Author Topic: Resource depletion as argument for space travel  (Read 16266 times)

Offline NUAETIUS

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Resource depletion as argument for space travel
« on: 04/25/2009 05:23 pm »
I have always hated the space mining argument as a linchpin of manned space travel, but this article in New Scientist is about the most disturbing thing I have seen in a while.

50 years worth of Platinum in the world if all cars where fuel cells?
10 years till we run out of indium? (Semiconductor material)
15 years till we run out of silver?
10 years till we run out of antimony? (Flame retardant)

Earth's natural wealth: an audit





Only 9-29 years left of Silver?  I would call this fiction but New Scientist is a respectable publication, not exactly Pop Sci.

This argument says that these are the years when these elements would run out if recycling is not drastically increased, but my fear is that even with recycling we will run out in less than a hundred years. 

If they are using US geological survey information how could they be off drastically?  If these numbers are accurate why is this not treated as an equal or greater threat to us than global warming? 

Even the most disastrous predictions associated with climate change don't have complete industrial bases collapsing in less than a generation...  Here's my question.

Are these numbers accurate?
If so why would these numbers get less airtime than Peak Oil, and Climate Change?
If accurate do these numbers help justify space exploration as a long term investment in resource availability?
« Last Edit: 04/25/2009 05:25 pm by NUAETIUS »
“It has long been recognized that the formation of a committee is a powerful technique for avoiding responsibility, deferring difficult decisions and averting blame….while at the same time maintaining a semblance of action.” Augustine's Law - Norm Augustine

Offline Jorge

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Re: Resource depletion as argument for space travel
« Reply #1 on: 04/25/2009 06:01 pm »
I have always hated the space mining argument as a linchpin of manned space travel, but this article in New Scientist is about the most disturbing thing I have seen in a while.

Space mining is economically nonviable right now because there is nothing that could be mined from space that is worth the cost of extracting and returning it.

Quote
50 years worth of Platinum in the world if all cars where fuel cells?
10 years till we run out of indium? (Semiconductor material)
15 years till we run out of silver?
10 years till we run out of antimony? (Flame retardant)

Earth's natural wealth: an audit





Only 9-29 years left of Silver?  I would call this fiction but New Scientist is a respectable publication, not exactly Pop Sci.

Respectable on science, ignorant on economics.

I don't see anything in that article saying their analysis included the effects of supply on price, nor the effects of price on demand. It is reasonable to assume they did not account for these effects, especially since they admit the calculations were crude.

As supply becomes scarcer, price increases, which depresses demand. As supply tends toward zero, price tends toward infinity and demand toward zero. Depletion is avoided because demand reaches zero before supply.

But even that's a simplification. When the price of a commodity rises beyond a certain point, it becomes economically feasible to develop alternatives. The article points out there's no substitute for platinum, but that ignores wider ranging alternatives: if platinum based fuel cells are too expensive, the market will adopt fuel cells based on something other than platinum. And if that is not feasible, the market will abandon fuel cells altogether for something more economical.

But if there *really is* no substitute for platinum, that strengthens the argument for space mining: as the price of platinum increases, eventually it will become economically viable to extract it from off-Earth sources.
JRF

Offline William Barton

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Re: Resource depletion as argument for space travel
« Reply #2 on: 04/25/2009 06:09 pm »
I agree with Jorge. If this thesis works for platinum, then it will work for anything. For example, thanks to Casini-Huygens, we now know there are enormous supplies of pertroleum-equivalent off-earth, basically oceans of "gasoline" on Titan. But long before the price of oil goes high enough it's viable to import it from Titan, we'll move on to something else. The underlying concept of the thesis is, mineral comodities can be driven by scarcity in the face of constant demand to become Unobtanium. There's no evidence that's true. The only practical use for in-space resources is... in space.
« Last Edit: 04/25/2009 06:10 pm by William Barton »

Offline Patchouli

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Re: Resource depletion as argument for space travel
« Reply #3 on: 04/25/2009 06:52 pm »

But if there *really is* no substitute for platinum, that strengthens the argument for space mining: as the price of platinum increases, eventually it will become economically viable to extract it from off-Earth sources.

