from the where-the-mother-lode-gives-birth? dept.
Geologists identify deep-earth structures that may signal hidden metal lodes
If the world is to maintain a sustainable economy and fend off the worst effects of climate change, at least one industry will soon have to ramp up dramatically: the mining of metals needed to create a vast infrastructure for renewable power generation, storage, transmission and usage. The problem is, demand for such metals is likely to far outstrip currently both known deposits and the existing technology used to find more ore bodies.
Now, in a new study, scientists have discovered previously unrecognized structural lines 100 miles or more down in the earth that appear to signal the locations of giant deposits of copper, lead, zinc and other vital metals lying close enough to the surface to be mined, but too far down to be found using current exploration methods. The discovery could greatly narrow down search areas, and reduce the footprint of future mines, the authors say. The study appears this week in the journal Nature Geoscience.
[...] The study found that 85 percent of all known base-metal deposits hosted in sediments-and 100 percent of all "giant" deposits (those holding more than 10 million tons of metal)-lie above deeply buried lines girdling the planet that mark the edges of ancient continents. Specifically, the deposits lie along boundaries where the earth's lithosphere-the rigid outermost cladding of the planet, comprising the crust and upper mantle-thins out to about 170 kilometers below the surface.
Up to now, all such deposits have been found pretty much at the surface, and their locations have seemed to be somewhat random. Most discoveries have been made basically by geologists combing the ground and whacking at rocks with hammers. Geophysical exploration methods using gravity and other parameters to find buried ore bodies have entered in recent decades, but the results have been underwhelming. The new study presents geologists with a new, high-tech treasure map telling them where to look.
Journal Reference:
Mark J. Hoggard, Karol Czarnota, Fred D. Richards, et al. Global distribution of sediment-hosted metals controlled by craton edge stability, Nature Geoscience (DOI: 10.1038/s41561-020-0593-2)
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday July 02 2020, @04:49PM (18 children)
Wouldn't the "belters" have lots of "rare earth" metals and unobtainium?
If SpaceX could make the cost of access to space, and the asteroid belt, much cheaper, maybe there would be another gold rush.
Maybe in the meantime we need to get much better at recycling what we've got.
But what about people who think it is their right to put the planet's recyclable resources into a landfill -- maybe just out of spite.
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:14PM (16 children)
Asteroid mining could lead to a literal gold rush, since large amounts of gold and other useful elements sank into Earth's core but are potentially abundant and accessible in the Belt.
Making it economical requires very cheap access to space, which Starship and some other advancements should provide. But there are other factors. Can you get 50+ tons of gold and other metals easily (refined, not raw ore)? Or can you get chunks into Earth orbit, wrap them with some kind of airbag, and safely land them in a desert somewhere (cheaply)? Otherwise you might have to use the materials in space instead of on Earth.
The mass of the belt is 4% of the Moon's mass (Moon is 1.23% of Earth). And half of that mass is Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea, which should probably be kept intact to use as stations. So you could eventually land *every* smaller asteroid and not affect Earth much.
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(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:35PM (6 children)
I wonder if we could develop tech to refine rare metals in space?
Orbit it much to the sun, collect solar power. But then you have to lift the refined product back to civilization.
Maybe we could learn to pollute the inner orbits closer to the sun in a way similar to how we've learned to pollute Earth's oceans.
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:43PM
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2015/03/zaptec-plasma-lightning-pulses-could.html [nextbigfuture.com]
Something like this would be a good start.
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Thursday July 02 2020, @06:11PM (4 children)
You don't have to lift anything. The raw material is very much "up" from here, and most of that "up" is between Earth's surface and orbit.
Collect solar energy in the belt to refine ores (large mylar "umbrella" parabolic mirrors would melt things nicely), then form the refined products into inert reentry "capsules" and throw them at Earth. You only need about 1km/s delta-V to reach Earth, and with an industrial base and no atmosphere you don't need wasteful rockets, there's lots of far more efficient options. Maybe you strap on some cheap thrusters to fine-tune its trajectory, that'd be especially useful for landing them exactly where you want them.
When the capsules reach Earth they aerobrake until they fall out of the sky in a blazing fireball shooting for the big bulls-eye you've painted in the middle of nowhere. Without parachutes, etc. they'd have a nasty impact, but you don't really care because they're just raw materials you're about to melt down and turn into something useful anyway.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @09:02PM (3 children)
With a bit of creativity, you won't even have to refine it in space first. You can use the fireball provided by earth's atmosphere to do some of the melting and splitting for you.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday July 03 2020, @03:54AM (2 children)
I'd be willing the bet that most anything that melts during reentry would immediately be blown off the surface by the high airspeed, and either be incinerated in the fireball, or condense and rain down across half a continent.
