| ▲ | stainablesteel 4 days ago |
| the ability to mine the moon or asteroid belt seems extremely lucrative, the logistics of transporting materials to earth costs less than shipping them across the ocean, an astounding level of value creation. |
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| ▲ | tverbeure 4 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| This can’t a serious comment. Did you notice the size of the Artemis rocket and the size of the payload it sends to the moon and back? Do you expect there to be diamonds just laying these on the moon surface, no mining required. |
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| ▲ | stainablesteel 4 days ago | parent [-] | | you don't have to ship things the moon, you just build a mass driver on the moon that sends things to earth. it doesn't need to yield diamonds, this would be lucrative with just fresh water | | |
| ▲ | sd9 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You actually believe that transporting _water_ from the moon to earth could ever be profitable, no, lucrative? Can you lay out the economics? Just so I understand. | |
| ▲ | tverbeure 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | “Just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. |
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| ▲ | xuki 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There is no other mode of transportation cheaper than shipping across the ocean. |
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| ▲ | stainablesteel 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | launching things via a mass driver from the moon to the earth requires a lot less fuel, is faster, and cheaper than shipping across the ocean | |
| ▲ | andai 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | That one is subsidized by externalizing costs to our lungs. | | |
| ▲ | kibwen 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Shipping on water has been, by far, the cheapest mode of long-distance shipping since the moment boats were invented. That is to say, since thousands of years before boats were ever powered by the shit that destroys our lungs. | |
| ▲ | sroussey 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | So is pace travel. Then rockets are not green! |
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| ▲ | AngryData 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It is valuable if they can find the right rocks and bring them back. A platinum group metal asteroid would be of immense value, at least the first one anyways. After that who knows, they might super saturate the global market for decades. |
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| ▲ | stainablesteel 4 days ago | parent [-] | | our use of platinum has been limited by its scarcity, having tons of it would completely change the things we could build. saturation isn't a real downstream effect of economics, it would instead be transformative |
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