of rock, or even a scoop of space diamonds from a distant asteroid back to Earth. But what if some survey discovered a clearly artificial structure on one of them, and scientists have no excuse for how it could be a natural formation. Would THAT be worth sending a 100 billion dollars mission to investigate?
I disagree with you about mining asteroids (and other celestial bodies). We can totally do it. We haven't even put our minds to it yet. Sure, right now the expenses are crazy high, but we aren't building systems specifically for mining asteroids. Look at how much shuttle costs compared to gdp have come down already. The USA needs to stop building all these wasteful telescopes that aren't game changers (although they are cool) and start focusing on how to create an economically self-sustaining space program.
Think about the energy required to do this. Also I would assume the amount of heat mined material shot on to earth would possibly burn up in Earth's atmosphere. Good brain storming tho. It's brainstorming ideas which brings insights necessary to solve problems. Thank you for sharing.
It just coasts, only initial launch/shot uses energy. It would be retrieved near earth and sent down. Yes, we will spend equal energy to launch, catching it. Very minimal.@@swiftycortex
Aeturen: Nowadays, I think the answer is obvious, but I didn't as a young teen. And the subject keeps popping up, even though nothing about spacefaring has changed by the orders of magnitude necessary for asteroid mining for terrestrial purposes to be viable, so it's a question that will need to be addressed time and again, the answer pounded out: "The economy of asteroid mining only works out in space!" Also, in Alien and a bunch of other SF, people are ferrying goods between star systems to profit from trade. This is going to happen exactly NOT EVER: The argument that technology goes ever faster and at some point it will be economically viable doesn't hold up to the travel time and energy requirements: Say it takes 150 years to go between Centaurus and Earth. Now think about the number of people in 1873, the amount of energy the individual person had at their disposal (and the pollution it came with), the state of medicine, science, transportation... Progress is exponential in nature: It begets progress progressively. In the 150 years from interstellar trade became possible to the first load of goods landing, we would have had thousands of breakthroughs on a level comparable to the internet, and would most likely be able to produce every element, ever, through fusion. And we're already nearing a point where we can build anything so long as we have the right elements on hand.
Very interesting. Abut the how to refuel for a return trip from mars question…. Maybe we could have a tank stay in orbit above mars, before the mars decent, that could provide most of the fuel to return home to earth.
It doesn't make sense to go to Psyche for one gold bar, but... One ton of gold is around 65 million dollars. Apollo lunar lander was about 10 tons. It's conceivable that one day we send a mining module which will extract 100 tons of precious metals, load them into a container and send it on a slow trajectory back to Earth. It starts making economical sense at that scale. How about 1000 tons? Sure it may lower the price, but the guy who brings it still wins. I don't think it will happen this decade, but I don't think the long term chance is zero, either.
DNA isn't amino acids, protein is. DNA encodes sequences of amino acids but needs a substrate of existing proteins and cytoplasm including free-floating amino acids to build them into proteins. There are many abiotic ways that amino acids arise from primordial soups of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and oxygen in water exposed to ultraviolet.
Very interesting as always! One correction: DNA is not made from amino acids! Proteins are made from amino acids, which are small molecules with between 13 and 24 atoms, which all have the same backbone but different side chains, so you can chain them together using the backbone. DNA is made of nucleotides, which are also small molecules, with about 35 atoms, and are also chained together, only 4 different nucleotides in DNA. DNA stores the information how proteins are pieced together from amino acids. And then there are still molecules made from sugar building blocks, which can also form long chains, and those made from fatty acids and glycerol, those we all have too much of.. so, life has some different kinds of lego bricks..
Question: electric propulsion is low punch over a long time. How much energy/power would be needed (even unrealistic values) to launch a craft using ion thruster (or similar) from earth? Would just like to know the theoretical limits. Awesome channel and content! 😊
Oh, at some point in the upcoming O'Neill Cylinder building years, mined minerals from space will be brought back to earth. May not be the main point of the trip, because it will probably be a cycler ship actually coming to pick up crew for new habitats. Might as well bring some trade goods and/or building materials to near-earth on the trip inwards, and swap the mass for passengers on the way out. Also, at some point, one of those massive mobile cylinder-packs would do it just because they can, having a certain sense of humor and as a kind of publicity or political stunt. Perhaps the bigger question would be this: "What would earth have that would be worth trading it for?" Not money for themselves. Planetside currency would have little or no value in space. Perhaps they would rain a quadrillion dollars worth of fluffy spun-metal bales down just to build more launch facilities, to get enough new crewpeople into space to staff the geometrically increasing number of habitats. If each mobile habitat-pack makes 2 more to repay the resource investment in its own construction, the number of such vessels will relatively quickly outstrip the population available to leave earth to live on them. In just 20 construction-doubling cycles, you'll have 2 million habitats that each hold tens of thousands of residents. That's tens of billions of people living comfortably in space. It will not be materials but human residents who are ultimately the limited resource.
I'm excited about the possibility of an interstellar comet interceptor probe -- maybe park a few around the asteroid belt, ready to go? For extra credit, have it radio a recorded message of "Pull Over!" while it flashes blue and red lights.
You could perfectly take two spacecrafts 180° one to another orbiting the sun at pluto's orbit, and you shouldn't wait orbital time, just transmission time.
I wish someone a lot smarter than me - not hard to find! - could explain why it is more likely for life pre-cursor chemicals to develop on, and be delivered to Earth by, asteroids. Wasn't the whole Solar System formed from the same gas cloud? Why would the chemicals be more likely to form in outer space, and not on the surface of a planet? Outer space is a pretty hostile environment, and the delivery impact would create additional stresses. A planet gently spinning in the habitable zone seems so much more suitable for complex chemical reactions to happen, and then remain stable and 'evolve'.
Vendikar - a safe space on Mars would be a few tens of kilometers below the surface where atmospheric pressure would be similar to Earth, then instead of worrying about cosmic radiation, meteorites, rapid catastrophic depressurization and losing an entire colony, all you would need to worry about deep underground is oxygen and energy for food and water. The habitat could be maintained using membranes instead of heavy pressure vessels. Sunlight and electricity could be piped down from the surface using fibre optics and cables. Alternatively, the near side of Phobos would offer protection against radiation and be easy enough to land on and leave even if it has no failsafe against depressurization.
What mass would an extra solar object entering our solar system need to be in order to start significantly altering the orbit of larger objects in our Solar System Lets say, "larger objects" would start with something the size of the Dinosaur killer. Significantly Altering would start at: exerting a force on the object where it is no longer in the standard deviation of it's expected orbit. (I.E. earth's orbit has a "range" from the sun)
I think you might overestimate the difficulty of transporting resources to Earth. Yes, at the moment there is no infrastructure in place to mine and move asteroid dust around, but that aside, we've been slapping parachutes on capsules and dropping them in the ocean for 60+ years. I know that's a tad oversimplified, but you know what I mean.
#Risa. Astronometry - in future, we could have several such identical telescopes in different parts of the same orbit, so providing more rapid results. For instance if we had say 6 telescopes in Jupiter’s orbit, spaced 60 degrees apart, with say a small nuclear power source, so supporting high data rates. That would be an interesting configuration.