Besides, the whole point of refining is to separate out the heavy base metals like iron and nickel so that you only have to ship the valuable ores back to Earth. Reducing the mass of your cargo by 90+% saves a bundle on shipping costs. And all that iron will be immensely useful for building stuff in space, while it's basically worthless on Earth.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 03 2020, @12:01PM (1 child)
It's worth noting that some meteorites have been ice-cold to the touch right after they've fallen. That's how inefficient the process is at heating the meteorite.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday July 03 2020, @01:10PM
I'm sure it helps that they come with built-in ablative heat shielding.
Phase transitions consume an enormous amount of energy - as one example it takes almost as much energy to melt ice without heating it (ice at 0C-> water at 0C = 79cal/g), as to heat the resulting water 100C to the edge of boiling (~100 cal/g). Going from liquid to gas consumes dramatically more energy that both, at 539cal/g.
I don't know the numbers for rock, but I imagine they're pretty high, and most rock doesn't conduct heat well so all the heat absorbed will tend to be shed by vaporizing the surface rather than heating the layers beneath it. I suspect metallic asteroids would tend to warm up a lot more during reentry since metals conduct heat so much better.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:13PM (6 children)
A SpaceX Dragon-2 can return 3000 Kg and platinum is running around $27K/kilo so a Dragon capsule full of best case pure platinum ingots would be worth $81M upon landing, and the long term target cost of a Dragon mission was supposed to eventually average $160M. Superficially that's a loss.
Of course, its hard to really say how much it would cost to cast a strangely shaped ingot that looks and weighs as much as a capsule, in space, and slap a light and cheap retrorocket and guidance package on it.
Also, pure rhodium runs about $70K per kilo, so assuming the world market could handle the flood, you could run a modest profit off rhodium mining, today, using COTS rocket hardware, assuming you got pure ingots of orbital rhodium for free via robot miners and automated refineries or some such nonsense.
Most likely, the metal would stay in space and occasionally be used as ballast for landings. Got an extra 100 kilos of re-entry capacity? Here's two million bucks of platinum to take home for the office beer and pizza slush fund.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday July 02 2020, @09:05PM (3 children)
The numbers could improve with a Falcon Heavy (2 boosters and center core landed) and Dragon XL [wikipedia.org]. But Falcon should probably be completely disregarded in favor of Starship, since SpaceX has put out estimates like $2 million for 100-150 tons (100,000-150,000 kg) to LEO (or better [twitter.com]), with the cost multiplied at least a few times to get 100-150 tons to anywhere in the solar system or less mass with extra fuel to spare. If oxygen and methane can be extracted and manufactured at the destination, even better.
Producing pure ingots of anything at an asteroid sounds difficult. Carrying back 5-50 tons and landing it seems unnecessary. I want to see big asteroid chunks redirected into Earth orbit, and then deorbited with a heat shield [soylentnews.org] and slammed into a desert. As great as using it in space would be, the demand is clearly on Earth's surface for the next couple of centuries at least.
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(Score: 2) by KilroySmith on Thursday July 02 2020, @09:48PM (2 children)
>>> slammed into a desert
I live in the desert, you insensitive clod!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday July 02 2020, @09:56PM (1 child)
They'll clear out the area with a nuke [thebulletin.org] first.
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(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday July 03 2020, @07:35AM
If you really want to clear out some desert, resurrect the real Project Orion. It would not only clear the take-off site for future landings you could deliver an entire asteroid mining facility to the Belt in one go.
200 million years is actually quite a long time.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday July 03 2020, @01:47PM
>Of course, its hard to really say how much it would cost to cast a strangely shaped ingot that looks and weighs as much as a capsule, in space, and slap a light and cheap retrorocket and guidance package on it.
That's the ticket. Virtually all the cost in a Dragon mission is in the launch and vehicle itself. Landing is very close to free, especially if you don't care about not pulverizing the lander on impact - asteroids do it all the time, and it wouldn't take much to provide a much more controlled reentry.
Casting reentry capsule shaped ingots should be dirt cheap, and there's lots of really cheap rocket designs to fine-tune the reentry trajectory - things get a lot simpler when you don't require the massive thrust-to-weight ratio needed for launch delta-V. Orbital "tugboats" could also do 99% of the job, assuming capsules are being captured into orbit first for a maximally controlled reentry trajectory, rather than entering Earth space on an atmosphere-skimming direct reentry trajectory.
Maybe smear some flour paste (or mineral alternative) on the leading surface as well for a cheap ablative heat shield - you don't want half your valuable asteroid burning away and falling as oxide dust along the reentry path. Then just let it slam into the bulls-eye and haul the big now-deformed ingot in for processing.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday July 03 2020, @01:57PM
I'm sure the iron, and probably nickle and other base metals would be left in space. What you'd send to Earth are the valuable metals you extract while purifying the iron, which will be largely useless in space until industrial infrastructure becomes far more sophisticated.