One problem can civilization as we know it operate without a supply of PGMs?

They're required for stuff like catalytic converters and semi conductors.

Though if the supply does get low and space is the only source for more without trashing the environment ie strip mining the ocean floor then I'd expect to see money get dumped into making launch costs lower.

It may be unpractical today to mine an asteroids but with a few advances in robotics and a reduction in launch cost by 10x it may even become cost effective even against present PGM mining techniques.

Getting it back could be pretty cheap if a mass driver were constructed at the site of the mine.
You wouldn't be getting back your mineral prize with a system like Constellation or even ROMBUS.
Though I see no reason why even Constellation can't test the mining techniques.
Instead a system of mass drivers could be placed on the moon or NEO which would throw reusable or even expendable cargo canisters into LLO or even all the way to earth.
The cargo canister may not even need parachutes it just needs to keep the platinum or other material from vaporizing during reentry.
Just let it crash into the ground out in the desert like genesis did.
Also keep in mind 1Kg of platinum costs about $37,800 USD while a Kg of payload on F9 or Jupiter 246 is less then $2200 and EELV is maybe only 2 or 3x or so higher then that.
Space mining of the material could become cost effective as soon as processing equipment can be sent to the source.
High enough flights would probably cost cost by half on all vehicles.
Even refining the raw ore to just 10% PMGs may make it cost effective to return.
As for the hydrocarbons on Titian it'll never be cost effective to use those on Earth or even near Earth.
On Earth biosources would be cheaper and in space C-type asteroids would be much lower delta V destinations.
Once you have the technology for a propulsion system that can travel to Saturn and back you probably won't need hydrocarbons for energy any more.
This includes old school solutions like project Orion as you could just burn the fission fuel in a reactor and get far more energy then the 10,000 tons of hydrocarbons the ship could bring back.
Or use the Orion to orbit SPS satellites.

« Last Edit: 04/25/2009 07:41 pm by Patchouli »

Offline mlorrey

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Re: Resource depletion as argument for space travel
« Reply #4 on: 04/25/2009 08:33 pm »
I agree with Jorge. If this thesis works for platinum, then it will work for anything. For example, thanks to Casini-Huygens, we now know there are enormous supplies of pertroleum-equivalent off-earth, basically oceans of "gasoline" on Titan. But long before the price of oil goes high enough it's viable to import it from Titan, we'll move on to something else. The underlying concept of the thesis is, mineral comodities can be driven by scarcity in the face of constant demand to become Unobtanium. There's no evidence that's true. The only practical use for in-space resources is... in space.

The number one resource in space IS space. Human overpopulation will continue to peak until 2040 and then slowly drop after that. All the people trying to use government to cap and trade, and limit growth etc all agree that the planets sustainable carrying capacity is 500 million people. They wont admit to the rest of the people that in order to acheive their environmental goals, 11/12ths of the human species will need to be exterminated, OR moved into space. If they did publicly admit it, they'd be voted out of office and space development would increase significantly.
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Offline KelvinZero

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Re: Resource depletion as argument for space travel
« Reply #5 on: 04/26/2009 05:27 am »
Remember that methane and hydrogen do not themselves contain energy. The energy comes from reacting them with oxygen. We only have oxygen on earth due to solar powered photosynthesis and this is what really limits the total amount of energy available to power combustion and life. Assuming you did find an efficient way to import hydrocarbons from other worlds you would not have added to the total pool of energy available through combustion on earth.

I strongly doubt colonisation will ever be an effective way of releiving population pressures on earth, and if so, it could only possibly be momentary. Before we had a million people on another world, not a thousandth of earths population, it would be quite capable of its own population growth to fill its needs and this would be the far more efficient (and attractive) option for the people already there. Beyond that you hit theoretical limits. If we could expand outwards at the speed of light, the volume of the colonised sphere would still soon grow much slower than the exponentially growing population within it.

Offline cgrunska

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Re: Resource depletion as argument for space travel
« Reply #6 on: 04/27/2009 11:53 pm »
and then we'd have trillions of people voting in a big empire type place with galactic wars and big giant space ships and stuff

!

