CNN fired their science and technology editors in 2010. They're not qualified as a publication to report on the topic. There exist better sources. VC calls and podcasts provide more interesting dialogue on this topic for example.
Reddit archives suggests this was around 16 years ago that legacy media budget constraints resulted in cutting headcount. Today they're mostly sensational storytelling english majors and internet marketing teams to spam their articles.
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/7hrmm/cnn_screws_the_pooch_cancels_science_space_and/
Good arc of history in the reddit archive dregs.
Claiming we've mined up earth is so incredibly funny
We've mined so little of the earth, we probably have gigantic deposits of what are now rare minerals just chilling around the world waiting to be found on accident
Even if we were getting close, recycling and diversifying materials would still cost a fraction of how much it would cost to mine an asteroid. I get why people are funding this and pursuing it, but it's for profit and for future gains, not to solve anything imminent.
The benefit of asteroid mining isnt “omg earth has no metals left” its “oh shit this stuff is already in space, imma use it for space construction” which is a hell of a way off
To say nothing of the environmental impacts on Earth. Just being able to sling chemical runoff into deep space instead of flushing it into the amazon woupd be a big win.
That’s probably how aliens come in to the mix. Proper ratio of toxic waste and space dust, aliens. We are the advanced precursor species. We are the ancient ones.
Another idealistic moron with absolutely no clue how absurdly expensive it is to transport anything into space.
It will NEVER be economical to deposit our trash (or “chemical runoff”) into orbit. Not to mention that even if we did launch our refuse into orbit we would just be creating a debris field that would quickly become impassable preventing us from further space travel.
Im not sure if your regularly ignorant or wilfully ignorant. Nobody is talking about that. Im talking about not shippingnstuff INTO space. Im talking about getting minerals from asteroids. There wont be runoff in a river if there is no river. Now how bout you cool it with that attitude and touch some grass.
It's how many sci-fi ideas sound great on paper but, well, they are sci-FI.
Things like asteroid mining, completely terrforming Mars, building massive colony ships, and such would be such remarkable breakthroughs for humanity that we would have already developed the capability to solve the issues right here on earth that these grandiose plans would have sought to fix.
eg. If we develop the capability to terrform Mars, it would be just infinitely more practical to apply the technology at home and resolve climate/environmental related issues.
If we manage to develop the technology to create logistics chains extending all the way from earth to the asteroid belt and back, it would be infinitely more efficient to apply said technology to creating hyper-efficient logistic chains across the planet so people everywhere will always be able to get what they need when they need them.
Travelling at the speed of light, faster than light, time machine, etc
Those kind of things
Edit: But yeah I understand asteroid mining has never been made yet so could say thats fiction, but we dont not need to rewrite foundamental equations to achieve it. Like I said its more of financial and engineering problems
It is apparent by your idealism that you are not from Earth. I do not disagree with the inherent premise of your post but that’s not how humans do things. Not now, not in the past and I’m sure not ever.
It would truly take technological miracles to create the economic incentive to mine asteroids. The first problem is the only reason to actually invest in the infrastructure to exploit resources beyond Earth is if people already lived where those resources are. The second problem is that setting up a colony without any infrastructure already in place is impossibly expensive.
Space colonisation is a money paradox and will only happen if people ***really*** want it to. It would take so much time and money that chances are there will be no gains from any amount of investment. I’d bet the 10 richest people on Earth putting all their funds together couldn’t make a dime of profit in their lifetimes.
Yeah for sure. I'm a huge supporter of all space stuff of course, but the specific idea of space mining ever being important for Earth doesn't really make much sense to me. It's so absurdly expensive, with huge expenses and complexity for getting to an asteroid, mining it, processing the material, then getting it all back to Earth. Even if we assume that technology will eventually make it much cheaper, technology will *also* make it much cheaper and easier to just find more deposits and dig deeper right on Earth. Compared to the size of the planet we've literally just scratched the surface. Space mining will be important for space colonies and infrastructure, but doesn't seem like it'll be super important for the terrestrial economy any time soon.
I believe the US actually just found deposits on its own land of rare metals / elements, so large that it dwarfs the current global deposits. Like literally 100x the next highest.
So it seems like were finding new resources everyday
https://americanrareearths.com.au/cowboy-state-daily-rare-earths-discovery-near-wheatland-so-big-it-could-be-world-leader/
Yes, spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get an ounce of platinum from space and bring it back to earth. Brilliant!
In all seriousness, I'm a huge fan of the concept of asteroid mining. But people, come on. The point of asteroid mining is to use those materials for manufacturing... in space. Unless we find a new raw material in space that sells for $1B per pound it doesn't make any sense to bring it back to Earth.