You can't use launch costs as guideline for the cost to send stuff back to Earth - virtually all of the cost of a Dragon mission is in the vehicle and the launch. The return trip is practically free - no huge first or second stages, and virtually all the acceleration is provided by aerobraking. You don't even need a capsule to land a meteorite, just cast your ingots as nice stable truncated cones and slap a guidance package into it.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:28PM (1 child)
Using the materials in space is better anyway. But that's going to require lots of other technologies, like nearly closed ecosystems...also a good thing.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday July 02 2020, @10:04PM
I would like that too, but I don't think it will be relevant anytime soon. Even if we have Moon and Mars bases in the 2050s-2080s, they won't need lots of asteroid materials.
On the other hand, if there is a disruptively cheap way to land useful metals on Earth, that's the way asteroid mining is likely to go. It might even be the environmentally responsible thing to do if it reduces pit mining elsewhere.
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @11:39PM
Gold Rush?
Nope. Total annihilation of most metal markets. Even complex alloys will fall in price dramatically, and that cost will be related mostly to fabrication and not materials.
Once we have lowered the cost to get to space enough, we can transition to the moon. At the moon, we can build automated factories, foundries, and mines. We just need enough supplies of other materials to perform final fabrication in space. The costs of getting materials to Lunar orbit is dramatically lower. So it could be incredibly easy to launch prefab components into Lunar orbit and complete final fabrication there. The very first things we should build are automated craft that could capture small asteroids and bring them back into Lunar orbit. We will learn enough about automated mining on the moon, that automated mining of the asteroid belts will be something were competent at.
Imagine a steady stream of ore coming into Lunar orbit, where in combination with Lunar sourced products, and expensive products from Earth, are used to create immense structures. If we built something like that, the costs of metal could be lower than the costs of plastic. That's only until they get off their asses and complete automated capturing of hydrocarbons from Titan.
I think the truth is that would be could be facing a world of incredible abundance, and that useful tool scarcity, will no longer be around to control populations. In fact, I bet that's the reason why it will take as long as it does. Rich people love artificial scarcity and protected markets. There is so much metal in our Solar system, that we could probably give each person on Earth access to unlimited metal for their life times. Imagine recycling and fabrication with metals that cost almost nothing because we brought back millions of tons just in the last quarter.
The actual costs for quite a few things will transition to labor and other complex components that have a ton of labor built into them. Simple structures that could be automatically built could be incredibly cheap.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday July 02 2020, @04:51PM (41 children)
"100 miles or more down in the earth"
"close enough to the surface to be mined"
TFA was not terribly clear to me how deep they really are and the journal article is paywalled...
(Score: 5, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:04PM (27 children)
170-200km seems to be the "sweet spot".
For comparison, the deepest bore on Earth is at 12,262 metres (40,230 ft) [wikipedia.org]
The preprint is available [eartharxiv.org].
And so is the data set [osf.io], if you want to plot the maps yourself. Or just to mirror it, just in case.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Thursday July 02 2020, @06:10PM (25 children)
There's a big difference between 12.2km and 170 - 200km. Also, they were just doing it for science as it were. To do something like make a bore hole 100km down, to search for good places to get X metal. Yeah, that's getting a lot more into science fiction than practical business.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2020, @12:10AM (9 children)
You have no idea. Having experience with bore holes going down just shy of 20k, I can say there is a big difference between a shallow well between 5k and 8k deep and a 35k deep on. I forget which oil company did that, but I heard they achieved a 35k.
The difficulty is that you have to, segment by segment, lower the whole drilling apparatus into the ground. At the tip is the drill bit, and down the inside and outside of the pipe flows the "lubricant" as it were. This is what results in the constant flow of drilling mud to the surface that is analyzed.
The taller your whole stack of pipes is, the greater amount of pressure on the joints, and the tip of the drill bit. That 20k foot well had one of the gnarliest SOBs I'd ever seen. Engineers rambled on about the strength of the tips, etc. Built for extreme pressures, heat, and a high enough hardness to withstand the rocks being drilled into. Those joints are simple threads, but they were impressive in their sizes and strengths as well.
There is a logical limit I'm sure some engineers could calculate.
Ohhhh! LOL
The final one.
Diminishing returns. If it takes you X days per 1 mile of stack to swap a drill bit, and each drill bit handles say 1 mile, how many days to drill 100 miles? We didn't get a 20k ft well drilled in just one day.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday July 03 2020, @12:47AM
But then again, it's a difference between drilling a borehole and sinking a well [ecpgroup.com].
I'm not sure someone tried to sink a well at 170 km depth**, so I can't say we'll know all the problems need to be solved - temperature and level of pressure making rocks behaving like a viscous fluid [stackexchange.com] are already on the list.
