[rpm4321]

I agree with most of your comments, with the exception of your concerns about continued material scarcity and human longevity.

Regarding material scarcity, I think space mining becomes a lot more economically viable once you have not only extraordinarily cheap energy, but also super light, super strong materials. Ralph Merkle talks about a diamondoid space shuttle (composed of perfectly arranged carbon atoms) weighing a few hundred pounds and getting to orbit with only a hundred dollars worth of fuel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdKyf8fsH6w

Also, people have been talking about space elevators forever, once we crack economically viable carbon nanotube production, reducing the cost to orbit by something like 99%.

Most importantly, when people talk about molecular manufacturing and molecular assemblers, they never seem to see the other side of the coin - molecular disassemblers - essentially "just in time" goods. When you can assemble and disassemble atoms at will, you essentially have programmable matter, and therefore you can do much more with less material.

As I mentioned below, you could also make the case that highly realistic VR systems would drastically reduce our demand for materials. After all, who needs to buy an actual Porsche when they can just close their eyes and have an experience much better than the real thing.

Regarding longevity, it seems to me that this is a cognitive bias because of the audacity of the idea, similar to the widespread skepticism towards human flight a hundred years ago. The idea is just so outlandish, and goes against thousands of years of philosophical and theological thought on accepting the inevitability of death, that people (myself included) instinctively recoil from it.

Assuming a 500 year time span - or even a 100 year one - and assuming that humans have developed the capability to manipulate matter at will, can scan and monitor the human body at extraordinarily high fidelity, model and simulate the body in great detail, and can experiment and iterate on those experiments at light speed with the aid of AI and neural interfaces - the death of death seems inevitable.

[Retric]

The problem with space mining when you look a the periodic table there is just not a lot of useful and rare elements. And all space mining is just extracting those elements so you need to have a gap that's worth the effort to go and collect even after LEO. When it comes to space mining think: Diamonds are carbon which is cheap. Even gold mostly just sits around, there is little point in increasing supply when so little of it is used. So yea, you might go and collect a few asteroids for some platinum etc but crossing the 1/10,000th of word GDP takes more than just a few useful elements.

PS: Outside of Fission or Fusion nothing ever actually runs out. Worst case, start mining dumps and river beds etc.

[rpm4321]

We are talking about a five hundred year time line. As I mentioned in my post, there will be massive reductions in the cost to orbit and back. Hell, we are already witnessing the very beginnings of this phenomenon with SpaceX.

Certainly in five hundred years time, and possibly just in a few decades, it will make about as much economic sense to import rare materials from orbit as it now does to import them from China.

Also, I'm making this argument primarily to counter concerns of material scarcity brought up by cletus. As I stated above, with this time span, I think we will likely have developed molecular assemblers and disassemblers, leading to essentially programmable matter and perfect recycling, which would lessen our need for materials.

You could also make the case that super realistic VR systems would drastically reduce our demand for materials. After all, who needs to buy an actual Porsche when they can just close their eyes and have an experience much better than the real thing.

[Retric]

There are two ways to look at this the way we do things now or the actual limits. For ideas based on now see: http://money.howstuffworks.com/question213.htm

For limits see some quick math, you can probably mine down about 20 miles without getting to fancy in 2512 esp relative to a space elevator. Texas is 20 miles * 268,800 sq miles = 10^16 cubic meters. Platinum has an average rarity ~5 millionth of a gram per kg. aka 5 parts per billion which works out to ~10,000,000 cubic meters in the top 20 miles of Texas granted your playing with density's etc but 10,000,000 tons is reasonable estimate compared to around ~100 tons mined each year. Now we might be better off mining asteroids than Texas, don't assuming we need to leave the planet any time soon.

PS: It may be a mainstay of sci-fi, but there is little actual evidence that asteroids are going to have particularly high levels of any of the really rare stuff. (other than H3)

[schiffern]

>PS: It may be a mainstay of sci-fi, but there is little actual evidence that asteroids are going to have particularly high levels of any of the really rare stuff. (other than H3)

Untrue. Iridium is the rarest element in the Earth's crust. The majority of the known deposites come from asteroids.

It's not just Iridium, either. Compare these two charts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elemental_abundances.svg and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SolarSystemAbundances.png

Why are they so different? Basically all the heavy and iron-loving stuff sank.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_catastrophe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_differentiation

[kens]

I was puzzled by this, since obviously there are elements that are more rare than iridium, so I checked the original data source. They eliminate most radioactive elements which kind of makes sense. I was a bit surprised to learn that polonium and radium are less common in the crust than iridium. They also eliminate noble gases from the list, of which krypton, xenon, and radon turn out to be rarer in the crust than iridium. Also a couple sources have rhenium rarer than iridium.

(I'm not trying to be pedantic and start an argument, but just fill in some information in case anyone else wondered about this data.)

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundances_of_the_elements_(dat... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earths...

[rpm4321]

It seems like we are having two different arguments. My main point here has been that material scarcity will likely be a non-factor in the future. You seem to be in agreement with that point, but seem dead set against the practicality of space mining.

Throughout my comments I've maintained that molecular assemblers/disassemblers (and possibly VR) should drastically lessen the amount of materials we consume. I'm simply saying that if we do run into scarcity issues, worst case, space mining should be many, many orders of magnitude cheaper within this time span.

Right now the US goes to the expense of floating rare earth elements on freighters from halfway across the globe, simply because we don't want to deal with the pollution, real property rights, safety issues, regulatory issues, and eyesores resulting from US mining operations. With the expected reductions in cost to achieve orbit, in 2112 the asteroid belt could very easily be the new China.

Now you could argue that the same breakthroughs that allow cheaper space mining would allow us to cleanly and efficiently extract resources in greater number from the earth - "molecular mining", if you will. That may be the case, but it's really impossible to predict to that degree of specificity at this point in time. We're probably arguing over what in the future would be the equivalent of going to the Walmart down the block or the Target across town to get a package of batteries. It probably doesn't matter.

Besides, the amount of materials we need really depends on how ambitious humanity wants to get:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain