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posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 06 2015, @04:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the a-can-of-paint-and-a-brush dept.

As major disasters go, asteroid impacts are one of the few, which are theoretically preventable, provided we had enough advance notice. Some schemes call for merely painting the asteroid white, and relying on radiation pressure from the sun, to change its' orbit enough to miss us.

Step zero, is to see the asteroid first, so I was thrilled to see, some recent progress on this front.

"Based on the geologic record and what we know about the NEO (near earth orbit) population, the probability of a catastrophic event is quite low. A Tunguska-scale event might occur once every few centuries. Impactors as large as the 10-km-diameter object that finished off the dinosaurs very rarely collide with Earth, just once every 100 million years or so.

But of course, these are just average rates. The next asteroid with the potential to level a city might not hit Earth for hundreds of years; it could also arrive tomorrow. The only thing we can say with certainty is that there will be more collisions in our future."

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Thursday May 07 2015, @12:19AM

    by frojack (1554) on Thursday May 07 2015, @12:19AM (#179717) Journal

    Couple of problems tho....

    No air for all those Internal Combustion Engines. No long term zero maintenance engine technology. Nuclear? Have you seen the amount
    of maintenance they require.
    No maintenance for all those machines, even the simple ones.
    No GPS system to guide all those automated trains - let alone lay their tracks.
    No communication system in anything approaching real-time. No human assistance in the asteroid belt.
    The "Go at landing" was one device, and it was mostly a failure. You will have to land dozens of craft in one go, and they will have to organize themselves mostly without human assistance.
    Not enough sunlight out there in the asteroid belt to allow mirrors to be of much use.
    Industrial automation still needs lots and lots of human maintenance.

    Basically, there is no economic case to be made for asteroid mining that doesn't entail capturing some random close-passer and chewing up the whole thing in some convenient location such as lunar orbit. And if you can get that much equipment up to the moon why not just mine the moon itself, rather than waiting for some close passer?

    If you aren't going to capture it in lunar orbit, you need a really big asteroid just to hold all the equipment, and have a smooth-ish round surface. And those things just tend not to show up close to earth, so you are going to have to send things all the way out there.

    Just prospecting for worth while minerals is going to be hugely expensive.

    (I wonder how much of the moon you can mine and take away from the moon before you start fucking up the orbit of the moon?)

    Anyway, by the time you have enough lift to get that amount of equipment into space, it will be just as cheap to mine on earth, build on earth, lift to space, and assemble in space. In short none of this happens with chemical rockets. And as soon as we have a replacement for chemical rockets, and we can lift what ever we want, we no longer need to mine asteroids. We will mine the Earth, Moon, and Mars.

    For that reason, I don't think it will EVER be economical to mine asteroids. Its a goal not worth achieving.

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