Billionaires funding "Space Mining" program

[II DALTON II]

It's like something out of a Sci-Fi movie lol.

Link

Possible though? Or have some people jsut lost the plot?

[SonofYAHWEH]

If I was a multi billionaire...I would give it a thought, does not seem to practical though.

[kramerprammer]

Interesting. It could of course be a load of rubbish which i suspect it is but there is a couple of things you could think about.

1 - There is conspiracy of teleporters from Earth-Mars. If there is any fact to this then they could already be mining mars for its resources.

2 - If they discover a new element on a different planet or some other celestial body then it might be worth the billions of dollars to travel there and bring back a few chunks

3 - If we have hidden technology not yet released to the public, like black project stuff, ufos and such, then we might be able to travel to planets like Mars in a matter of minutes - hours making it profitable to mine its resources.

Of course its all possible depending on what science we have secretly discovered however I get the feeling that certain people are bored and are feeling the need to start a new conspiracy theory.

[SilverTemplePilot]

This may be the only new source to harvest gold and silver in the future.

[kshymkiw]

(04-24-2012 09:28 AM)II DALTON II Wrote:  It's like something out of a Sci-Fi movie lol.

Link

Possible though? Or have some people jsut lost the plot?

This is a very real possibility. Asteroids are made of heavy dense mineral deposits. It isn't hard to think that we will one day be mining the Asteroids in our solar system for minerals, when we have depleted all the resources available to us on our own Planet.

That being said, there are plenty of interesting thoughts about how to use the resources available to us within the solar system. For example, IO, could be used as a Power Plant, to power some of these operations. IO has an electrical tie to Jupiter. When a Volcano erupts on IO it also throws a LARGE Electrical discharge.

Imagine if we could find some way to harness that.

[Dom2012]

If i were a billionaire i wouldn't give a shit about getting any richer!!! ....its never fails to amaze me the greed of humans .....

[Dom2012]

and this video instantly springs to mind !!!!!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zyc12-neTjM

[kshymkiw]

(04-24-2012 10:54 AM)kramerprammer Wrote:  Interesting. It could of course be a load of rubbish which i suspect it is but there is a couple of things you could think about.

I doubt it is. There is a distinct need for this kind of development. Asteroids hold the key to almost all metals on our planet. Why not mine them?

(04-24-2012 10:54 AM)kramerprammer Wrote:  1 - There is conspiracy of teleporters from Earth-Mars. If there is any fact to this then they could already be mining mars for its resources.

This is more rubbish than the thought of mining Asteroids.

(04-24-2012 10:54 AM)kramerprammer Wrote:  2 - If they discover a new element on a different planet or some other celestial body then it might be worth the billions of dollars to travel there and bring back a few chunks

That is very possible, but highly unlikely. We have been hit by enough Asteroids to know what is inside of them. It would take a truly unique find, to have a situation like this.

(04-24-2012 10:54 AM)kramerprammer Wrote:  3 - If we have hidden technology not yet released to the public, like black project stuff, ufos and such, then we might be able to travel to planets like Mars in a matter of minutes - hours making it profitable to mine its resources.

We have tons of Black Projects, some that never make it to any stage of success. Ion Propulsion has been around since the 1950's. For what you the consumer see's now, our technology is 20-30 years ahead of that in the Millitary Sector. I doubt you will see "minutes" travel to Mars, unless of course your starting point is outside of any gravitational force here on Earth. Light takes 8 minutes to reach Earth from the Sun, and almost 13 minutes to reach Mars from the Sun. Since we can't travel anywhere close to the speed of light today, the probability of travel every taking minutes from Mars to Earth is very slim. Voyager 1 is traveling at 17km/s

(04-24-2012 10:54 AM)kramerprammer Wrote:  Of course its all possible depending on what science we have secretly discovered however I get the feeling that certain people are bored and are feeling the need to start a new conspiracy theory.

The science for this is probably closer than you think.

[Mojofabulous]

If it's highly profitable, it will be done. It is as simple as that.

[nosirrahx]

I hope like hell that we do mine silver in space. Can you imagine how hard up we would need to be before this was a good idea? Silver would have to be monstrously more expensive than it is now before the cost of space mining could be justified.

It would be interesting to calculate how much silver would need to sell for to justify a mission that brings back 1 million oz. I would be willing to bet that even at $1000 an oz they would be in the red.

[Viper_99]

I read an article somewhere that indicated the ocean floor had vast amounts of gold, it was just too costly to retrieve. The article was trying to suggest that there is so much gold on the planet that it could never be a monetary standard...I found a fact and a website after a little search. "If all the gold suspended in the world's seawater were mined, each person on Earth could have about 9 pounds of gold." http://www.savethesea.org/STS%20ocean_facts.htm Who needs space? 16 oz in a pound and how many people on this planet?

[Bill Spencer]

This thought only demonstrates some higher level of desperation to acquire such elements. To me it is clear that Earth has been exploited so far that new sources must be tapped to fulfill future demand for such materials. With declining ore richness and increasing mining depth it be outrageously expensive to continue mining as has been in the past. Eventually there will be a point reached where one has to move 100 T of dirt to get one OZ of material out of it. I leave it to be imagined to what the expense is to do that at lets say 2000ft below the surface....
If this exceeds the expense of such space mining, then yes, perhaps it becomes feasible to do that. But risks and expenses are literally astronomical...

Just my 2 cent worth

[jalidi]

With current technology cost of a return robotic mining mission has been estimated at a cost of a billion dollars per two ounces. So they'd have to import literally millions of ounces before they went profitable which would have untold consequences for the price of silver on earth... thinking back to the collapse of the value with the introduction of silver from the New World. But they wouldn't just mine silver alone, some asteroids have billions of dollars worth of platnium, gold, lead, titanium, nickel-iron---one asteroid all by itself (16 Psyche) has enough nickel-iron in it to match world production for a million years.