** actually, I'm pretty sure nobody tried, otherwise we wouldn't be discussing this.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 03 2020, @12:53PM (7 children)
Notice the key property here, energy transferred over great distances mechanically (such as a 100 km long stack). A lot of these problems go away, if the forces applied are incremental and local. That is, the drill bit isn't experiencing forces from the rest of the kilometers of stack on it because they are supported in some other way (near neutral buoyancy probably). All you really need is a drill (with a short stack) with sufficient greater density than the rock it's drilling into.
Similarly 100 km of fluid dynamics is much harder than 100 1 km stretches of fluid dynamics. There are ways to delink dynamics of a long pipe so you don't have to worry about large scale fluctuations breaking it. Also make sure the internal pressure is near equal to the external pressure.
The other big problem is heat. Rock isn't getting harder at those depths, but softer due to the heat. The problem is that the drill bit (assuming you continue to use a solid drill bit - there are other approaches like drilling with a pressurized fluid) is getting softer as well, also due to the heat. An ability to move massive amounts of heat to the surface would solve that problem because you could cool the bit to traditional working temperatures while not cooling the rock that is being drilled. The drill bit would experience greatly increased life span.
Further, drill bits have well understood lifespans. If it takes a while to transport a drill bit down, then why not transport numerous bits down so that you have a pool of bits to use when the current one fails? It's far quicker to transport a drill bit tens of meters than it is to transport it 100 km.
I think this really is not that hard aside from heat transport and maybe shear due to movement of the crust. A near neutral buoyancy structure (2.7-3 metric tons per cubic meter for crust [joidesresolution.org], somewhat greater for upper mantle, maybe around 3-3.3 [oup.com] metric tons per cubic meter?) is supported by the surrounding rock rather than having to support the mass of the structure. Pumping fluids or moving solid parts around can similarly be done incrementally.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday July 03 2020, @02:07PM (6 children)
> If it takes a while to transport a drill bit down, then why not transport numerous bits down so that you have a pool of bits to use when the current one fails?
Where are you going to put them? The hole is the same size as the drill bit, and to use a new bit you must first remove the old bit. I suppose you could potentially design a "stacked bit" where you could disengage the dull front bit to let the next bit take over - but that next bit is going to have to either drill through the first one, or back up and drill around it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 04 2020, @03:23AM (5 children)
Well, sounds like we have another big challenge then. While it might be possible to assemble a drill bit wider than the hole it came in under the high performance conditions of 100 km down, we can also drill parallel holes and store stuff in them as well as use that for the space needed to swap out drills and such.
All I can say though is that if you're pulling drill bits all the way to the surface to replace them, then you're doing it wrong.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday July 04 2020, @09:23PM (4 children)
>All I can say though is that if you're pulling drill bits all the way to the surface to replace them, then you're doing it wrong.
If you're trying to dig a 100mile borehole, probably not. But if you're drilling, there's not a whole lot of other options - that shaft is transmitting a lot of torque, you'll be lucky if you can use a stack of bits that can break away on demand (rather than breaking away whenever you hit something hard). You're almost certainly not going to be able to park a bunch of replacement bits in a side hole and re-connect to them when needed - not in a semi-liquid environment of packed with mud and shattered stone.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday July 05 2020, @01:51AM (3 children)
Why would it be transmitting any torque at all? The drill bit itself doesn't need to generate net torque. And the force needed to drill can be generated locally (rather than mechanically through a rotating shaft) meaning most of the pipe wouldn't be experiencing any force or torque from the drilling itself. And if you made most of the pipe near zero buoyancy, any segment wouldn't generate much force on the rest of the pipe.
Rather than be an impossible thing, this sounds like a way to implement things. The semi-liquid environment already moves things around. Stack of bits doesn't sound workable, but replacing a drill bit, by pulling back the assembly and replacing it, does sound to me like it would be viable.
My thinking is that in the long run, many decades down the road, one could create huge shafts and complex transportation systems capable of managing multiple drills at the same time at various levels of the system (to widen parts of the system or drill deeper), and vast underground infrastructure to mine these alleged deposits. And all of this could be a natural incremental improvement of technology we could deploy in the near future (well, have to make the stuff first).
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday July 05 2020, @02:48AM (2 children)
Net torque is what lets the bit cut through rock - without it it your hole doesn't get any deeper.
Semi-liquid is fine - pieces of shattered stone are NOT. And inevitable.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday July 05 2020, @03:51AM (1 child)
Torque not net torque is what lets the bit cut rock. You can, for example have two or more drill bits rotating counter to each other so that they are cutting rock, but generating zero net torque in the process.