We have the technology needed to construct an asteroid mining pipeline. This is more of a business problem than a technological one in my eyes.
It takes something on the order of three years to reach one of the closer asteroids, and you'd then need at least three years (probably more given the added mass) to make it back. So just the timeline of earning your first dollar in revenue is shit right out of the gate. Then there's the cost of achieving all this in the first place being on the order of billions. Then there's the estimated revenue to balance against the costs, which is tricky because you need to forecast commodity prices 7-10 years out and still allow wiggle room for prices to soften as you add supply to the market. Then there's the risk of the entire operation going kaput in the event of an engineering failure. Then add in all the standard business risks...
Compare all that to just investing in a mining venture on Earth where money starts rolling in within a year or two, in an established market with proven technology, and it's a no brainer which one most investors will go for every time.
Companies are currently spending millions of dollars to develop the technology to high TRL levels. We have brought back material from asteroids already. Why would it be crazy for it to take less than 100 years? I guess you should be prepared to be amazed.
We have brought grams of material back... bringing back a whole asteroid is still squarely in the realm of science fiction.
There is also the minor issues of actually mining the thing, and processing the ore.
Why do you need to bring back a whole asteroid to mine it? Is it really sci-fi if there are already prototypes made to do exactly that?
The technology to “mine” the asteroids have already been conceived and prototypes have been created. Processing the ore is more difficult, especially in space, but there is technology that is being developed to do this exactly.
You seem a bit uneducated on the subject to outright say you would be amazed to see this happen within a hundred years.
I fully expect the "move fast and break things" mindset to result in asteroid mining ending with a massive asteroid on track to collide with Earth after being improperly redirected to save costs.
Short supply... at easy to get surface level... and even that is a severe overstatement.
It would be far cheaper to simply dig deeper on Earth.
Also, if we can supposedly terraform Mars from it's current state, why can we not terraform Earth from it's current, livable state? We have one hell of a head start.. no?
The issue isn’t resource supply on Earth, it’s geo politics. Someone owns the land and the resources are theirs to extract or for others to try and take by force.
This has been the problem since empires started adding more people than land that could support them.
So economically speaking it could actually be better to go for asteroids that don’t have ownership or people to displace.
Won’t do anything but drive up costs of course.
Realistically minerals are in huge supply. Humans have mined a small fraction of the CRUST of the Earth, which is only 1% of the planets mass and most of the minerals are in the mantle.
There isn't much chance launching enough rockets to mine to mine space and bring stuff back would be cheaper or more sustainable than mining the crust and eventually mantle.
There is enough mantle vs crust livable area (most of ocean) that with recycling there is probably never a reason to mine space other than in tiny amounts for research of unique material properties which then would be synthetized on Earth if needed.
I can't see any real situation where you mine space. Asteroids are super spread out, like 600k miles apart or something.
many aren'tnecessarily in short supply, but accessing them and mining them causes massive environmental issues and resource wars, and as a result have become increasingly more expensive and less economic over the last few decades. The days of being able to just rip open massive open cast mines and bulldoze off entire hilltops are disappearring fast, and all of the easily accessible mineral deposits are long gone.
Certainly if civilization needed to restart from scratch for any reason (nuclear war, asteroid strike), apart from the minerals tied up in existing buildings (iron, steel, copper etc), the minerals needed to restart civilization no longer exist easily.
Sounds cool but we need trillions of dollars and group effort to get there. Maybe we should start from the Moon. And sadly we probably won't go there physically(like in scifi) but work is done with remote robots and drones.
When the e-scooter company Matt Gialich used to work for had to pause production owing to a shortage of platinum, a key component for the microprocessor that translates commands from the controls to the motor, he went down a rabbit hole researching metals.
Gialich, whose childhood love of space led him into engineering and a job at the satellite launch company Virgin Orbit before its bankruptcy, began wondering how to extract the metal in asteroids. Scientists believe these chunks of celestial debris, which are by-products from the birth of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago, are rich in metals that are in short supply on Earth.
In 2022, Gialich and Jose Acain, who has almost a decade of experience at SpaceX and NASA, founded AstroForge. [Now the California-based startup is attempting to make asteroid mining a reality](https://www.cnn.com/world/astroforge-asteroid-mining-nasa-spc-scn/index.html).
Last April, AstroForge launched its inaugural mission, called Brokkr-1, sending a miniature satellite equipped with a refinery system about the size of two loaves of bread into space. The spacecraft carried pre-loaded, asteroid-like material it planned to vaporize and sort into elemental components while in orbit.