Minor typo in the chapter title for "Cheleb". The chapter title reads "[Cheleb] How with the Starship be refueled on Mars?". The word "with" should be "will". I have no idea how easy it would be to edit the chapter name/title.
21:25 or thereabouts- There are about 100, and were made out of about 20 of them. The most interesting thing is that those 20 are all 'left-handed'. The chance of that happening is vanishingly small. It makes you begin to realise how special this planet is. We'd better stop ruining it, and we need to stop that very soon.
15:31 Imagine how amazing it would look if you were falling into Jupiter. Forget the radiation and forget the pressure for a while. Getting closer and closer until it takes up your whole field of vision. Even then you'd still be far above the planet. Imagine falling through a gap between the clouds. Seeing the rise all around you. Clouds bigger than Earth. God, it would be terrifying but also incredibly beautiful.
Question: You talk about intense solar flares disrupting satellites and such. Can you go into more detail about what the effects of it would be. For example. Would phones stop working? Would cars not be able function because their circuits are fried? Would all the factories have to shut down? Would the telephone systems survive? If any circuitry is damaged could it be repaired easily or would we have suffer through months or years of outages as the manufacturing facilities come online and start producing replacement parts? Finally. Would the entire planet be effected or would some parts be spared if so what parts?
Wrong assumptions for cost of mining? It sounds like you are figuring the cost of mining based on the cost to get that one sample, about $1M/gram. But mining wouldn't be launching a space ship for each small bit of, 1Kg, of material to get it back to Earth. It would cost a lot more to get the mine set up and started. The cost of doing the actual mining would be quite low since I would assume that humans would not be present and all the energy for the mining would be from nuclear. So almost all the cost to mine the material, get it ready to go back to Earth would be in the up front cost to make the mine operational. Mining techniques and equipment would be proven much earlier on the Moon because sending a human to do maintenance on an asteroid would not be an option. Maintenance would be super low and done by robots. You might send occasional new drill bits and saw blades from Earth. Getting it back to Earth would likely be much cheaper than you think. You don't need a space craft for most of the material's journey back to Earth. In fact since it's not super important how long it takes to get to Earth it could be as simple as making sure you have really good aim when you "throw it" from the asteroid toward Earth. Things burn up in the Earth's atmosphere because they are going really fast as they move through it. But something falling straight down from space starting at a slow speed will not reach speeds adequate to burn up as it falls to earth. Like the guy that jumped from a balloon near the edge of space. You would have to have super good aim, calculations to time it right on a fast spinning asteroid so that it gets all that right to hit down at a specific spot on the Earth. Probably better would be to have it land (hit down) on the Moon then gathered and re-launched toward Earth. It's a lot of math problems. Figuring the equipment it would take to mine the ore. Package it to send back, (melt it into a shape or in a package that's good for aerodynamic drag). Launch at the precise moment and angle. Time it also so it hits the moon as it and the earth are moving away from the asteroid. So maybe a batch of launches once per year. That would also allow for time to gather the mineral from the landing "field" and re-launch to Earth.
It's a bit much to say "ever". It's definitely not useful to want to bring back raw material back to earth with our current technology and those we can realistically anticipate for the next few decades. But you also never know. For one there could be products made from space based resources in space that are valuable enough to bring back to Earth. Absolutely. Gold is also super useful in space though. So there will be a market once we start moving out there in a meaningful way.
Hey Fraser, Big fan! There is something on my mind about technosignatures… Why build a big dyson sphere when a nuclear fusion reactor (should be in theorie) a more efficient and easier way to harvest energy?
Question: Solar flares are unavoidable; the impact on our current spacecrafts is expected to be great; would this not automatically lead to the Kessler syndrome? Making finding solutions to 'cleaning' space a more urgent task then currently estimated.
Question: Dangerous solar flares i.e. Carrington event level solar ejections; would it be possible to perform a planet wide drill, shutting down satellites, electricity grids, computer servers etc. for a fixed short period, or is it the developed world's procedure to F. around and find out? or would shutting down/ unplugging assets not protect it?
13:29 I don't think Psyche would be mined to be sent to earth. It would be mined to be use to make a space station. Screw having to use Aluminium. Could you imagine, a permanent space station in Psyche? If it is solid enough, spin it up to give some gravity inside and mine it from the inside out to make space ships and probes to mine other asteroids. Actually, that could make a good book. The people working on the asteroids would be called belt people. /s
Regarding the question about asteroid deflection, would the next-most-likely object we would need to deflect not be a comet rather than a rogue planet? I guess the problem here is that most comets that visit the inner solar system only do so over enormous timescales. Like the last people to witness it may have been building pyramids in the desert. So tracking the orbit of Earth-killing comets seems impractical, which means if one were on a collision course, we would probably only find out on its approach right? That would give us precious little time to respond, so most asteroid deflection strategies may be too slow? I'm curious as to whether people are contemplating what if anything could be done in such a scenario?
Actual serious space mining talk is near Earth Asteroids. But saying it never going to happen please those comments in history always wrong. Like Fusion power star ship engines for example massively lowering the mission cost. Maybe some form of warp drive. The Never can't account for future science advancements. Not in our life time is the more safe term to use.
Risa: we would need a ring of gaia telescopes on jupiter orbit, and another ring of relay sattelites at mars orbit, so we can vet hugher bandwidth data back from jupiter distance. But another problem: at this distance, the solar panels need to be extremely large.
There could be an emerging use case for mining asteroids. If instead of returning the material to Earth, the material was used for space industry, or maybe if propellent could be extracted, it could make economic sense. Space isn't a bad place to do modular assembly work, and if some basic heavy components could be fabricated in orbit.. In this situation the launch costs are on the other side of the equation.
Re: parallax measurements. Why wait a hundred years? I'm no expert, but it seems to me that we need only to send twin spacecraft in opposite directions, to station them on opposite sides of the Solar System. As far as the data transfer rates go, can't we solve that with larger parabolic dishes and more powerful transmitters? Newer launch vehicles such as the SpaceX Starship promise to largely negate space probe weight and size constraints.
Question: why do scientists expect to find dark matter particles around earth? Why would dark matter have effect on star orbits in the galaxy but zerro effect on planet orbits around sun?
Mars was best IMO. It seems to me that the economics of mining asteroids would eventually be possible if smaller asteroids were slowly moved into earth orbit (by for instsnce nuclear fusion) propulsion) where they could be dismantled, and brought to earth via a space elevater.
Aeturen - I was half way through my comment when you said what I was saying. Just build a habitat there and then we have our Rock Rats. Huge Ben Bova Grand Tour fan here.
If anti-matter fell up, it might have indicated that it was regular matter that was traveling backwards in time. If you hit an electron with an energetic enough photon you can redirect it in space, so the thought was, why not in time? A positron behaves almost exactly like a time reversed electron. One of the things this could have explained is the lack of anti-matter in our universe. It would make it possible for the missing anti-matter to exist, just traveling backwards in time so we would never encounter it.
Question: Are the any gravitational tractor proof of concept missions in the near future? Would the best option for asteroid mining be to tow something like Psyche into lunar orbit to mine it there with the infrastructure already (hopefully) being built for lunar mining & production?
