Reading the article pulls me back to the expanse. What a great show. I recall the authors wrote an article expressing how wrong they were to predict that Ceres had no water [0].
Nah but that's probably the smallest gripe one can have with Ceres station. Spinning up a planetoid so it has 0.3 g negative gravity and doesn't tear itself into a quintillion pieces is quite a bit more questionable.
Yes that whole world aspect is one of the few in the ‘verse that are wholly impractical. The only way you could do it is encase the object in a super strong tensile mesh or shell, in which case you might as well build O’Neill cylinders out of its mass instead.
Wouldn't a mesh or net be significantly less mass than a whole enclosure of metal? Plus, with a meshed asteroid, you get "free" radiation shielding due to the mass.
I'm guessing the casing would have to be hefty stuff and a lot of it to hold in all that mass under ~0.3g of outward centrifugal acceleration.
Of course you might be able to do some stuff internally as you hollowed out the thing too like perfuse it with high tension wires kind of like steel reinforced concrete, but it seems like a huge job at least on par with building giant space stations.
Still you might be onto something with the radiation shielding.
Inyalowda, the more you share, the more your bowl will be plentiful
my favorite show ever, imo best sci fi show ever. Ceres station in the books/show is a really cool idea even though it's got several reasons why it couldn't actually work
>“Ceres is a lot closer and it’s a lot easier to get to than these moons in the outer solar system,” Raymond says. “So it is a very enticing target.
Many of us know we won't live long enough to see the results of any sort of mission to Europa or Titan meant to detect life in their deep, liquid oceans (if these oceans in fact exist, if we ever get there and are able to drill to them). Not only is Ceres much closer, but if this article is accurate, access to the subsurface ocean could be quite close to the surface. Here's hoping it comes to fruition.
Over the next 2 years, I expect SpaceX to send a lot of probes out.
First, mass to orbit is super cheap now. Second, part of the whole R&D for Mars will be to try a variety of long range engine types and configs, and they love to iterate fast and play.
So I expect probes sent in Mars' direction, but also elsewhere to explore. And I cannot stress this enough, they are clearly capable engineers, but these probes don't need 10 years of development and hyper engineering, because cost to orbit is meaningless.
A probe fails? Who cares! You sent 5 different designs, and can just send more anyhow.
NASA was concerned about cost to orbit, but also perception. A lost probe would be a "waste to taxpayers", and just getting launch windows was a chore. I remember some probes had to wait years for space on the shuttle, so constrained was lift frequency.
But SpaceX is OK with blowing stuff up during tests, with learning as they go. So I imagine 2 years max, they'll be spewing satellites all over the place, without a concern if they fail early, or even make it.
Yet some will. Many will.
And you can bet some will head to asteroids.
Note: at this point someone usually chimes in with how hostile space is, and cheap probes won't work, and yada yada.
I didn't say cheap. Cheap implies skimping out on part quality or construction. You don't need to do that, as the parts are not remotely expensive compared to R&D, dev time and custom build work. In fact if one removes R&D, part cost isn't noticeable.
This means that scale is cheap. Building 1000 probes is almost the same cost as 1. And launch is now super cheap.
Access to Space is on the verge of when airplanes became unremarkable.
You can already see this with all the various lunar landers - quite a crash fest so far, but thenlatest iteration already performs better than the previous one. Can't really imagone similar progress with modern it-must-work-first-time NASA. :)
SpaceX rockets are not optimized for probes, for the higher speeds needed to toss stuff at interplanetary speeds. Sure, they can haul more to orbit and a customer could stack an additional stage, but that is very expensive compared to rockets with established cryogenic/efficient/faster upper stages. SpaceX is optimized for what it is doing (LEO/GEO) and, despite the presentations, shows little engineering interest in exploration beyond the moon.
The tech to keep your eye on is orbital refueling. If someone can finally crack that, all bets of this sort are off. While I'd love to see a nuclear rocket or something, even just the energy advantage of being able to refuel in orbit rewrites all our intuitions about time and expense of exploring the Solar System. We are so bound by having to launch things as single bundles of stuff from the ground... the rocket equation does not like that.
>> even just the energy advantage of being able to refuel in orbit rewrites all our intuitions about time and expense of exploring the Solar System.
Except that it doesn't. Refueling in LEO only helps if your gas station is in the same orbital inclination you need for your target. As each interplanetary launch will be via a different orbital plane/inclination, there is little use for generic infrastructure. Just using a bigger one-time rocket will be more efficient than trying to refuel and then boost interplanetary from an inappropriate orbital plane.
Now in higher orbits refueling can start to make sense as inclination becomes less of a handicap, but boosting from a higher orbit is less efficient than from a lower (oberth). A single larger rocket will still be the way to go.
If you're launching the fuel for the purpose of extending the range of a probe, well, of course you'll put it in the right place.
There's no point of conceiving of a world where we can afford to launch fuel but still have to treat every single launch as exceedingly precious and expensive such that we can only afford to set up One Fuel Depot in space, the way we have One Space Station. Either this gets cheap enough that SpaceX basically has a "launch + more fuel launch(es)" as a standard package or it never happens at all, there isn't much in between.
To get to the moon SpaceX needs to go beyond LEO. You cannot say in one breath that non-leo isn't their wheelhouse, then in another say it is.
Further, my post mentions new propulsion designs.
You're also 1980s thinking launches are expensive. They're cheap, and mass to orbit is cheap, and going to get much cheaper.
We all need to understand the change that is coming. Getting to space is being removed as a barrier. Think about projects where mass to orbit cost is unimportant, or think of projects where many launches is not a concern.
Think of 1000 super light, highly disposable attempts to make tiny sensor platforms which can endure distance, environment, and time.
Keep in mind losing 1/2 of them, even all is just fine, if you gleam valuable data to iterate and move down a path of low cost, tiny workable design.
It's not 1980. Cost to space is cheap. We now need to work on cost to planets, and even other solar systems.
We need to test engine designs, new methods of hardening platforms, all with low cost, simple designs.
And to others, yes, space is hostile. So? That's why we're iterating on a fix.
>> Keep in mind losing 1/2 of them, even all is just fine,
The cost difference between a spacecraft with a 50% failure rate and one with a 1% failure rate is basically not a thing. If you are at 50% success then you are already doing 99% of the job correctly. It is comparable to professional sports. If your NFL team wins a game or two during a season, you must be doing 99% of things right.
>> It's not 1980. Cost to space is cheap.
The cost for an interplanetary shot hasn't changed all that much recently. The SpaceX stuff is efficient to LEO/GEO and the moon... at a stretch. (Even the moon would require a variety of new refueling techs.)
What high flight rate would enable is testing in situ rather than expensively preventing possible failures at the design stage. That is, expend effort on the things that actually fail, rather than things that might fail. It also enables production of the probes on an assembly line.
An assembly line of probes would be amazing. Many have said we should built a dozen copies of Kepler space telescope to then detect millions of planets. Sadly, that just isn't what the scientific community wants. Each probe is bespoke. Some parts are standardized but the actual instruments tend to be designed for one specific mission. As for testing in leo, that isn't as useful as one would think. Space in LEO is very different in terms of temperature/light/radiation. LEO orbit is much warmer and dynamic (rapid orbits) than say deep space on the way to Jupiter. So it is better to test sensors on the ground in conditions that better match those where the probe is actually going. LEO is a good vacuum, but most probes wouldn't feel any difference between real space and a vacuum chamber on earth.
I wonder if we can come up with an experiment that requires a ton of identical probes as a middle ground. Like, can we make an astronomical interferometer telescope out of thousands of probes? Maybe? As someone who doesn’t understand space or astronomical interferometers, that sounds cool as heck.
I hope SpaceX does as you say and starts sending a lot of probes, but a lot really depends on the whims of Elon. There isn't really a strong business case for scattering probes around the solar system. Starlink makes money. Selling launch capabilities to NASA makes money. Doing basic science? Establishing a Mars colony? Those sound more like the kind of thing that isn't going to happen unless Elon insists they do it, and it seems like maybe he's not as interested in space exploration these days as he is in trying to get Donald Trump elected to another term.
What happened to asteroid mining? I wonder if positive ID of a solid gold/platinum rock would spur more missions that way. The issue is it's not easy to get that material back down.
Even silver, palladium, or cobalt in significant quantities could be sufficient motivation if the craft to harness the rock is cheap enough to make, launch, and operate. SpaceX is just the kind of company that would be able to do such a thing were anyone to do it. I bring up these other metals just to point out that while Gold or Platinum is what we always think of, industrial metals would also work to motivate.
Back before there were so many hecto-billionaires (fifteen now, according to Forbes), I remember seeing a throwaway quote somewhere to the effect that the first trillionaire would be the first person to economically mine asteroids.