Offline gospacex

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Re: Resource depletion as argument for space travel
« Reply #7 on: 04/28/2009 08:04 pm »
> Though I see no reason why even Constellation can't test the mining techniques.

Too many "alternatively gifted" managers?

Offline gospacex

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Re: Resource depletion as argument for space travel
« Reply #8 on: 04/28/2009 08:14 pm »
I don't see anything in that article saying their analysis included the effects of supply on price, nor the effects of price on demand. It is reasonable to assume they did not account for these effects, especially since they admit the calculations were crude.

As supply becomes scarcer, price increases, which depresses demand. As supply tends toward zero, price tends toward infinity and demand toward zero. Depletion is avoided because demand reaches zero before supply.

But even that's a simplification. When the price of a commodity rises beyond a certain point, it becomes economically feasible to develop alternatives. The article points out there's no substitute for platinum, but that ignores wider ranging alternatives: if platinum based fuel cells are too expensive, the market will adopt fuel cells based on something other than platinum. And if that is not feasible, the market will abandon fuel cells altogether for something more economical.

Substituting stuff would work relatively ok for a few hundred years. But when the list of depleted (=> exorbitantly costly) minerals will become longer than the list of those which are cheap yet, we'll be in deep trouble.

We should colonize space to avoid this. Otherwise, we are just smart dinosaurs.
« Last Edit: 04/28/2009 08:15 pm by gospacex »

Offline Lab Lemming

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Re: Resource depletion as argument for space travel
« Reply #9 on: 07/31/2009 11:12 am »
Also, a lot of these are minerals chiefly mined as byproducts or only recently put into high demand, so there has been little time to develop a supply chain. It takes decades to move from exploration plan to mine, so if high tech creates overnight demand, then there will be a supply gap since the supply side is old technology.

Offline Arthur

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Re: Resource depletion as argument for space travel
« Reply #10 on: 07/31/2009 12:51 pm »
The Earth's crust is 30 to 50 km thick and very few 'mines' extend even 1 km deep. Current 'economically viable' resource exploration and extraction techniques are able to reach only a tiny fraction of the Earth's resources. As supply dwindles and prices rise, deeper exploration and extraction methods become economically viable.

It could actually be a very long time before 'space mining' is the only option, but at least rising prices and lower costs to orbit should make 'space mining' more economically competitive.

I would have to agree with the statement that the best place for space resources is in space. Avoid the launch costs.

Offline khallow

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Re: Resource depletion as argument for space travel
« Reply #11 on: 07/31/2009 01:36 pm »
I think the measures of resource consumption are more a measure of the efficiency of the global economy rather than a sign that we're running out of resources. Recycling, expansion of Earth-side mining, and substitute goods will keep these from becoming serious issues.
Karl Hallowell

Offline JohnFornaro

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Re: Resource depletion as argument for space travel
« Reply #12 on: 07/31/2009 03:20 pm »
There's another sidenote to Mike Lorrey's guess of 500M people as being the max sustainable Earth population, assuming all of the luxuries we now have.

Back in the cold war days, the USG did some estimate of how few people the US needed to maintain its then current standards of living and tchnology.  I can't remember the numbers all that well, but I think that the US pop at the time  was 150M, and th study concluded that 15M people could maintain the "American" standard of living.

It would be interesting if someone could post that article, or at least comment if it was a fantasy that I read on some survivalist site.

Smart dinousaurs.  I like that.

The silver number seems intuitively low.
Sometimes I just flat out don't get it.

Offline alexterrell

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Re: Resource depletion as argument for space travel
« Reply #13 on: 07/31/2009 05:00 pm »
PGMs are fairly easy to recycle, but oil and gas aren't. And land is also in short supply.
 

In the long term, if humans don't colonise the solar system, they're dead meat. Just not sure if the long term is 50 years or 500 years.
« Last Edit: 08/30/2009 08:46 pm by alexterrell »

Offline savuporo

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Re: Resource depletion as argument for space travel
« Reply #14 on: 07/31/2009 09:24 pm »
I have always hated the space mining argument as a linchpin of manned space travel, but this article in New Scientist is about the most disturbing thing I have seen in a while.