All the Mars colonization I believe is just a facade for asteroid mining. It's not about how much it is worth in our current context. Of course, bringing it down and refining it on the surface would make little sense, but it's not like we don't want to build anything in orbit around the Sun
28:16 I think it will be more along the lines of the first Starship lands and sets up the fuel plant and pumps H2 out of it's storage tanks to make fuel, and then the second one lands and sets up another fuel plant and pumps H2 to both pants so it takes half the time to refuel, then the third etc, and by the time there is enough capacity to immediately refuel a starship when it lands, there will already be a permanent base, extracting water etc from the soil, growing crops to feed themselves and the tourists/scientists coming on starship and then it will expand to extracting enough water to supply H2 to the fuel plants so that the starships don't need to bring it with them. The only parts of the bases that will be at ground level will be the greenhouses for the food to grow, the rest will be under ground to protect from radiation. The power needed won't be as huge as many assume because they'll use the same heating method used by Mark Watney. RTGs. RTGs will also power Stirling engines, which will be fine to use when there are people around to maintain them.
Re. gravitational lensing, I think in due course we will be able to accurately reconstruct images. As the distant object gradually transits the foreground object the distortions created by the foreground object will change. As the object nears a dense region (such as the center of a galaxy) the distortions will be greater. Measuring the rate of change will allow a more accurate estimation of the mass of the foreground galaxy and each region within it. Each computational pass can feed back the better estimations into the next analysis of the transit. Error checking can also be undertaken by studying structures within the far object's image. If the map of the foreground object is accurate enough, and the correctional analysis is also accurate enough, then the image of the far object (and portions of it) should remain consistent during the entirety of the transit. If it distorts at certain points then there is an error somewhere. Once it no longer does, then you can be confident that you are seeing the far object as it truly was.
I simply think you are wrong about asteroid mining. But it all depends on either creating some space lunch system here on earth that is dramatically cheaper than what we have today. We are talking about space elevator, space fountain and orbital ring sort of technology. Or at least Lofstrom loop. But the other way it can happen is by building up that space infrastructure in space. Once you are up there, it does not cost that much to move stuff. It is getting in to space and out of orbit that is the costly part. And the very in situ utilization you talk about is a core aspect of making that infrastructure. Maybe I am a bit of an optimist when it comes to this. I do think that if you start to build up that space infrastructure, then space mining will not only be a major industry the local economy around that asteroid. But that will spread all across the solar system and even back to earth. A lot of it will likely stay in the long term around earths orbit rather than be exported down. Since there are a lot of benefits to having orbital installations and such.
[Janus] Isn't the fact that we find amino acids in space point to any life outside of earth also using the same amino acids as a starting point? It's far more unlikely that life would evolve from a completely new and unknown mechanism, when the one we know can lead to life is likely available.
Ganymede as a moon of Mars wouldn't work. Ganymede would lose all the atmosphere and even frozen water. at mars distance from the Sun. Not much would remain out of it.
You might have considered that the most dangerous thing is having theAntarcitc ice wall fracture and allow the oceans to drain off thE disc, Norm ducks and runs away.
If i have to prove this how would i approach the problem. "a universe existed before the big bang and big bang is a energy release in the pre-exiting universe passing as a wave and expanding like a 3d waves"?
For most of the questions I had no answer but I can tell you that I was on a cave tour and when the guide turned off the light the room was absolutely deathly dark and no you could not see your hand in front of your face. Anyone can choose to argue but I was in that room and you could not see anything. It's not like a night darkness that most of the time isn't really dark, OK, sure I wouldn't want to be hunting for a small sharp pointed object.
12:50 I think it would make more sense to do an astrometry mission with a voyager-like probe because you could take a base-line measurement at Earth, then take a measurement at many AU out from the solar system without waiting the long orbital periods of the planets.
Regarding asteroid or moon mining. While it is ridiculously, prohibitively expensive to send a ship to an asteroid, mine and then return with the product, if it is cost effective to mine and use resources in-situ then what prevents an in-situ mining robot firing refined metals elsewhere in the solar system for use elsewhere. The cost benefit calculation changes when you are looking at it as infrastructure rather than as a mission.. Sure the initial outlay is huge but so are the returns.
Aren't we considered in a binary system? Because Jupiter and the sun orbits around the barycenter which is a little bit outside the sun. Saturn too but were not counting it because its not always the case. Yeah Jupiter isnt a star but it has its own mini solar system and everything else. Its responsible for even altering everything in the solar system so is there any objections on that idea?
Fraser the question was “what are the chances of mining”!!!! NOT whether mining would be profitable! Nor did they specify after mining bringing it back to Earth! Your reading comprehension is aweful!
Since CMEs from the sun are the most risky thing for human life on Earth, why do you think protecting our infrastructure from them is not one of humanity's highest priorities?
Boötes void is the place where the suns don't shine.
Nice!
Booty's void
Does it smell bad though?
@@Mr.Anders0n_ Maybe! I’ll tell you in 7 billion years when some of my atoms end up there.
@@oberonpanopticon so, you're planning on littering the area, blocking us from being angle to answer the question 😒
At around 3:20, Fraser says 10 light years twice, but it should've been 10 million light years.
You're exactly right. Wow. What's 6 orders of magnitude?
Thank you, I was very confused. 10 ly made no sense but he said it twice, so... yeah, confusing.
Yeah, weird that I did it twice. Verbal typo.
@@frasercain neurons do funny things sometimes 😄
This incapsulates how poor our puny brains are at understanding the vastness of the universe.
I’m not understanding the “whole 10light yrs away” thing, there are stars 10lys apart in the galaxy, doesn’t he a million?
Yeah, it should have been 10 million light-years
@@frasercain👍
Yeah, I think that's what he meant.
Yeah, I seem to make that verbal typo a lot. :-(. And the editor doesn't catch it, and I don't catch it when reviewing the video.
The way I explain how asteroid mining would work is: The price of gold on the earth is $22k per pound. The price of water on the moon is $100k per pound.
i imagine billionaires will one day flex their "space gold" and will have the ingots verified upon arrival and it will only be handled by a few people and sold at a ridiculous price that could service whole cities.
@@danielbirchfield8552And then even later, space gold will outnumber earth gold 10:1
Also, that’s because we currently have a lot more infrastructure on earth than on the moon.
It's Cobalt and helium 3 that's going to be needed here on earth. We'll probably have to learn how to bring an asteroid into earth's orbit first. Inflatable heat shields and spin launcher could make bringing stuff to earth much cheaper.
@@Bryan-Hensley By the time mass importation of ANYTHING is commercially viable, only what is not present in extractable quantities anywhere, or not synthesizable, on the planet will be imported- it would take hundreds of years to even begin to reach that point, by which time 3He won't be an issue, if still used in appreciable quantities.
Until then, the 3He is going to be even MORE important in space than anywhere else.
You can often reconstruct a galaxy that is being gravitationally lenzed, and I've done it many times.
Often the galaxies are smeared by roughly circular sources of gravity.
You can just hold up a mirrored cylinder along the galaxy you chose to "reconstruct" and look at the reflection in the cylinder. A glass with straight sides can work ok.
It may not be perfect but you can definitely get close to seeing the galaxies "unsmeared".