Because?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday July 05 2020, @01:31PM
Because you're not plugging a connection together with a bunch of gravel in the way.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday July 03 2020, @02:09AM (14 children)
Yup. May as well go for the earth's core, there's a lot of metal in that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2020, @02:22AM (13 children)
It would be truly idiotic to attempt such a thing. If you were successful, you'd doom the planet to extinction. If you fail, huge volcano.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 03 2020, @12:59PM (12 children)
And your point is? I don't see even the slightest need to mine the Earth's core today. But in half a billion to billion years, the Earth is doomed anyway. Might as well make something useful of it when that time comes.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday July 03 2020, @02:19PM (11 children)
>But in half a billion to billion years, the Earth is doomed anyway.
Hardly. It'd be far easier to move the Earth than mine it away - we even have a convenient gravitational tugboat already handy in the moon, we just need to install some engines and we can tow the Earth around to keep it in a nice temperate orbit around the aging sun and eventual expanding red giant. Assuming some sort of reasonably efficient mass conversion we could even install massive lights on the near surface of the moon to simulate the sun and tow the Earth through interstellar space to a new star - or just soar across the galaxy indefinitely, occasionally nabbing a new moon as we pass a star system to keep the system powered.
As interstellar world-ships go, an actual planet is hard to beat, so long as you're not in a hurry to get anywhere.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday July 05 2020, @03:22AM (10 children)
Except by a bunch of smaller world-ships with say, a billion or more times the surface area of Earth.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday July 05 2020, @02:27PM (9 children)
So long as you're okay with all the vulnerabilities of flying in a massive tin can. Not that a planet is completely invulnerable - but it has a very different set of vulnerabilities, and in general is far more robust - especially if you can control the brightness of the "sun" to compensate for environmental fluctuations.
Don't get me wrong - I'd love to see humanity living in clouds of O'Neill cylinders with vast floating microgravity cities down their cores... but artificial habitats just aren't robust enough to allow chaos to run free. And while there are many benefits to a controlled environment, I dearly hope we never lose our appreciation for the power and bounty of nature unchained - and nature can't truly exist in the limited confines of a controlled environment.
It's not like there's any shortage of raw materials floating around to make artificial habitats - including all the other planets we don't decide to terraform. But I strongly hope that the oasis that gave us birth will maintain a certain sentimental value.
If nothing else, if allowed to lie relatively fallow the rich native biodiversity could provide a steady stream of new intelligent species to join us, assuming we're not so xenophobic as to want our own species to be the only intelligent life in our corner of the galaxy. How many million-year epochs do you suppose it takes on average before a new technological civilization arises? Ours is the only one we know of so far (assuming we include all our hominid cousin species), but it's only been a few hundred since the Cambrian Explosion gave birth to a huge diversity of complex life - and there'll be millions more to come before the red dwarves start burning out.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday July 05 2020, @11:37PM (8 children)
Such as massive redundancy?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Monday July 06 2020, @01:06PM (7 children)
Compared to a planet? Not hardly. Not on an individual basis anyway.
It's the difference between spreading your eggs across a multitude of tiny fragile baskets, and putting them all in one heavily armored nigh-indestructible bunker.
If your primary concern is that some of the eggs survive (aka the survival of the species), lots of fragile baskets may be a better bet - though given the scale of astronomical disasters there's an awful lot of things (like a nearby supernova or other such high-energy event) that could easily kill everything in all the baskets, while only killing the facing surface of a planet.
On the other hand, if your primary concern is the survival of a specific handful of eggs (yourself and your family), then putting them in the bunker radically increases their safety.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:36PM (6 children)
Yes, compared to a planet. And how could I be thinking of redundancy on an individual basis?
You don't need the full thickness of a planet to shield against such high energy events. And one of the advantages of lots of slightly more fragile baskets is that you can spread the baskets around. Some baskets might end up near the supernova. Others won't. And if you have enough warning, you can move those smaller craft out of the way quicker than you could move a planet. For example, given 10,000 years warning, you could move a significant distance away, while the planet just has to tough it out.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:36PM (5 children)
>And how could I be thinking of redundancy on an individual basis?
The Earth is massively redundant as an individual system, because every ecological component is massively redundant.
>You don't need the full thickness of a planet to shield against such high energy events.
True, but you need a LOT more material than you would need to shield against normal background radiation in space, and it's extremely unlikely you'd apply that to all those artificial habitats since it's a massive disadvantage in all other circumstances.
>And one of the advantages of lots of slightly more fragile baskets is that you can spread the baskets around. Some baskets might end up near the supernova. Others won't. And if you have enough warning, you can move those smaller craft out of the way quicker than you could move a planet. For example, given 10,000 years warning, you could move a significant distance away, while the planet just has to tough it out.
There's no getting out of the way of a supernova, not within a solar system. Either you're got enough light-years of distance between you, or you don't. And the Earth is no more difficult to move than an equivalent mass of artificial habitats. And you're not going to get a whole lot of warning, since the radiation wave travels at light speed. With enough advancements in stellar physics we might be able to accurately predict the collapse 10,000 years out, but it seems a stretch since all the really interesting changes are hidden beneath thousands of miles of stellar material.
