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Old 11-18-2020, 09:08 PM   #11
AlexanderHowl
 
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Default Re: Asteroids vs Planetary Mines

Mining the Earth core would probably result in an extinction level event. The core rotates faster than the surface, so you could need to slow the core to have a stable mining structure. Doing so would weaken the Earth's magnetic field, eventually dooming all life on Earth.
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Old 11-18-2020, 09:32 PM   #12
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Default Re: Asteroids vs Planetary Mines

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Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl View Post
Mining the Earth core would probably result in an extinction level event. The core rotates faster than the surface, so you could need to slow the core to have a stable mining structure. Doing so would weaken the Earth's magnetic field, eventually dooming all life on Earth.
If you've got the tech to mine the core in the first place, you almost certainly have the tech to replace the magnetic field.
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Old 11-18-2020, 09:41 PM   #13
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Default Re: Asteroids vs Planetary Mines

Something often forgotten in these anslyses is the human factor. Even at TL10, living on a planet is much nicer than living in space. And mining is a process that, barring an aggressive AI track, requires a bunch of humans. Personal costs could easily be 100x as high for an asteroid mine. The company has to pay workers for the inconvenience and provide facilities. Planetside, it's just labor.

Then there's environmental regulations. In one of Peter F Hamilton's books, he had "industrial planets" where mines and factories polluted with little oversight and everyone needed masks just to go outside. These fed the needs of more "clean" planets where very tight environmental regulations ruled. In this universe, interstellar transport was fast and easy, but any robust trade scheme could support that dichotomy. And human nature certainly does.
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Old 11-18-2020, 09:50 PM   #14
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Default Re: Asteroids vs Planetary Mines

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Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl View Post
Mining the Earth core would probably result in an extinction level event. The core rotates faster than the surface, so you could need to slow the core to have a stable mining structure. Doing so would weaken the Earth's magnetic field, eventually dooming all life on Earth.
The sun turning into a red giant and boiling the oceans away would happen well before lack of a magnetic field was an issue (and dealing with the sun is surprisingly simple, we have the tech today, just not the numbers or economy). It takes a few billion years for it to cause significant damage, which is an issue for planets because intelligent life that can deal with that problem takes even more billions of years to develop.
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Old 11-18-2020, 10:36 PM   #15
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Default Re: Asteroids vs Planetary Mines

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Then there's environmental regulations. In one of Peter F Hamilton's books, he had "industrial planets" where mines and factories polluted with little oversight and everyone needed masks just to go outside. These fed the needs of more "clean" planets where very tight environmental regulations ruled. In this universe, interstellar transport was fast and easy, but any robust trade scheme could support that dichotomy. And human nature certainly does.
I'd say that requires rather cheap space transport and toxic environment survival technology, and very expensive clean production technology. Or a very inefficiently organized economy most likely based on blatantly abusing the industrial world populations.

I mean, you were talking about how living on a planet is nicer than living in space, but living on a toxified death world is at best not very much nicer than living in space.
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Old 11-18-2020, 10:54 PM   #16
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Default Re: Asteroids vs Planetary Mines

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The sun turning into a red giant and boiling the oceans away would happen well before lack of a magnetic field was an issue.
Lack of a magnetic field would be a problem fairly fast (solar wind strips ozone layer, solar UV cooks surface life) though solutions are lower tech than core mining.
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Old 11-18-2020, 10:56 PM   #17
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Default Re: Asteroids vs Planetary Mines

And it is likely much less pleasant to live on a toxic world than on a space station. We have the technology right now to mine asteroids (getting to the Main Belt would be a bit of a challenge, but it is not impossible), and we could do it for relatively cheap right now if we actually wanted to invest in the economies of scale. If the USA, or the EU, or even China was really interested, we could have operational and economically viable mines on 16 Psyche right now, but they decided that staring at their navels was better than stepping up.

I guess the question becomes more about optics and politics than about economics. Governments will likely support planetary mines because they employ planetary populations and governments get elected by happy planetary populations. If a corporation started making money hand-over-fist, they would have to buy off politicians fast because the owners of planetary mines would want them shut down, especially since the salaries associated with off world mining would draw away their best workers and the production from off world mines would crash their markets.
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Old 11-19-2020, 05:12 AM   #18
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Default Re: Asteroids vs Planetary Mines

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The World Gold Council defines "high grade" ore as 8+ g/t (ppm), while "low grade" ore is 1-4 g/t.
How is the "t" defined here? Is that per ton of extract?

If so, what happens when we get TL10 hi-res ore maps which show the mining drones where to go more precisely and hence cut down on the amount of waste material extracted?

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Originally Posted by khorboth View Post
Something often forgotten in these anslyses is the human factor.
Likewise, the political factor has been ignored so far.

If we have an Expanse-like setting, we have the OPA in control of the asteroids, and they may be unwilling to sell minerals to Earth or Mars. The Inners would then have to resort to planetary mining.

And then... (spoilers for season 4):
Spoiler:  
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Old 11-19-2020, 06:04 AM   #19
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Default Re: Asteroids vs Planetary Mines

The discussion was started talking specifically about an underground planetary mine, rather than open pit mining. With modern technology, underground mining becomes less necessary. Digging complex holes that present a safety hazard chasing the richest ore isn't as much of a winning strategy anymore. The number I see most often is that 85% of all modern mines are open pit. So the classic deep mine is already facing some strong pressure from the same boring techniques that asteroid mining would use. (shovel it in a refine it)

We mine a lot of different things. Heavy metals are probably the thing asteroids are best at providing. How do asteroids do at the following:
  • Salt. Not generic salts, but Sodium Cloride. its been mined for centuries, and I don't think it forms in massive layers on asteroids like it does on earth.
  • Phosphates. We mine huge amounts of phosphates every year
  • Calcium Carbonate. Otherwise known as limestone and the primary ingredient of concrete. I'm fairly sure calcium is fairly abundant in asteroids, but I don't know that calcium carbonate is, and I don't know how much extra work is needed to transform it into the most common TL8 building material.
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Old 11-19-2020, 06:42 AM   #20
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Default Re: Asteroids vs Planetary Mines

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Originally Posted by Daigoro View Post
How is the "t" defined here?
Grams per metric ton of ore. Which also happens to be parts per million by weight.

Quote:
If so, what happens when we get TL10 hi-res ore maps which show the mining drones where to go more precisely and hence cut down on the amount of waste material extracted?
Depends on what assumptions you want to make about the tech, I suppose. The Star Trek transporter locks onto the individual gold atoms and beams them individually into the proper place in a replicated necklace, say, so 100% yield -- if you only count transported atoms, but not all the atoms you had to scan or that are within range of your transporter beam, that is. Or maybe the transporter beam has a limited resolution (they're always talking about tweaking an annular confinement beam, after all) so you have to beam some other minerals along with your gold and process them, for less than 100% yield, depending on how much known gold you're willing to leave behind to avoid bringing back any rock at all.

For most tech, the total volume is still going to matter to some degree. The nanite crawlers still have to make it along the pure gold vein and back, so how long and thin it is through all the rock you're ignoring still matters -- time and energy to make repeated trips down the nano-tunnel. Even if you map the vein precisely, perhaps it's easier simply to vaporize an 2m wide circular tunnel with your mining laser, so people and your laser can get deeper in, and just shove all the plasma through your industrial scale mass spectrograph while you're at it so you don't have to re-smelt it later.
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