The old masters used to use this trick to hide secret images in their paintings.😮
Your not anywhere near there anytime soon.🤣
I have a question that has stuck with me since it came up. The Cassini-Huygens probe used the same celestial body for multiple gravity assist maneuvers.
Assuming you have as much time as needed, could you increase the velocity of a probe further and further by doing gravity assists over and over again or is there a limit in velocity a probe can get by such maneuvers?
At first, I thought the answer would be straight forward, but when I looked at the probe's trajectory, I realized it's quite complicated. It's orbital mechanics after all and I'm no Scott Manly 😅
I still thought about it really hard and here's my take. First, if you want to keep bouncing off a planet, you need to keep aligning your trajectory to be where the planet will be around the sun, and I don't know if both the gravity assist trajectory and the planet's orbit can KEEP aligning together with every bounce.
Even if we solve this problem, my hunch tells me that as your speed increases, the amount of fuel you need to burn to maneuver into the gravity assist trajectory keeps increasing. Remember, gravity assists aren't completely free. You still need to expend some energy for it to work. At some point, you'd reach the Milky Way escape velocity (think Oumuamua), so turning back for another bounce would be very expensive.
So, I think there's a sweet spot for how many times you can bounce off as the amount of energy needed for trajectory adjustments increases and as the time needed to complete each orbit also increases (because the orbit around the planet would keep getting bigger)
Finally, if it were possible, I'm sure the smart guys at NASA would've done it to make missions like New Horizons travel much faster.
@@Mr.Anders0n_ There comes a point where it would be going too fast to ever reach the planet you want it to bounce off with the fuel you have, then you have to choose another until you run out of planets by which time it's leaving the system. So yes, there is a limit to the velocity you could attain.
I don't think Oumuamua's velocity is greater than the Milky Way's escape velocity - it's greater than our Sun's but there are far far bigger stars with higher gravities.
It'll most likely stay within our galaxy, unless it finds a really improbable sequence of gravity assists instead of gravity brakes.
The limit is provided by either the surface or atmosphere of the celestial body and diminishing returns as the velocity gains decrease with each pass at a certain altitude.
“How much more dark can space be? None. None more dark.”-Spinal Tap joke. But seriously, one of the Apollo capsule astronauts told of traveling the dark side of the Moon. No sun. Moon shadow. Looking out the portal, lights down in capsule, into space. What he said was that it was like a white mist. So many stars so close. A level or two of darkness, night sky, than we’d ever see on Earth.
I like to imagine seeing that.
I've talked to astronauts about this. Even the ones who know their way around the night sky get confused because all the stars are so bright.
If I would do space mining, I wouldn't bring it to earth. It has more value in space (becsue you don't have to shoot it to space yourself).
I would name it "space metals (TM)" and use it for space stations and such.
Looking forward to the Psyche station and shipyards.
Question: Are there any technical downsides to having to wait for half an orbit for astrometry that would be solved by having a pairs of spacecraft?
Good suggestion. Brilliant! Pair of satellites makes a lot of sense.
There are the obvious downsides that a) everything in the universe moves, which introduces the problem of "What has happened in the gap between my measurements?", and b) not everything we observe last long enough to be observed from both extremes; having two satellites on opposite sides of the Sun at all times would let us take a snapshot of whatever we're looking at at the exact same time.
The longer the single-satellite's orbit is, the higher the risk of c) the satellite having a major malfunction between the extremes, making its obsvervations less-than-optimal (or worse); increasing the number of satellites will of course increase the risk that one will malfunction, but conversely decrease the risk of the whole programme's failure.
21:02 DNA is not made up of amino acids (they are made up of Deoxyribonucleic acids)! It is proteins that are are made up of long chains of amino acids.
Also, while amino acids are important building blocks for life, they are not the only building blocks that are necessary for life, in fact very early life might not have had any amino acids, as it is thought to have contained only RNA within a fatty membrane, with RNA taking the role of both DNA and proteins in later life.
Touching a rock from another star system would be a very memorable experience due to the existential feelings and thoughts it would cause.
Love your show! One minor correction: In the amino acids on astroids part you said DNA is made of amino acids. This is wrong. Amino acids make up proteins, but DNA is not a protein.
Love your content.....on RUclips, Patreon and the email newsletters!!! I've learned SO much...from you and from further researching topics you bring up ! 🤟
Wouldn't the better question about antimatter be whether it would curve spacetime in the opposite direction of normal matter, rather than having negative mass?
Your Q&A's are awesome. Maybe placing Psyche in orbit around Mars would be like two birds w/one stone, giving Mars enough oomph to form an atmosphere and mining materials for Earth and Mars colonies. If Man can't go to Psyche bring Psyche to Man.
It's a tiny fraction of the mass of Mars. It wouldn't help that much.
How about robotic ships in the rings of saturn redirecting larger ice fragments out of order to collide with mars? Or finding ice asteroids / comets and redirect their orbits.
@@Joe-lb8qnIsaac Arthur's channel has some calculations - that'd be not enough, also it'd bring the gravitational energy (like fireball) of each ice fragment as heat, even theoretical limits and mass that's available (to good measure add Saturn's rings and whole asteroid belt) won't do but a little.
Better to just live in space.
@@frasercain we already do 😃 but yeh aside the low gravity that would be the way.
For parallax/astrometry, you could overcome the waiting issue at distant orbits by launching a pair of satellites in orbit around the sun offset by 180°. Would still have the data rate issue at large distances though
Or even easier, you could just send one telescope into deep space and use a telescope on or near Earth to act as your second position. They don't have to be on opposite sides of the Sun, they just have to be far apart.
Why does telescope calibration hate me?
Mood af
If it’s a refractor then it’s because the space vampires don’t want you to see them.
Mining Psyche for metals for return to Earth probably makes no economic sense.
For now.
But mining Psyche makes excellent sense if your objective is to make space habitats, ships or Von Neumann robots, for further exploration in the solar system.
You'll need energy. Between fission, solar and perhaps eventually fusion, you can get it.
You'll need labor. Robots, of course.
You need to remember that today's tech level is not tomorrow's tech level. AI is coming on strong. So is robotics. Fast forward 50 years and tell me we won't need metals in a microgravity environment.
We will eventually regard metals and volatiles in the Belt and inward to be very precious to our ambitions - and pretty easy to access and exploit.
regarding parallax, couldn't you use two identical craft in a very large solar orbit and place one on each side of the sun? Eliminates the waiting? Would allow nonstop research?
Were the gravitational waves produced after the big bang stretched like space time when inflation occurred?
The BB created space rather than stretching it.
+
@@douglaswilkinson5700
Sure. But Inflation stretched it exponentially, thus the question if the original gravitational waves suffered inflation as well.
@@NunoPereira. Yes the gravitational waves would have been redshifted by a huge factor, maybe a billion times or more.
Semantics is important in astrophysics, cosmology, etc. and science in general. Inflation created new space. What effect this had on gravity I don't know. My field is stellar astrophysics.
If gold mined off an asteroid and returned to Earth is more expensive than gold mined on Earth, would it devalue gold? Wouldn't it need to be cheaper to devalue gold?
It would need to be cheaper just to make it worthwhile...
Hm... Not necessarily. You're assuming that price is the only thing that makes something worthwhile. What if there wasn't enough gold on Earth to satisfy a hypothetical new industry? Then it might be worthwhile for them to mine an asteroid even though it is more expensive, just so they could meet their demand.