Assuming you do get millenia, or even decades of warning, the habitats could either try to flee, or just pile on a bunch more radiation shielding and hope for the best (probably far more reliable and cost-effective). Meanwhile the Earth will in fact tough it out - killing most life on one side of the planet is rough but easily repopulated within a few decades, especially if there's some human intervention. Assuming most human habitats were self-contained underground vaults (every bit as comfy as a space habitat, with far more radiation and impact shielding) we'd barely even notice except when visiting the parks on the surface.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 07 2020, @11:29PM (4 children)
So if I wipe out all life on Earth, some ecological component(s) will somehow do something to reverse that? I can do massively redundant ecological components with that other stuff too.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday July 08 2020, @01:35PM (3 children)
Obviously not. But things are so massively redundant that you'll find it virtually impossible to wipe out all life on Earth, while wiping out all life in an orbital habitat would be trivial. And there's several common cosmic disasters that could wipe out all life in ALL such habitats in the solar system, unless they were ridiculously overbuilt to defend against such dangers that are unlikely to occur within any given million-year window. Disasters that the Earth *has* been repeatedly subjected to without jeopardizing the long-term survival of the life here.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday July 12 2020, @05:20AM (2 children)
What happens when the orbital habitat is bigger in land area than Earth, better shielded, and easier to move around because it's orders of magnitude lighter? I'm not saying this is the ideal way to do orbital habitats, but you have a lot of options with them and how they're configured that you don't have with a planet.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday July 12 2020, @03:06PM
>What happens when the orbital habitat is bigger in land area than Earth...
Then we've basically already ascended to demigodhood, can easily mine the gas giants, and probably even mine the sun directly for mass that we can transmute into whatever elements we want. So what's the motive for pulverizing Earth?
One thing to keep in mind is that the asteroid belt already has enough material to build enough orbital habitats to support a thousand times the current population - and adding the other rocky planets would increase that by a few thousandfold more.
Using just the asteroids we'll have a thousand times as many Einsteins, Mozarts, etc., and the pace of social and technological change is likely to be so high that the world (and what is possible) will be completely unrecognizable within a single generation.
Meanwhile, if we assume 4 kids per woman to double the population every generation, it's going to take ten or fifteen generations to fill the habitats made from the dead rocky planets, with the number of active geniuses increasing all the time. I feel safe in assuming that we'd have advanced to mining the gas giants before kicking everyone off Earth began looking remotely appealing. And by the time we're done with the gas giants,mining the sun itself will probably be within easy reach. I suspect Earth will be spared by simple virtue of there being enough more attractive stepping stones that we'll blow right past having much industrial use for it
There's a counterpoint as well though that I think may stop us from ever reaching such massive populations in the first place - social changes cause stress, which tends to reduce birth rates. Since larger populations cause faster social change, it seems likely that at some point the stress from the pace of social change will drive population growth below zero and stabilize the population. And frankly, it seems very possible we're approaching that level already.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday July 12 2020, @03:33PM
Oh, and another thought on artificial habitats versus planets: Planets are held together by gravity - created by entropy, while artificial habitats will have to fight entropy constantly, mechanically holding themselves together against the pressure and centrifugal forces they contain. That means you need to constantly inspect and repair them, ideally through some form of integrated nano- or bio-technology, but for the foreseeable future you'd probably have to either overbuild the things enough that every single structural component can be replaced "live", or plan on retiring them periodically before catastrophic failure inevitably occurs. (I'd love to believe the first would be the norm, but we seem to have a real aversion to paying a substantial preium today for something that will benefit our grandkids.)
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday July 03 2020, @09:02AM
Thanks, I searched arxiv, I didn't know about eartharxiv...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by zocalo on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:09PM (12 children)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:20PM (11 children)
And iron and various metals are mined at less than 1km or 2km. Even rich ore veins are not cost effective to mine deeper down than that. The cost of bringing the ore to the surface becomes more prohibitive as the mines go further down. For the most part they'd rather go sideways than down. If mines are running into economic trouble at 2km, they're really not likely to be profitable in most ways at 150km and deeper, at least not with current methods and mining technologies. Those would be too deep to be even remotely profitable to raise to the surface for now.
Asteroids and their mining products, on the other hand, can be rolled downhill if they can ever be reached.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:33PM (10 children)
Well, I guess we just have to develop new technologies, the horror!
And besides the process should be fully mechanized, you turn the machine on, and up comes your cobalt or whatever,, so costs aren't really an issue.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday July 02 2020, @06:17PM (4 children)
Machines break, and there's going to be a lot of breaking when trying to mine something 100km below the ground.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2, Interesting) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 02 2020, @06:27PM
And we can build machine that repair themselves, or they can resurface to be repaired by humans. It's still closer than the asteroid belt.