Space mining is economically nonviable right now because there is nothing that could be mined from space that is worth the cost of extracting and returning it.
Securing access to strategic resources doesnt need to be economically viable.
Space mining of strategic resources is entirely viable.

One small example : Japanese car companies are relying on _smuggling_ rare earth metals out of china right now, and rare earth metals are relatively abundant and cheap.

Second small example : there is a rush between French, Chinese and others to get access to Bolivian lithium salt fields, for lithium-ion batteries. And lithium, again, is relatively abundant and cheap.
« Last Edit: 07/31/2009 09:27 pm by savuporo »
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Offline William Barton

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Re: Resource depletion as argument for space travel
« Reply #15 on: 07/31/2009 09:40 pm »
PGMs are fairly easy to recycle, but oil and gas aren't. And land is also in short supply.
 

In the long term, if humans don't colonise the solar system, their dead meat. Just not sure if the long term is 50 years or 500 years.

My educated guess is, the long term is probably closer to 500 years than 50, which is a good thing since if it were 50, it'd probably be much too late to do anything about it, other than pray for a miracle. It will probably take the better part of 500 years to establish a true space-faring industrial civilization, which is why I think humanity needs to get started on it right now. I might be off by as much as a century or two, one way or another, but not by an order of magnitude. I've always had an answer to the "why" of space exploration, one I've been pushing for the past 35 years (since I began writing professionally in the early 1970s, anyway): Exploring and then developing the resources of the solar system will buy us just one thing: another couple of thousand years in which to come up with viable solutions for all our problems.

Offline William Barton

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Re: Resource depletion as argument for space travel
« Reply #16 on: 07/31/2009 09:50 pm »
Another thing I've tried to point out over the years, especially to certain types of economic conervatives is, the Club of Rome wasn't wrong in principle, but merely in all their details. There *are* limits to growth, we just don't know what they are yet, other than that they are not the tight, socially motivated boundaries imagined by the Club of Rome. But it's simple in principle: No space travel, Earth is the limit. Or maybe the solar system is the limit. Or the galaxy if through some miracle we wind up with magic FTL starships. But on every scale, the end result is the same: an expanding-shell civilization with a live frontier and a dead core. That's the actual problem whose solution we'll one day have to face, whether its on Earth in a few centuries, or out among the stars, millennia from now.

Offline alexterrell

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Re: Resource depletion as argument for space travel
« Reply #17 on: 07/31/2009 11:05 pm »
William - nicely put.

Though one famous sci-fi author (AC Clarke?) pointed out that short term predictions tend not to come as fast as predicted, but long term predictions come faster. We tend to see progress in straight lines but in many areas it's more exponential.

For example, a base on the moon is hugely expensive, but if it exports material to Earth Orbit it dramatically reduces the cost of doing everything in Earth Orbit, and that opens up Mars and the rest of the solar system. 

Offline gospacex

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Re: Resource depletion as argument for space travel
« Reply #18 on: 08/01/2009 12:30 am »
PGMs are fairly easy to recycle, but oil and gas aren't. And land is also in short supply.
 
In the long term, if humans don't colonise the solar system, their dead meat. Just not sure if the long term is 50 years or 500 years.

Absolutely. Remember that the most of the resources already consumed were consumed in the last 50 years or so - and we start to see the first cases of depletion (oil, helium). Sure it won't get too bad in next 100 years, but what will happen in say 1000 years? 3000 years? And 3000 years is only about the length of known human history to date... really not a long stretch of time.
« Last Edit: 08/01/2009 12:30 am by gospacex »

Offline savuporo

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Re: Resource depletion as argument for space travel
« Reply #19 on: 08/01/2009 11:51 am »
Remember that the most of the resources already consumed were consumed in the last 50 years or so - and we start to see the first cases of depletion (oil, helium). Sure it won't get too bad in next 100 years,
Once again, resource depletion may not get too bad _globally_, but local instances of resource depletion can get nasty.

Which would you rather prefer, world powers fighting for remaining unevenly distributed resources, that they dont have locally, or everyone turning the attention towards the sky for new resources ?
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