Of course, in such a scenario the price of gold would probably go up so it might end up being cheaper to mine an asteroid after all.@@norml.hugh-mann
I have this one question. Can we make bases on all the moons in are solar system to navigate around..
All of them except for Io.
ANDORIA
What a cool thought... Maybe a little terrifying as well.
Hi Fraser, you regulary say if you have a question, write it in the comments. So here is my theory and a somewhat combination questions, maybe for a QA show.
The theory of timedelation, the theory of the Big Bang, the way to measure distance.
And the maximum speed of something or somewhat can travel in the universe, and the speed of light (the maximum speed of our observations)
Due to the gravity of objects, and (in my oppinion) also the speed at which the clock&observer travel through universe, the measurement of time differs. If we measure time with the most accurate tools we have now, atomic clokcs. Due to that the electro magnetic waves, (which make up the bouncing, and the counting of bouncing we use to measure the passing of time), have a longer distance to travel to keep up with the atoms in the clock, in motion. Versus an atomic clock which does not move. In my opinion, this means if the clock&observer travel at the speed of light, the measurement of time, (the counting of the electro magnetic waves bouncing), will approach or become zero, null. Same for an clock&observer at the center of an infinite mass, time measurement (for human observation) will become zero.
Now for argument sake, i only measure full seconds.
The Big bang, when our universe expanded from a 'nothing', from an infinite mass with an infinte small size, to where it is today.
Travelled distance= speed * time. So im at the beginning of the big bang, measuring time, the big bang happens and i travel along the edge of the expanding universe outwards from center, during 1 second (at the maximum speed we, now think ,is possible, approx 300000 km/second.) After 1 second i am 300000 km away from center, and the universe has a diameter of 600000 km. But, this is only valid for the time and speed of light we measure today on earth. Me standing at the edge of expanding universe, and traveling at 300000 km/sec, thus my measurement of time is null, or close to zero/null.
travelled distance (300000 km, according to today earth seconds) = Speed * time (close to zero or null)
300000 = Speed * 0.0etc0infinite row of zeros 01 >> Speed must be higher then 300000 km/sec, for the observer travelling at the edge of the universe expanding, IF we take our today earth second as basis.
So there is difference between the 'second', the time measurement today at earth. And the second which was measured in the beginning of the Big bang and expansion start of our universe. In theory , if the universe is still expanding at the speed of light at it's edge, the passing of the first second, for the clock&observer standing at the edge of expanding universe, has not finished yet, and that combined with what we assume is the max speed of things 300000 km/sec, that would mean for the clock&observer at the edge of universe in his observation he is travelling faster then the speed of light. In our observation of the clock&observer at the edge of universe expansion, the universe has been expanding 14 billion years. (and i say for argument sake, at the speed of light) In the observation of the clock&observer traveling at the edge of expanding universe, not even 1 second passed in time, while the distance traveled is the radius of our universe today.
For argument sake, lets say, the universe just now stopped expanding at the edge, and clock&observer just measured their first second. Their speed then was, 14 billion year * speed of light = 1.324512e+23 kilometer/second. According to the measurement of time for the clock&observer at the edge of universe, the speed of travel is 1.324512e+23 kilometer/second.
Now my theory/question 1:
Is the measurement of time subjective, depending on place/speed in universe? And if so, that means our measurement of speed of light, is also subjective. And therefore not a constant, but depending on the location and/or travel speed of the observer in the universe.
Theory/question 2:
When we made up the theory of the Big Bang, did they also take into account, timedelation? Because we interpolated back to the beginning of our universe, in the Big Bang theory. Or is it all interpolated on the second we measure on earth today?
Extra comment/theory:
Time is made up by humans. Theoretically for the clock&observer travelling at the speed of light, at the edge of the expanding universe. Time does not exist, no measurement/detection of passing of time has ever occured there.
Well, this hopefully gives you some food for thoughts, and maybe a Q&A question idea for one day.
Thanks for your videos, i enjoy them.
💥 💫 🧭 🌎🕚 🕦 🌚🪐 🌠 🌀
Fraser, Boötes is a Greek borrowing. It's pronounced not like “boots,” but rather bo'-OH-tis. There is a pharyngeal stop between the two "o"s, akin to one in “uh-oh.” only not as pronounced. More like Hawai'īan “a'a” term for a lava type, which ls like two distinct “a” sounds separated without a strong constriction of the glottis. Like “coöperative” is not pronounced like the last name Cooper, neither like "coh operative.” Try the middle ground between the two.
You've just said, "No way... ever..." I will postulate that your chances of being correct approach being identically zero. Consider that nickel, mined in the Sudbury basin, is in fact mining what was once an asteroid.
Q.
What process during a Supernova can accelerate a Star, and eject it out a Galaxy.
I read there was a kilonova, and it was 120,000 Light Yrs from the closest Galaxy. How did the Neutron Stars get there.
Okay, so it's 1980. There is no way people will EVER carry a wallet sized movie theater in your pocket with Star Wars and a library of other movies stored on it, making VHS rentals obsolete. That can't happen because it would cost $100,000 just to store one movie, and there's no way in hell it would fit in your pocket!
Okay, so transporting precious metals from psyche to earth would cost a few orders of magnitude more than it's worth on the surface of Earth. Buy why exactltly? Fundamental physical laws? I don't think so. The reason it's expensive to transport material from the asteroid belt to earth is lack of space infrastructure, not first principles.
As mentioned in the video, there would be incentive to mine psyche for material to be used in space. When we've been doing that for a while, perhaps a few decades, voila space infrastructure, and massive ubiquitous asteroid mining. Now metal in space is suddenly really cheap, so we deorbit a bunch until market forces equalize.
RE: Mining Psyche: We could actually do it on the cheap, it would just take a long time, and require building a bit of infrastructure on Psyche.
Direct transfer is on the order of 4kps; if you use a Jupiter gravity assist, you get down to 2kps. That is between half and a quarter of the delta V to reach LEO, so, for near earth industrial uses, it probably makes more sense to mine Psyche than to lift from earth, purely on a delta v budget basis.
Required infrastructure: Psyche: Mining and forging; light sail, solar panel, thermal nozzle, and mirror manufacturing; return package railgun (needs about 3kps for non optimal returns); LEO/Luna: A lot of solar panels and lasers to provide breaking energy to actually capture the packages (you can use waste material for reaction mass but you likely want to go with the less efficient light sail for a good chunk of the delta v, reserving the thermal nozzle configuration for capture where a high thrust maneuver is required)
Questions -
How is an object given co-ordinates for its location, Is there a general system or relative to each telescope?
Is there a map of all Stars in our Galaxy.
When will the Universe be all Mapped?
Where is Earth located compared in relation to the Universe. In the middle or more on the edge?
The Universe is about 13.9 Light years old - is the universe 27.8 Light years wide?
What would be the best way to learn(free) about Astronomy.
How can I contribute (as an amateur) to Astronomy.
Fraser, have you named a star after yourself and have you found anything in space.
You didn't answer the question about mining 16 Psyche.
The question was, "What do you think are the chances of actually mining Psyche?"