With mechanization, scarcity is a thing of the past
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Friday July 03 2020, @04:06AM (2 children)
The trouble is the temperature. 1500F is a nontrivial materials science problem. That's the temperature where you forge iron, and it's difficult even for tungsten carbide in a nonreducing environment.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday July 05 2020, @03:24AM (1 child)
Then make it cooler. There's limits to how much heat you could dump on the surface of Earth (generating useful power in the process), but it's pretty high.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday July 08 2020, @01:43PM
Easier said than done. The challenge is not where do you dump the heat - it's how do you move massive amounts of heat tens to hundreds of miles, fast enough to keep the bit from overheating. The scale of the problem is akin to dropping a fine wire into a scalding hot tub, while keeping the water around the wire frozen.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:32PM (4 children)
Costs are ALWAYS an issue. If there are no material costs, then there are time costs. (And I don't really see "no material costs" ever happening.)
Much easier would be greatly improved recycling, and probably even mining the waters of the ocean.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 02 2020, @11:58PM (3 children)
Time doesn't matter to the machine doing the work. It just has to produce as fast as we consume.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Insightful) by shortscreen on Friday July 03 2020, @02:10AM (2 children)
It also needs energy. The premise of TFS was something about building infrastructure for renewable power. If it takes more energy to produce the materials to make the power plant than what the plant itself can produce during its lifetime then it becomes yet another boondoggle.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday July 03 2020, @02:44AM
It also needs energy.
Plenty of that everywhere you look
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday July 05 2020, @03:32AM
There's huge temperature differentials between the surface and 100 km down. The mining part may well pay for itself energy-wise.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:28PM (2 children)
We haven't even gone 10 miles deep yet.The only question left then is whether it's cheaper to dig, or to fly out to the asteroids. Either way it's going to have to be unmanned, so at least life support won't get in the way, but keeping the machinery on the ground makes it accessible for repairs
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by leon_the_cat on Thursday July 02 2020, @06:56PM (1 child)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole [wikipedia.org]
and they had real trouble making that.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 02 2020, @07:29PM
That's because we're still using primitive hand tools. We're still living in a 19th century machine age.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @07:24PM (3 children)
Well, no duh. It's been long known that you have your sedimentary layer, your stone layer, some caverns, more stone, maybe some more caverns, then magma, and finally the underworld (nobody knows if there is anything below that because they haven't survived the demon onslaught to tell). The metal you find really depends upon what sort of biome you started out in, and just damn hope you don't hit an aquifer because they are a real PITA to work with.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Mykl on Friday July 03 2020, @01:09AM (2 children)
I always dig down until I hit Bedrock, then work my way up to 11 units above the bottom level of the map. That way you're one level above the large lava lakes on layer 10, and can mine freely for the good stuff - Diamonds, Redstone, Gold and Emeralds. Try to set up your mines underneath a Mountain biome - that's where you get the best chance of diamonds appearing.
(Score: 2) by hubie on Friday July 03 2020, @01:18PM (1 child)
Do you just keep digging a 1x1 down? What do you do if you hit a cavern? Seal it up and find a way around it and keep going down?
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Sunday July 05 2020, @11:55PM
Caverns are great natural sources of resources, so I'll usually explore those fully. I'll also continue the tunnel down to bedrock.
I usually just dig diagonally down, but sometimes I'll do a vertical shaft (2 x 1). You can dig a few blocks at a time down then swap sides over (that way you're not digging directly below yourself). A ladder on one side helps you get back up. When you reach the bottom of your shaft, place a water block at the bottom - you can jump down the entire shaft safely and land in the water block - very fast travel!
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:27PM (2 children)
My understanding of the metal biz is tangential related to the energy biz that I invest in and I do actually know about.
However. From what I do understand WRT all the people freaking out about the gold reserve being 100 miles down. The way it SEEMS to work for sedimentary metals like gold, is gold comes out of lava or other eroded gold containing rocks thrust to the surface, and washes into the downstream river bed curves naturally which eventually accumulate concentrated nuggets of gold.
We're pretty talented at finding subsurface ancient riverbeds. Trust me, they aren't ALL a mile downriver of gold-containing ancient lava rocks. But, if we somehow knew where deep crust reserves of gold existed, we could predict that "in the recent million years" or WTF gold-enriched lava had squirted out around there or predictably nearby, then we already know there's an ancient riverbed 100 feet below the surface a mile downriver of the gold-lava, so, go dig up those river gravels that are only 100 feet down.
Mind you its a waste of time to dig up ALL the river gravel thats 100 feet down, thats a metric shit ton of almost entirely gold-free gravel. Most of the earth has not been dug up, despite some people's peculiar ideas.