It made me wonder, because it seems like even if someone had easy access to $100 trillion worth of platinum, they would no longer have $100 trillion worth of platinum. How much can you benefit from scarcity when you are also obliterating it?
It's also mildly entertaining to consider that while the quote I mentioned was intended to express the idea that asteroid mining would make someone a trillionaire, it might have been prophetic yet gotten things exactly backwards. With Bezos and Musk both having space programs, it seems plausible that compound interest could bring us to a future where the first trillionaire becomes the first asteroid miner instead of the other way around.
> How much can you benefit from scarcity when you are also obliterating it?
If you're just selling the minerals that might be the case. If you also have a vertically integrated company that produces things that use a lot of minerals (batteries), you might just be able to use all these things yourself, and sell them for more than the base cost of the material.
> How much can you benefit from scarcity when you are also obliterating it?
The same way that DeBeers did.
Plus, you could also buy up the manufacturers that actually use this. Platinum price drops, but you're also benefitting from getting it at-cost as you literally drop-ship it to your factory producing catalytic converters and microchips.
Sure you can do that, but the desire for catalytic converters is pretty static. They aren't a luxury good like diamond jewelry. You don't have the option of making them scarce and desirable.
> It made me wonder, because it seems like even if someone had easy access to $100 trillion worth of platinum, they would no longer have $100 trillion worth of platinum. How much can you benefit from scarcity when you are also obliterating it?
You can't (for practical reasons) instantly drop all of it on the market at once. As you increase production, terrestrial mines may decide to shut down based on price fluxations or increases in difficulty of mining the last remaining deposits. World governments might prefer to keep terrestrial mines as reserves for national security reasons and import space sourced materials when economically feasible.
Short the commodity market before your plans become known. Essentially selling the new metal at the old price. Your profit then depends on the depth of the futures market at various terms in the future.
Secondly, don't bring the resource back to Earth. Take it to the Moon, Mars, or orbital manufacturing facilities, to be used in further space exploration/colonization.
I went through that thought exercise a few years ago, and decided the metals might end up worth more as weapons.
If you maneuver a big asteroid into Earth orbit, you can always just drop chunks of it on the heads of people you don’t like. Basically “rods from God”, but using mass that’s already in space. I wrote a book using that as the premise.
Platinum prices going to zero wouldn't destroy the economy, just platinum mines.
The estimate I've seen for the total amount of gold humans have ever dug up is an approximately 20m³ cube. Wiki says gold has a density of 19.283 g/cm³. If I'm doing my math right, that means we've dug up 154,264,000 kg of gold. If you value that at the current price of $85,000/kg, we've got $13 trillion of gold.
Compare that with the guesses they were making about the "value" of a single metallic asteroid, 16 Psyche, of $10 quintillion[0]. Coming into contact with the New World let pre-industrial civilizations 2x or 3x the resources they could access, while the boost from asteroid mining could give us six or more orders of magnitude. That 20m³ could be collected and put in a museum.
It will depend on the level of competition in the launch market. If there's another reusable launcher (Blue Origin, say) then SpaceX will be constrained to not mark up the price too much and prices will be closer to costs, and anyone will be able to benefit from the cost reduction that allows large projects like this.
> maybe he's not as interested in space exploration these days as he is in trying to get Donald Trump elected to another term.
I think he's been pretty transparent that his recent interest in politics is downstream of his belief that Tesla and SpaceX will (continue to) be constrained by political action by one side more than the other.
I think its entirely possible that he's an old man settling into a 'shakes fist at clouds' mindset and justifying supporting it by telling himself its the right business move.
In reality I think he's a narcissist who is getting addicted to the limelight and this is just another stunt to get people to talk about him. I don't think its a business decision.
The problem with this is that presently it takes years for a probe to reach the destination. So one cannot do a quick try-observe-tinker loop. Granted with cheaper access to orbit the time can be reduced by using more fuel, but still space is huge.
The existence of liquid water on such bodies, particularly in the early solar system when such bodies were warmed by short lived radioactive decay, has strong implications for theories of the origin of life. It's possible life originated in such a body, then later was seeded onto Earth (and Mars, and Venus) when impacts dispersed life-bearing fragments to later fall as meteorites. It's also conceivable that life could have been seeded into the nascent solar system to colonize such bodies, then later spread to the planets.