You answered the question, "What do you think are the chances of mining Psyche for precious metals and then bringing those materials back to Earth?"
Then you acted like the person asking the question excluded the possibility of using resources from Psyche out in space when in reality, they just asked if we will ever mine Psyche. Then you doubled down on your 0% answer.
Assuming we continue with our plans of moving out into space, we absolutely will mine asteroids for all of their resources and 16 Psyche has a ton of those resources.
So, that might be your honest opinion, but you're absolutely wrong. Chances are pretty high. Given that the question made no mention of any time restrictions, I would say the chances are about 50% that someone will mine 16 Psyche at some point.
I have a question. So it's not worth it to bring a piece of rock, or even a scoop of space diamonds from a distant asteroid back to Earth. But what if some survey discovered a clearly artificial structure on one of them, and scientists have no excuse for how it could be a natural formation. Would THAT be worth sending a 100 billion dollars mission to investigate?
I disagree with you about mining asteroids (and other celestial bodies). We can totally do it. We haven't even put our minds to it yet. Sure, right now the expenses are crazy high, but we aren't building systems specifically for mining asteroids. Look at how much shuttle costs compared to gdp have come down already. The USA needs to stop building all these wasteful telescopes that aren't game changers (although they are cool) and start focusing on how to create an economically self-sustaining space program.
Couldn' they shot material to Eart, like a cannon,(and good aim)? like mine refine shoot! Slow, but a stream could be set up.
Thumbs up 👍
Think about the energy required to do this. Also I would assume the amount of heat mined material shot on to earth would possibly burn up in Earth's atmosphere. Good brain storming tho. It's brainstorming ideas which brings insights necessary to solve problems. Thank you for sharing.
It just coasts, only initial launch/shot uses energy. It would be retrieved near earth and sent down. Yes, we will spend equal energy to launch, catching it. Very minimal.@@swiftycortex
Aeturen: Nowadays, I think the answer is obvious, but I didn't as a young teen. And the subject keeps popping up, even though nothing about spacefaring has changed by the orders of magnitude necessary for asteroid mining for terrestrial purposes to be viable, so it's a question that will need to be addressed time and again, the answer pounded out: "The economy of asteroid mining only works out in space!"
Also, in Alien and a bunch of other SF, people are ferrying goods between star systems to profit from trade. This is going to happen exactly NOT EVER: The argument that technology goes ever faster and at some point it will be economically viable doesn't hold up to the travel time and energy requirements: Say it takes 150 years to go between Centaurus and Earth. Now think about the number of people in 1873, the amount of energy the individual person had at their disposal (and the pollution it came with), the state of medicine, science, transportation... Progress is exponential in nature: It begets progress progressively. In the 150 years from interstellar trade became possible to the first load of goods landing, we would have had thousands of breakthroughs on a level comparable to the internet, and would most likely be able to produce every element, ever, through fusion. And we're already nearing a point where we can build anything so long as we have the right elements on hand.
Vulcan. Definitely. For both the question and the surprising answer!
Very interesting. Abut the how to refuel for a return trip from mars question…. Maybe we could have a tank stay in orbit above mars, before the mars decent, that could provide most of the fuel to return home to earth.
It doesn't make sense to go to Psyche for one gold bar, but...
One ton of gold is around 65 million dollars. Apollo lunar lander was about 10 tons.
It's conceivable that one day we send a mining module which will extract 100 tons of precious metals, load them into a container and send it on a slow trajectory back to Earth. It starts making economical sense at that scale.
How about 1000 tons? Sure it may lower the price, but the guy who brings it still wins. I don't think it will happen this decade, but I don't think the long term chance is zero, either.
DNA isn't amino acids, protein is. DNA encodes sequences of amino acids but needs a substrate of existing proteins and cytoplasm including free-floating amino acids to build them into proteins. There are many abiotic ways that amino acids arise from primordial soups of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and oxygen in water exposed to ultraviolet.
Very interesting as always! One correction:
DNA is not made from amino acids! Proteins are made from amino acids, which are small molecules with between 13 and 24 atoms, which all have the same backbone but different side chains, so you can chain them together using the backbone.
DNA is made of nucleotides, which are also small molecules, with about 35 atoms, and are also chained together, only 4 different nucleotides in DNA. DNA stores the information how proteins are pieced together from amino acids.
And then there are still molecules made from sugar building blocks, which can also form long chains, and those made from fatty acids and glycerol, those we all have too much of.. so, life has some different kinds of lego bricks..
Question: electric propulsion is low punch over a long time. How much energy/power would be needed (even unrealistic values) to launch a craft using ion thruster (or similar) from earth? Would just like to know the theoretical limits. Awesome channel and content! 😊
Oh, at some point in the upcoming O'Neill Cylinder building years, mined minerals from space will be brought back to earth. May not be the main point of the trip, because it will probably be a cycler ship actually coming to pick up crew for new habitats. Might as well bring some trade goods and/or building materials to near-earth on the trip inwards, and swap the mass for passengers on the way out. Also, at some point, one of those massive mobile cylinder-packs would do it just because they can, having a certain sense of humor and as a kind of publicity or political stunt.
Perhaps the bigger question would be this: "What would earth have that would be worth trading it for?" Not money for themselves. Planetside currency would have little or no value in space. Perhaps they would rain a quadrillion dollars worth of fluffy spun-metal bales down just to build more launch facilities, to get enough new crewpeople into space to staff the geometrically increasing number of habitats.
If each mobile habitat-pack makes 2 more to repay the resource investment in its own construction, the number of such vessels will relatively quickly outstrip the population available to leave earth to live on them. In just 20 construction-doubling cycles, you'll have 2 million habitats that each hold tens of thousands of residents. That's tens of billions of people living comfortably in space. It will not be materials but human residents who are ultimately the limited resource.
Most viable space industry will base on mining. New tech and refining tech would lead industry. Higher viability than colony Mars.
I'm excited about the possibility of an interstellar comet interceptor probe -- maybe park a few around the asteroid belt, ready to go?
For extra credit, have it radio a recorded message of "Pull Over!" while it flashes blue and red lights.
You could perfectly take two spacecrafts 180° one to another orbiting the sun at pluto's orbit, and you shouldn't wait orbital time, just transmission time.
I wish someone a lot smarter than me - not hard to find! - could explain why it is more likely for life pre-cursor chemicals to develop on, and be delivered to Earth by, asteroids.
Wasn't the whole Solar System formed from the same gas cloud? Why would the chemicals be more likely to form in outer space, and not on the surface of a planet?
Outer space is a pretty hostile environment, and the delivery impact would create additional stresses. A planet gently spinning in the habitable zone seems so much more suitable for complex chemical reactions to happen, and then remain stable and 'evolve'.
Vendikar - a safe space on Mars would be a few tens of kilometers below the surface where atmospheric pressure would be similar to Earth, then instead of worrying about cosmic radiation, meteorites, rapid catastrophic depressurization and losing an entire colony, all you would need to worry about deep underground is oxygen and energy for food and water.
The habitat could be maintained using membranes instead of heavy pressure vessels. Sunlight and electricity could be piped down from the surface using fibre optics and cables.
Alternatively, the near side of Phobos would offer protection against radiation and be easy enough to land on and leave even if it has no failsafe against depressurization.
