in Delta-V - one character goes on a rant about how Mars is pretty much a dead end. Does anyone know how true this is?
Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'
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Re: Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'
#12in Delta-V - one character goes on a rant about how Mars is pretty much a dead end. Does anyone know how true this is?
I’m not familiar with the contents of the rant but I don’t think anyone can know how well Mars colonization would go.
Re: Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'
#13I couldn't find it on en.wikipedia, but Konstantin (the man) seems to have been a precursor of transhumanists: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantin_Tsiolkovski#Cosmism... .
Re: Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'
#14Not related to the novel, but what is the current biggest technological challenge to asteroid mining?
Re: Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'
#15I enjoyed Delta-V, but Daemon and Freedom IMO were much more entertaining
influx was really good!
Re: Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'
#16Not related to the novel, but what is the current biggest technological challenge to asteroid mining?
Physics followed closely by economics.
Re: Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'
#17I enjoyed Delta-V, but Daemon and Freedom IMO were much more entertaining
Daemon and Freedom are top class hard scifi. The plot hinges on technical detail that is both completely plausible and a natural extension of existing information technology. It's obvious that Suarez really understands what he's talking about in a deep way. I'd say "Daemon" is top twenty for best hard scifi books. http://superkuh.com/hardscifi.txt Delta-v is good scifi and I love this kind of background detail.
I found the books enjoyable, they're good techno thrillers and page turners like the Ramez Naam ones or Crichton's books but I think putting them into the top 20 is a little bit too much. Just taking a look at your list, Butler and Lem and Ted Chiang are on a different level.
Re: Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'
#18Not related to the novel, but what is the current biggest technological challenge to asteroid mining?
In some sense we have done it (taken a sample, returned to earth). The question is, would it be valuable to do so at scale?
If we had a good reason to mine an asteroid, knew we could get to said asteroid, and the asteroid has a composition we predicted. It’s probably possible to mine it to some extent.
However, in terms of economics... today, we haven’t proven we can mine an asteroid in a meaningful way.
Assuming we could, why? It would be cheaper at this point to just send up stuff from earth. If we prove our the mining tech, then it becomes cheaper to replicate, then it becomes more economical. However, first we need a use case that precludes an earth resupply (to force the major investment of tech). I suspect this will happen when we mine some super rare substance that is never found on earth (and/or we are curious about what’s deep inside an asteroid)
Re: Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'
#19in Delta-V - one character goes on a rant about how Mars is pretty much a dead end. Does anyone know how true this is?
I haven't read the book and maybe the argument is solid, but I'm inclined to disagree. For mining, maybe Mars isn't the best place (hoisting stuff out of the gravity well might not be worth it except for high-value metals), but on the other hand it has decent gravity and an atmosphere, which means it's more suitable for human habitation and fuel processing than the asteroids. And living on a planet has a certain appeal that living on a ship doesn't.
In the far future we might have better habitats in the asteroid belt than on Mars, but that's pretty far out. In the medium term, I expect Mars will be an important fuel stop at the least.
I guess there'd be a kind of a self-perpetuating economic force at work: mining would be most lucrative when the products can be consumed near where they're made, and if there's a heavy demand for construction in the asteroid belts then the asteroid belts are where most of the materials will come from. If it's on Mars, then the materials will be gotten on Mars. (That's assuming that material shipment is expensive. On the other hand, if you can mine iron in the belts and then just lob it at Mars with a rail gun and have the Martians drive out in rovers to collect the splatters of molten metal off the surface, then maybe the economics of non-local mining can work out.)
Re: Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'
#20Not related to the novel, but what is the current biggest technological challenge to asteroid mining?
The process chain necessary to turn rock into a single useful metal is colossal, and has been since antiquity.
The effort required to set such a chain up, in space, for not one, but for dozens of metals (modern manufacturing requires many of them), as well as other chemicals (many of whom are inputs into other processes) would be astronomical.
And then you would actually need to do something useful with that metal.
If you're not refining and using what you mined in orbit, and are bringing it back to Earth, it's cheaper to just mine what you're looking for on Earth. We have no shortage of mineral deposits that are considered economically non-viable today - but are still far easier and cheaper to extract than anything in space.