This is relevant because the early origin of life on Earth is taken as evidence that origin of life is a fast, high probability process. But if its origin here depended on events that require such warm moist small bodies, then it may be that it either happened early or it wouldn't happen as all, and such an inference would be invalid.
The hard part is not "warm the ice enough to melt it into liquid water" but "don't let all the water turn into gas an escape". The phase diagram is a harsh mistress at low pressures.
For reference, the surface temperature on Ceres varies from 110K to 235K, which is -163°C to -38°C in chart units, but "effectively zero pressure" (I can't find exact numbers for Ceres, but the 100×-heavier Moon is measured in nanopascals) is off the bottom of the chart.
We may never be able to answer definitively, but another theory is that the evolution of life is a series of steps, some with highly probable pathways (lipids with hydrophobic tails forming enclosed boundaries) and some extraordinarily improbable (formation of eukaryotic cells, incorporation of mitochondria).
The book The Vital Question by biochemist Nick Lane goes into this in great depth. https://nick-lane.net/books/the-vital-question-why-is-life-t... He estimated that simple, single celled prokaryotic organisms should be pretty common when the right conditions and probably happened multiple times independently on Earth, but eukaryotic mitochondrial cells may have only happened one single time and all complex life is descended from that one cell. I believe that was covered in https://lexfridman.com/nick-lane/) that
If anything life as we know it is a very low probability process due to many filters that we were somehow lucky enough to pass. Some of them for sure we still don't even realize yet.
Life being plentiful in the universe, and the kind of lame arguments for this assumption, entered into the secular science enthusiast dogma as a countercultural reaction to the prevailing Christian dogma of life on Earth being special. Sagan/etc's hand-wavy argument about the number of stars being a prime example.
The dogma is such that people who subscribe to it will often reflexively assume that anybody challenging it is a disingenuous Christian. FWIW I am not a Christian, nor do I have any other religion, but I think there is fair reason to doubt that advanced life is common. For one, you don't have to stack too many improbabilities to easily overpower the number of stars. Secondly, evolution isn't a process that works towards the goal of creating human-like advanced life; in fact if anything it favors crabs a lot more than smart apes. Third, and most important, the rare earth hypothesis is consistent with all of our observations thus far.
> fair reason to doubt that advanced life is common
Emphasis mine. This is an enormously different and stronger claim than just "life is common". Personally I think it's most likely that cells are relatively common (given a habitable planet anyway), but anything as complex as a fish is very rare.
I think it's reasonably likely (but not certain) that simple forms of life are plentiful, and it is even possible that life more advanced than us exists out there. What I absolutely reject is the notion that I should feel quite certain of the latter because "so many stars!"
Counter: the [Robin] Hansonian universe.
('Grabby Aliens' in his unfortunately chosen IMO nomenclature). However rare life is, and however rarer intelligent life is, it expands to fill galaxies, even allowing for lightspeed limitation.
A century ago or so, it was popularly thought that Mars was covered with irrigation canals, obviously created by some advanced form of life. That was debunked and the hope shifted to maybe there being some fungus or plants... Such were not found so it shifted to microscopic bacteria. There is perhaps some evidence of those, but nothing conclusive, so now people are talking about cracking open rocks to find the fossils of bacteria...
This all has an uncanny resemblance to the "god of the gaps" phenomenon. As science explains more of our world, the religious cram their gods into smaller and smaller gaps in our scientific understanding. And as science shines light on the apparent sterility of Mars, alien life enthusiasts cram their proposed aliens into the ever smaller gaps in our knowledge of Mars.
Oh, life being common is an older idea than that. In the 1700s it was common belief that each of the other planets in our Solar System was inhabited, because otherwise their existence would be a waste, and because of vulgar Copernicanism.
People can expect that life is common any amount they like (well, if they stay within the 1 in a few thousand planets upper bound we have as a fact nowadays).
My problem is with people insisting that's a certainty.
I'm pointing out that common belief was hilariously wrong in the past, so there's no reason to think it's not hilariously wrong now. The meme that "there's lots and lots of stars, so life must be out there" is not sound reasoning.
It's possible life was seeded on earth from Mars. Mars was hit by a massive asteroid right in its peek habitability era, and it could have flung living matter to earth just at the start of it's habitability era
Funny, I was just reading a chapter in The Dark Forest that included Ceres. What's that thing where you see/hear a word or concept and then it suddenly keeps appearing in places?
[0]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/dear-dawn...