The Emptiness of the Deep Beyond

[AlexanderHowl]

Once again, who would enforce the quota? Neither China, the EU, or the US would recognize the authority of such a cartel, and they have plenty of weapons to go around to torch any cartel that attempted to harass their citizens. Of course, it is the Belt, so someone might be stupid enough to try such a scheme, but its lifespan would be measured in years.

At best, you might have them agree to divide 16 Psyche into quadrants, one for each of the big three and one divided among the other nations, with each quadrant operating under the rules of the supervising government. While this would be a tense arrangement, it would be better than war, and it would provide everyone the precious metals that they needed for their TL9+ technology. Within each quadrant, I imagine that the competition would be ruthless, though the supervising governments would probably keep things from becoming violent.

In that case, the governing struture would likely be something like a Psyche Council. Each quadrant vould have three voting members and regulations could require a supermajority of eight votes to be approved. Each quadrant would nominate one of their voting members for rotating officer positions every four years, with the offices being President, Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer. A rotation would be Treasurer > Secretary > Vice President > President > Treasurer.

I imagine that the quadrants would lease stakes to mining operations in exchange for 20% of their production. 4/5th of the lease revenues would go taken as profits for the supervising nations while 1/5th would be used for Psyche Council operations. Since the miners would generate $800 billion/year, the Psyche Council would have a budget of $32 billion per year.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Computers are vulnerable through a number of methods because they generally require external stimuli. If you know how a computer transforms frequencies of light into digital information, you can write commands in light that activate within the computer as soon as the frequencies are translated into digital information.

That's Magical Hacking. It's about as practical as mind controlling humans with patterns of light (which, given THS tech, may not be impossible, but probably isn't very practical). Human-resolution vision doesn't even have enough bandwidth to do what you need to do.

[AlexanderHowl]

Originally Posted by Anthony

That's Magical Hacking. It's about as practical as mind controlling humans with patterns of light (which, given THS tech, may not be impossible, but probably isn't very practical). Human-resolution vision doesn't even have enough bandwidth to do what you need to do.

No, you can hack self-driving cars and other computerized technology through using visual ques right now, and they are just crude exploits that take advantage of how a computer interprets visual data. For example, you can 'conceal' the word 'stop' on a stop sign through drawing several small lines through the individual letters. Humans will not even notice the breaks because humans look for familiar patterns, shapes, and colors, so the stop sign will always read as a stop sign to a human being. Computers will notice the breaks though, and will interpret each break as a separation between letters, meaning that they will ignore the stop sign.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Once again, who would enforce the quota? Neither China, the EU, or the US would recognize the authority of such a cartel,

Looks to me like all of the above are going to be recognizing the authority of such a cartel in exchange for a cut of the profits.

It is going to be a cartel too. Nobody is goign to let mining go on until Adam Smith's invisible hand lowers the return on mining until it isn't worth doing any more. Governments cal that "economic disruption" and generally try and prevent it.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

No, you can hack self-driving cars and other computerized technology through using visual ques right now, and they are just crude exploits that take advantage of how a computer interprets visual data.

That's not hacking; no code injection is occurring. Rather, it's just exploiting low skill. There are exploits for low skill that work against human vision too, they're just different.

[AlexanderHowl]

Anyway, the point still stands that 16 Psyche is strangely unexploited and unpopulated in a setting where people are exploiting and populating the Oort Cloud. A small company with a SM+7 mining ship could easily land on 16 Psyche and earn more than the entire cost of the mining ship after a year of operations, meaning that they could be making money hand-over-fist after the first year. You might have reasons for international companies to avoid 16 Psyche, perhaps international agreements forbid mining due to unresolved questions that could potentially lead to war, but I do not see why the Duncanites would avoid mining 16 Psyche.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Anyway, the point still stands that 16 Psyche is strangely unexploited and unpopulated .

Someone working with the latest information might find that an in-setting explanation is needed but on a meta level it's simple to explain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_Psyche

Look at the dates in the Wikipedia article. Even the first mass estimate that would make 16 Psyche high density and therefore interesting is post-writing of TS (which was befoe its' copyright date of 2002). David woudn't have known anything interesting about 16 Psyche at the time.

[AlexanderHowl]

16 Psyche has been known as a M-type for a while, I remember reading about its classification back in the early-1990s, so it has been known to be metal rich for a while. I think the primary issue was probably that previous science fiction authors did not pay much attention to it, so neither did the authors of Transhuman Space.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Anyway, the point still stands that 16 Psyche is strangely unexploited and unpopulated in a setting where people are exploiting and populating the Oort Cloud. A small company with a SM+7 mining ship could easily land on 16 Psyche and earn more than the entire cost of the mining ship after a year of operations, meaning that they could be making money hand-over-fist after the first year.

That just indicates problems with the way the mining modules are designed, because the above statement is true for any M-class asteroid.

[AlexanderHowl]

M-type asteroids are phenomenally rich in previous metals, up to hundreds of times as much as the surface of the Earth, so any mining enterprise should produce a lot of precious metals. After all, they are the likely source of all of the precious metals on the surface of the Earth, as the original deposits would have been subducted into the mantle billions of years ago. Any story about asteroid mining should either take place on a M-type asteroid or be about supplying such operations with supplies and/or volatiles from a C-class asteroid.

The mining equipment in Spaceships is probably based off the mining equipment that we have today, so its production is probably not unrealistic. For example, a SM+10 mining module masses 500 tons and processes 50 tons of ore per hour, which is actually quite modest compared to a lot of mining operations today. At that point, you just have to weigh the pros and cons of having humans directly involved in the operations of the mining facility.

What is unrealistic though it that anyone who turn a M-type asteroid into a Cole habitat, as a M-type asteroid a cubic kilometer in volume should have an average of half a million metric tons of precious metals. At the probable value of precious metals in the future, that is probably a couple trillion worth of precious metals, so it would make a heck of a lot more sense to process the ore to extract the precious metals and then to construct a habitat from the leftover industrial metals, silicon, and slag. If you do not do that, you could end up with criminals attempting to steal your habitat so they can extract the precious metals from its shell.