What mass would an extra solar object entering our solar system need to be in order to start significantly altering the orbit of larger objects in our Solar System
Lets say, "larger objects" would start with something the size of the Dinosaur killer.
Significantly Altering would start at: exerting a force on the object where it is no longer in the standard deviation of it's expected orbit. (I.E. earth's orbit has a "range" from the sun)
Redwire manufactured a human bodypart on iss. I think that will be the first commercialy available manufacturing in space. Its close.
I think you might overestimate the difficulty of transporting resources to Earth. Yes, at the moment there is no infrastructure in place to mine and move asteroid dust around, but that aside, we've been slapping parachutes on capsules and dropping them in the ocean for 60+ years. I know that's a tad oversimplified, but you know what I mean.
#Risa. Astronometry - in future, we could have several such identical telescopes in different parts of the same orbit, so providing more rapid results.
For instance if we had say 6 telescopes in Jupiter’s orbit, spaced 60 degrees apart, with say a small nuclear power source, so supporting high data rates.
That would be an interesting configuration.
Minor typo in the chapter title for "Cheleb". The chapter title reads "[Cheleb] How with the Starship be refueled on Mars?". The word "with" should be "will". I have no idea how easy it would be to edit the chapter name/title.
21:25 or thereabouts- There are about 100, and were made out of about 20 of them. The most interesting thing is that those 20 are all 'left-handed'. The chance of that happening is vanishingly small. It makes you begin to realise how special this planet is. We'd better stop ruining it, and we need to stop that very soon.
Last time I checked, Canada was in the Americas. Howdy from a fellow American living in Iberia.
15:31 Imagine how amazing it would look if you were falling into Jupiter. Forget the radiation and forget the pressure for a while. Getting closer and closer until it takes up your whole field of vision. Even then you'd still be far above the planet. Imagine falling through a gap between the clouds. Seeing the rise all around you. Clouds bigger than Earth. God, it would be terrifying but also incredibly beautiful.
Question: You talk about intense solar flares disrupting satellites and such. Can you go into more detail about what the effects of it would be. For example. Would phones stop working? Would cars not be able function because their circuits are fried? Would all the factories have to shut down? Would the telephone systems survive? If any circuitry is damaged could it be repaired easily or would we have suffer through months or years of outages as the manufacturing facilities come online and start producing replacement parts?
Finally. Would the entire planet be effected or would some parts be spared if so what parts?
Wrong assumptions for cost of mining?
It sounds like you are figuring the cost of mining based on the cost to get that one sample, about $1M/gram. But mining wouldn't be launching a space ship for each small bit of, 1Kg, of material to get it back to Earth. It would cost a lot more to get the mine set up and started. The cost of doing the actual mining would be quite low since I would assume that humans would not be present and all the energy for the mining would be from nuclear. So almost all the cost to mine the material, get it ready to go back to Earth would be in the up front cost to make the mine operational. Mining techniques and equipment would be proven much earlier on the Moon because sending a human to do maintenance on an asteroid would not be an option. Maintenance would be super low and done by robots. You might send occasional new drill bits and saw blades from Earth.
Getting it back to Earth would likely be much cheaper than you think. You don't need a space craft for most of the material's journey back to Earth. In fact since it's not super important how long it takes to get to Earth it could be as simple as making sure you have really good aim when you "throw it" from the asteroid toward Earth. Things burn up in the Earth's atmosphere because they are going really fast as they move through it. But something falling straight down from space starting at a slow speed will not reach speeds adequate to burn up as it falls to earth. Like the guy that jumped from a balloon near the edge of space. You would have to have super good aim, calculations to time it right on a fast spinning asteroid so that it gets all that right to hit down at a specific spot on the Earth.
Probably better would be to have it land (hit down) on the Moon then gathered and re-launched toward Earth.
It's a lot of math problems. Figuring the equipment it would take to mine the ore. Package it to send back, (melt it into a shape or in a package that's good for aerodynamic drag). Launch at the precise moment and angle. Time it also so it hits the moon as it and the earth are moving away from the asteroid. So maybe a batch of launches once per year. That would also allow for time to gather the mineral from the landing "field" and re-launch to Earth.
Re The planet becoming a star; could a rogue Jupiter, drifting slowly into a cold gas cloud, be the catalyst/nucleus for star formation?
It's a bit much to say "ever". It's definitely not useful to want to bring back raw material back to earth with our current technology and those we can realistically anticipate for the next few decades. But you also never know. For one there could be products made from space based resources in space that are valuable enough to bring back to Earth. Absolutely. Gold is also super useful in space though. So there will be a market once we start moving out there in a meaningful way.
Hey Fraser, Big fan!
There is something on my mind about technosignatures…
Why build a big dyson sphere when a nuclear fusion reactor (should be in theorie) a more efficient and easier way to harvest energy?
Question: Solar flares are unavoidable; the impact on our current spacecrafts is expected to be great; would this not automatically lead to the Kessler syndrome? Making finding solutions to 'cleaning' space a more urgent task then currently estimated.
Question: Dangerous solar flares i.e. Carrington event level solar ejections; would it be possible to perform a planet wide drill, shutting down satellites, electricity grids, computer servers etc. for a fixed short period, or is it the developed world's procedure to F. around and find out? or would shutting down/ unplugging assets not protect it?
13:29 I don't think Psyche would be mined to be sent to earth. It would be mined to be use to make a space station. Screw having to use Aluminium. Could you imagine, a permanent space station in Psyche? If it is solid enough, spin it up to give some gravity inside and mine it from the inside out to make space ships and probes to mine other asteroids.
Actually, that could make a good book. The people working on the asteroids would be called belt people. /s
Regarding the question about asteroid deflection, would the next-most-likely object we would need to deflect not be a comet rather than a rogue planet? I guess the problem here is that most comets that visit the inner solar system only do so over enormous timescales. Like the last people to witness it may have been building pyramids in the desert. So tracking the orbit of Earth-killing comets seems impractical, which means if one were on a collision course, we would probably only find out on its approach right? That would give us precious little time to respond, so most asteroid deflection strategies may be too slow? I'm curious as to whether people are contemplating what if anything could be done in such a scenario?
Vendikar -
Titan would be a good one. Wear a thermal suit and breathing element. With a backpack with wings to slide your arms onto and you could fly!
Actual serious space mining talk is near Earth Asteroids.
But saying it never going to happen please those comments in history always wrong.
Like Fusion power star ship engines for example massively lowering the mission cost. Maybe some form of warp drive. The Never can't account for future science advancements.
Not in our life time is the more safe term to use.
Risa: we would need a ring of gaia telescopes on jupiter orbit, and another ring of relay sattelites at mars orbit, so we can vet hugher bandwidth data back from jupiter distance. But another problem: at this distance, the solar panels need to be extremely large.
There could be an emerging use case for mining asteroids.
If instead of returning the material to Earth, the material was used for space industry, or maybe if propellent could be extracted, it could make economic sense.
Space isn't a bad place to do modular assembly work, and if some basic heavy components could be fabricated in orbit..
In this situation the launch costs are on the other side of the equation.
