Posted on 05/13/2019 6:31:41 PM PDT by BenLurkin
They can take it from our cold dead hands.
MUGA....Make the Universe Great Again.
It will be challenging to decide which aspects of our star system should be protected from the space mining industry, the researchers wrote in their paper.
Especially since we have no idea what's out there and there is no space mining industry. But never mind, "We should be in charge of all this." Said people who can't pass freshman calculus.
You don’t want to protect the habitat of the spotted moonbat?
Protect the spotted space owl!
These idiots have been staying up late and binge watching “The Expanse”. We’re not quite there, yet guys.
CC
LOL
They should open up bids for garbage service.
Regarding “mining” the water from Saturn's rings.
The rings lose water to Saturn all the time naturally - like rain. At the rate of 4,400 pounds per second. At that rate it will be gone in 300 million years anyway.
What I suggest is put a big catch basin below the rings. England has an average water usage of about 55 gallons a day per person. (Baths, washing, etc. - the USA is double that). But we can get by on 55 if we have to I bet.
So by catching the rain from Saturn, that would provide enough water for about 85,000 people. Of course it isn't like we would ship it back to earth, it would be for people living in space (and near Saturn). By that time I'm guess we could figure out good recycling of grey water (already do?) - so maybe a person could get by on 5.5 gallons of water a day for drinking, cooking, etc. So that would support 850,000 people! (I think the actual number of necessary drinking water is more like 1 gallon of day, so I'm being generous.)
“...of cosmic debris.”
Some might call it mining. I would call it cleaning up the environment.
Thanks fieldmarshaldj. Daffy idea because there are no hard borders, only objects always in motion -- although if it is going to be done (and everyone's going to abide by it) then the "space wilderness" should be merely designated objects of no economic value AND of scientific value.
The Martian Way, full text:
https://archive.org/stream/TheMartianWay/MartianWayByIsaacAsimov1950s_djvu.txt
I rooted for the miners in Avatar.
I think you are wrong. Find an asteroid a cpl of million tons made mostly of water ice. Land a small reactor on it. Reactor heat to melt some water and turn to steam as propulsion into an orbit around the moon and we are off to colonizing space. Water is very good radiation shielding and would make a very good building material, believe it or not.
Idiots
Same here. Told my boss at the time that I was rooting for the humans.
She looked at me like I’d just bitten the head off a kitten.
Yes, let’s not have some other kind of entrepreneur, industrial revolution, human advancement should be contained and restrained - by bureaucrats. /sarc
What do you do with the reactor when you have used up the water?
Who is going to operate and maintain the reactor? What happens if the reactor has an accident?
Nice idea but the devil is in the details.
Q) What do you do with the reactor when you have used up the water?
A) It is in space. Doesn’t really matter much but toss it into the sun if it bothers you and it is out of fuel or send it back out for another asteroid. Not a complicated setup: see: Direct Energy Conversion in Fusion Reactors, by Ralph W. Moir, Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, Livermore, CA
Q) Who is going to operate and maintain the reactor?
Robots. The RF round trip when it is way out there is too long for remote controls.
Q) What happens if the reactor has an accident?
A) Not much. It is in space. Not near space. Way way out there. Heck even if it went supercritical where k > 1 as in kaboom it would be a little flash in the sky. The scary thing would be if the asteroid hit the earth hence going for a lunar orbit. Not a big deal if we accidentally hit the moon.
We haven’t quite got a working fusion reactor yet. One that is autonomous that we can put is space I think is a few decades off.
If we are talking about fission reactors (all that is available today) we are talking about an expensive piece of hardware and if you include autonomous robot reactor, we’re talking big money.
The difficult thing about fission reactors is that after a fairly short time at power the reactor will continue to produce a prodigious amount of heat even when shutdown.
If that heat can not be removed from the reactor core the core will destroy itself.
The robot reactor you’re talking about sounds like a multi-billion dollar machine. I don’t think we want that bit of tech out there on its own with no one to take care of it.
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