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1/23/2013 3:03:44 AM
8
We'll be mining asteroids by 2015
Apparently.
How do you feel about this? I like the idea of travelling into the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter.
That means, if we use the same technology used for the Curiosity rover to reach Mars, journeys would take a whole year and probably a bit more. It took Curiosity 8.3 months to get to Mars, and the mining spacecraft will have to go there, mine - which could take weeks or months, and then travel back.
Considering Curiosity's journey, that's 16.6 months and a relatively large additional amount of time to do the mining. A whole year and 4 months, plus the mining time. Uh... This will have to be incredibly sophisticated.
What on Earth are they going to get the minerals with? They can't blow the asteroids up can they?
Are they going to grab the asteroids, drill into them or melt them with lasers?
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Well, all this stuff about getting all these resources is gonna cause an economic shitstorm as precious resources like these metals and minerals become more readily available to the world. I could imagine that the plan would change according to the ship they pilot out there. Is it big and tough? We'll grab it and take it home. Can it manuever well and land? We'll cut drill them/laser them and extract the resources directly and return home. However, if they take them home without cutting or drilling, new jobs could be created as industries form around the process of extracting precious resources and refining them. So there's that. And that's assuming the machinery will be sophisticated and advanced enough to do this on its own without human intervention.