I don't think anyone is ambitious enough to dig 100 miles down, and the river bends naturally concentrate heavy gold to maybe higher concentration than the stuff 100 miles down anyway! So even if you could dig 100 miles down you might get more gold per ton from the river bend a mile downstream and 100 feet below the surface.
At least as I understand geology of metal mining. Oil geology is more interesting. Permeability discussions all day long.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:59PM (1 child)
Looking purely at gold (and silver) contents per ton of material, landfills have higher concentrations than most active gold/silver mines. Makes one wonder when a company is going to start mining landfills.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 06 2020, @06:08PM
Sorry for the late response, but some tailings piles have been reprocessed multiple times as extraction technology has improved, LOL, so its not impossible.
My guess is the oversight of re-disposal of "fresh" trash would be more expensive than digging up new ore. You could throw out cans of paint in the old days but they'd shit a brick at the cost of proper disposal if it was unearthed from a landfill.
I guess one way to make sure leaking landfills don't contaminate the earth would be to dig them up before they leak, regardless of disposal cost.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:56PM
Don't dig too deep!
(Score: -1, Troll) by negrace on Thursday July 02 2020, @09:52PM (1 child)
I thought the community/editors were supposed to filter out garbage like this so that not to waste everybody's time.
Why did I just read this? It is not April 1st.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by janrinok on Friday July 03 2020, @06:32AM
Why is this - in your opinion - garbage? It is a technological challenge that has generated an interesting discussion.
It is not April 1st, and this story is based upon a reputable source, raises interesting questions and is being discussed sensibly with a good balance of humour from time to time. This is the sort of discussion that this site was created for.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @10:11PM
With that much gold, every Black person could be a hip-hop star.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday July 02 2020, @11:47PM
This works in spades for celestial bodies that have a far lower surface gravity than Earth. Mars has a third the gravity of Earth. One could go crudely 35 km down before one sees similar pressures. On the Moon which is a sixth the gravity, it's more like 70 km down. Ceres, the largest asteroid, could be drilled all the way to the 480 km deep center without experiencing such pressures (it has 4% of the Earth's surface gravity and the gravitational force drops roughly linearly with depth reaching zero at the center).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Friday July 03 2020, @03:51AM (6 children)
For reference, the deepest hole we've drilled in Earth is the Kola Superdeep Borehole [wikipedia.org] at a maximum depth of 12.2 kilometers (7.6 miles).
Reaching a depth of 10 miles would require significant R&D to overcome the material science limitations from the heat at that depth. Extending that another order of magnitude is well into "technology indistinguishable from magic" territory.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday July 03 2020, @07:04AM (2 children)
Somebody probably said much the same thing about the first ICE vehicle operating at anything greater than a walking pace, or our early thoughts of manned flight, or landing on the moon. Just look at how silly we now know those suggestions to be - we could never achieve such things.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @04:43AM (1 child)
The point of the expression "technology indistinguishable from magic" isn't a statement on whether or not something is actually possible. Instead, it is a statement of the degree of advancement. For example, the first airplanes are not such technology as you could explain the operation to people 20 years earlier quite easily. A 777X, 330neo, or F-35, would be such a technology because there is so much advancement in just about every way that the same people might be hard pressed to tell reality from you making stuff up. Might as well be magic, from their point of view, as it is probably beyond their ability to comprehend how it works even with study.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday July 05 2020, @11:40PM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday July 05 2020, @03:38AM (2 children)
It would require heat management and transportation. Drill bits, for example, work a lot better when they're cooler and require less exotic material science R&D. So would the 100 km down. You need to change the problem - material science isn't going to get you that far.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Monday July 06 2020, @03:44AM (1 child)
I've been thinking on this for a while and I can't solve the problem with cooling. They already use a coaxial drill shaft with a constant supply of water/drilling mud pumped down the center. The mud is both a cutting fluid and a coolant. The trouble is that with any sane value for the thermal conductivity of the drill string you've saturated the heat capacity of the mud on the way down the hole. If you make the bore larger (to accommodate more coolant flow or an insulated string) you increase the surface area transmitting heat into the bore.
The rock doesn't drill like surface rock either, instead of breaking and flushing the chips away it tears and flows in plastic deformation.
Segway: It is not a trivial problem, and the space-nut in me is giddy to see what solutions they find to go deeper. That tech will very likely be useful for Venus. Cloud colonies can't work unless we can harvest materials from the surface, and we don't have the tech today to do much of anything (except die) at 90 bar and 460C.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 06 2020, @09:30AM
Then make the hole even bigger. The cooling capacity of the hole goes as the square of the radius, the surface area transmitting heat only goes linearly. I'll note also that that the heat needing to be removed goes down significantly after one has cooled the surrounding rock around the hole - neighboring rock becomes insulation.
Sounds like an easier problem actually, IF you can keep the drill bit cool enough to exploit it.