Re: parallax measurements. Why wait a hundred years? I'm no expert, but it seems to me that we need only to send twin spacecraft in opposite directions, to station them on opposite sides of the Solar System. As far as the data transfer rates go, can't we solve that with larger parabolic dishes and more powerful transmitters? Newer launch vehicles such as the SpaceX Starship promise to largely negate space probe weight and size constraints.
How much would the orbits of the planets in our solar system deviate over time if the Andromeda galaxy suddenly vanished?
Question: why do scientists expect to find dark matter particles around earth? Why would dark matter have effect on star orbits in the galaxy but zerro effect on planet orbits around sun?
Mars was best IMO. It seems to me that the economics of mining asteroids would eventually be possible if smaller asteroids were slowly moved into earth orbit (by for instsnce nuclear fusion) propulsion) where they could be dismantled, and brought to earth via a space elevater.
Aeturen - I was half way through my comment when you said what I was saying. Just build a habitat there and then we have our Rock Rats. Huge Ben Bova Grand Tour fan here.
If anti-matter fell up, it might have indicated that it was regular matter that was traveling backwards in time.
If you hit an electron with an energetic enough photon you can redirect it in space, so the thought was, why not in time? A positron behaves almost exactly like a time reversed electron.
One of the things this could have explained is the lack of anti-matter in our universe. It would make it possible for the missing anti-matter to exist, just traveling backwards in time so we would never encounter it.
Question: Are the any gravitational tractor proof of concept missions in the near future? Would the best option for asteroid mining be to tow something like Psyche into lunar orbit to mine it there with the infrastructure already (hopefully) being built for lunar mining & production?
Could dark matter be parallel universes interacting through gravity ?
To protect us from solar storms, we should in fact make backups of all our information on optical discs like Blueray?
All the Mars colonization I believe is just a facade for asteroid mining. It's not about how much it is worth in our current context. Of course, bringing it down and refining it on the surface would make little sense, but it's not like we don't want to build anything in orbit around the Sun
28:16 I think it will be more along the lines of the first Starship lands and sets up the fuel plant and pumps H2 out of it's storage tanks to make fuel, and then the second one lands and sets up another fuel plant and pumps H2 to both pants so it takes half the time to refuel, then the third etc, and by the time there is enough capacity to immediately refuel a starship when it lands, there will already be a permanent base, extracting water etc from the soil, growing crops to feed themselves and the tourists/scientists coming on starship and then it will expand to extracting enough water to supply H2 to the fuel plants so that the starships don't need to bring it with them. The only parts of the bases that will be at ground level will be the greenhouses for the food to grow, the rest will be under ground to protect from radiation. The power needed won't be as huge as many assume because they'll use the same heating method used by Mark Watney. RTGs. RTGs will also power Stirling engines, which will be fine to use when there are people around to maintain them.
Re. gravitational lensing, I think in due course we will be able to accurately reconstruct images. As the distant object gradually transits the foreground object the distortions created by the foreground object will change.
As the object nears a dense region (such as the center of a galaxy) the distortions will be greater. Measuring the rate of change will allow a more accurate estimation of the mass of the foreground galaxy and each region within it. Each computational pass can feed back the better estimations into the next analysis of the transit.
Error checking can also be undertaken by studying structures within the far object's image. If the map of the foreground object is accurate enough, and the correctional analysis is also accurate enough, then the image of the far object (and portions of it) should remain consistent during the entirety of the transit.
If it distorts at certain points then there is an error somewhere. Once it no longer does, then you can be confident that you are seeing the far object as it truly was.
I simply think you are wrong about asteroid mining. But it all depends on either creating some space lunch system here on earth that is dramatically cheaper than what we have today. We are talking about space elevator, space fountain and orbital ring sort of technology. Or at least Lofstrom loop. But the other way it can happen is by building up that space infrastructure in space. Once you are up there, it does not cost that much to move stuff. It is getting in to space and out of orbit that is the costly part. And the very in situ utilization you talk about is a core aspect of making that infrastructure.
Maybe I am a bit of an optimist when it comes to this. I do think that if you start to build up that space infrastructure, then space mining will not only be a major industry the local economy around that asteroid. But that will spread all across the solar system and even back to earth. A lot of it will likely stay in the long term around earths orbit rather than be exported down. Since there are a lot of benefits to having orbital installations and such.
You can see your hand directly by the light of the Milky Way, right here on Earth, if you have a clear enough sky. Personal experience!
Is there any level in Venus' surface that the rock temperature would be cool enough to hold ancient magnetism? Would it be very deep down?
[Janus] Isn't the fact that we find amino acids in space point to any life outside of earth also using the same amino acids as a starting point? It's far more unlikely that life would evolve from a completely new and unknown mechanism, when the one we know can lead to life is likely available.
Ganymede as a moon of Mars wouldn't work. Ganymede would lose all the atmosphere and even frozen water. at mars distance from the Sun. Not much would remain out of it.
Can voyagers or bew horizons detect the first radio signals at their furthest distance away approx 100 light years away
You might have considered that the most dangerous thing is having theAntarcitc ice wall fracture and allow the oceans to drain off thE disc, Norm ducks and runs away.
Vendicar,
Titan! Because I could fly under my own power, whear a wingsuit and an oxygen tank
If i have to prove this how would i approach the problem. "a universe existed before the big bang and big bang is a energy release in the pre-exiting universe passing as a wave and expanding like a 3d waves"?
For most of the questions I had no answer but I can tell you that I was on a cave tour and when the guide turned off the light the room was absolutely deathly dark and no you could not see your hand in front of your face. Anyone can choose to argue but I was in that room and you could not see anything. It's not like a night darkness that most of the time isn't really dark, OK, sure I wouldn't want to be hunting for a small sharp pointed object.
Mining asteroids will get cheaper to mine as we advance in technology will it happen in our lifetime...maybe most likely not
12:50 I think it would make more sense to do an astrometry mission with a voyager-like probe because you could take a base-line measurement at Earth, then take a measurement at many AU out from the solar system without waiting the long orbital periods of the planets.
Question: Why does the Planck length have the value it does? What is fundamental about that length that causes our understanding to break down?
Regarding asteroid or moon mining.
While it is ridiculously, prohibitively expensive to send a ship to an asteroid, mine and then return with the product, if it is cost effective to mine and use resources in-situ then what prevents an in-situ mining robot firing refined metals elsewhere in the solar system for use elsewhere.
The cost benefit calculation changes when you are looking at it as infrastructure rather than as a mission.. Sure the initial outlay is huge but so are the returns.
Aren't we considered in a binary system? Because Jupiter and the sun orbits around the barycenter which is a little bit outside the sun. Saturn too but were not counting it because its not always the case. Yeah Jupiter isnt a star but it has its own mini solar system and everything else. Its responsible for even altering everything in the solar system so is there any objections on that idea?
Hi Fraser. Do you think that magnetic fusion plasma engines will be the answer to future manned space missions to the outer solar? system.
Fraser the question was “what are the chances of mining”!!!! NOT whether mining would be profitable! Nor did they specify after mining bringing it back to Earth! Your reading comprehension is aweful!
Question: could we use gravitational lensing to see light from beyond the observable universe?
Since CMEs from the sun are the most risky thing for human life on Earth, why do you think protecting our infrastructure from them is not one of humanity's highest priorities?