Mining asteroids is a goal that makes sense. I can picture a future where spacecrafts are regularly sent to the asteroid belt and come back to earth with some minerals. Living on the moon does not make sense. There is nothing to be gained from humans living in a future moon base. Not any more than cities built in Antarctica, or in orbit with a constellation of ISS like satellites.

We won’t build a city on the Moon, nor Mars, nor any of Jupiter’s moons, nor anywhere outside of Earth, and we won‘t do this even if engineeringly possible, for the exact same reason we won’t build a bubble city inside the Mariana Trench.

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TheOtherHobbes 2 days ago | parent [-]

Mining asteroids makes no sense whatsoever with any currently imaginable practical tech, especially not economically. The numbers for even the most basic solutions just don't work, and anything cleverer - like adding thrusters to chunks of metal and firing them at the Earth - has one or two rather obvious issues.

The Moon is interesting because it's there, it's fairly close, it's a test bed for off-world construction, manufacturing, and life support, and there are experiments you can do on the dark side that aren't possible elsewhere.

Especially big telescopes.

It has many of the same life support issues as Mars, and any Moon solutions are likely to work on Mars and the asteroids, more quickly and successfully than trying to do the same R&D far, far away.

Will it pay for itself? Not for a long, long time. But frontier projects rarely do.

The benefit comes from the investment, the R&D, the new science and engineering, and the jobs created.

It's also handy if you need a remote off-site backup.

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NetMageSCW 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Mining asteroids wouldn’t be for Earth - it would be for satellites or LEO or possibly even Mars, which is a lot closer to the Asteroids than Earth and may need some extra raw materials we don’t want to spend the horrendous cost of lifting out of Earth’s gravity.

The Moon has nothing to offer Mars explorers as everything will be different and solutions for the unique lunar conditions (two weeks of darkness, temperature extremes, moon dust, vacuum) do not apply to Mars at all. It’like saying living under the ocean is good practice for living in the Artic, but we should start under the ocean because it’s closer.

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Supermancho 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Mining asteroids makes no sense whatsoever with any currently imaginable practical tech, especially not economically.

With current tech, it's practical enough to extract rocks from a rock. We've already done this on a comet, which I think is much harder to do. With current economics, not practical to fund such an endeavor, even if it was to haul back an asteroid made of solid gold. Regardless, we're discussing the far future, rather than current state.

If raw materials (again, an unknown) continue to become more scarce, it's hard to say what economics might support extra-planetary resource collection. What's for sure, is mining Mars will be harder than mining asteroids for water or metals, et al.

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runarberg 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Mining asteroids makes no sense in the current economy with our current technology. But working towards engineering solutions which makes mining asteroids make sense makes sense (if that makes sense).

However, it is much easier to see us send robots to mine these asteroids, or send robots to the moon to build a giant telescope on the dark side (if that makes sense), then it is to see us build cities on the moon to build said telescope, and to mine those asteroids.

You see the difference here is that the end goal of mining asteroids are resources being sent to earth and exploited, while the goal of space settlements are the settlements them selves, that is some hypothetical space expansion is the goal, and that makes no sense, nobodies lives will improve from space expansion (except for the grifters’ during the grift).

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parineum 2 days ago | parent [-]

> nobodies lives will improve from space expansion (except for the grifters’ during the grift).

Aspiring to goals and accomplishing them makes life worth living to a lot of people. Furthermore, humanity seems to have an innate drive to explore and learn.

Even to those left at home, it's inspirational to think that there are people who are taking steps to explore the universe.

Maybe it won't help anyone live but it will give a lot of people something to live for.

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