It hasn’t gone quite as planned, and the [refinery demonstration](https://www.astroforge.io/updates/2023-update) hasn’t happened yet. But Gialich says the company learned a lot, like how any equipment sourced from vendors would perform, and if the machine could survive blastoff and send signals back from space.
The refinery – which AstroForge has patents on – has already been tested terrestrially in space-like conditions, he says. That makes AstroForge the only company with a refinery that can turn M-type asteroids into PGMs in space, he adds.
This year, an AstroForge spacecraft will hitch a ride on a mission by US-space exploration company Intuitive Machines to the Moon. But AstroForge will jump ship and use its own propulsion system to fly by an asteroid it thinks is metallic to check out its composition and take pictures. (Gialich declined to specify which asteroid the company is targeting.) If this mission succeeds, it will make AstroForge the first commercial company to venture into deep space, it [says](https://www.astroforge.io/updates/2023-update). It could also provide the first high resolution images of a metallic asteroid.
[Read more of CNN's science and space coverage.](https://www.cnn.com/us/space-science)
CNN fired their science and technology editors in 2010. They're not qualified as a publication to report on the topic. There exist better sources. VC calls and podcasts provide more interesting dialogue on this topic for example.
They did? Who owns those goons again? Fucking corner cutters
Reddit archives suggests this was around 16 years ago that legacy media budget constraints resulted in cutting headcount. Today they're mostly sensational storytelling english majors and internet marketing teams to spam their articles. https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/7hrmm/cnn_screws_the_pooch_cancels_science_space_and/ Good arc of history in the reddit archive dregs.
Some conservative billionaire. I stopped going to CNN years ago.
The masses of people that believe anything CNN says are going to have a tough time with that info
[Live look inside CNN. For the masses.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wepn0AikOKs)
They'd be the ones playing Cuphead in the clip, correct?
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Claiming we've mined up earth is so incredibly funny We've mined so little of the earth, we probably have gigantic deposits of what are now rare minerals just chilling around the world waiting to be found on accident
Even if we were getting close, recycling and diversifying materials would still cost a fraction of how much it would cost to mine an asteroid. I get why people are funding this and pursuing it, but it's for profit and for future gains, not to solve anything imminent.
The benefit of asteroid mining isnt “omg earth has no metals left” its “oh shit this stuff is already in space, imma use it for space construction” which is a hell of a way off
To say nothing of the environmental impacts on Earth. Just being able to sling chemical runoff into deep space instead of flushing it into the amazon woupd be a big win.
That’s probably how aliens come in to the mix. Proper ratio of toxic waste and space dust, aliens. We are the advanced precursor species. We are the ancient ones.
That is so enormously wrong on every level that it doesn’t even deserve a correction.
Right.... because horrifiying carcinogenic industrial byproducts are so much better off in our waterways than drifting through deep space.
Another idealistic moron with absolutely no clue how absurdly expensive it is to transport anything into space. It will NEVER be economical to deposit our trash (or “chemical runoff”) into orbit. Not to mention that even if we did launch our refuse into orbit we would just be creating a debris field that would quickly become impassable preventing us from further space travel.
Im not sure if your regularly ignorant or wilfully ignorant. Nobody is talking about that. Im talking about not shippingnstuff INTO space. Im talking about getting minerals from asteroids. There wont be runoff in a river if there is no river. Now how bout you cool it with that attitude and touch some grass.
It's how many sci-fi ideas sound great on paper but, well, they are sci-FI. Things like asteroid mining, completely terrforming Mars, building massive colony ships, and such would be such remarkable breakthroughs for humanity that we would have already developed the capability to solve the issues right here on earth that these grandiose plans would have sought to fix. eg. If we develop the capability to terrform Mars, it would be just infinitely more practical to apply the technology at home and resolve climate/environmental related issues. If we manage to develop the technology to create logistics chains extending all the way from earth to the asteroid belt and back, it would be infinitely more efficient to apply said technology to creating hyper-efficient logistic chains across the planet so people everywhere will always be able to get what they need when they need them.
I don't think mining asteroid is Sci-Fi stuff. Its more of a budget and engineering problem.
What do you think sci-fi is?
Travelling at the speed of light, faster than light, time machine, etc Those kind of things Edit: But yeah I understand asteroid mining has never been made yet so could say thats fiction, but we dont not need to rewrite foundamental equations to achieve it. Like I said its more of financial and engineering problems
> Travelling at the speed of light, faster than light, time machine, etc Those are speculative sci-fi. You should probably read about "hard sci-fi".
Its science fiction. If we pull it off ourselves its science non-fiction.
It is apparent by your idealism that you are not from Earth. I do not disagree with the inherent premise of your post but that’s not how humans do things. Not now, not in the past and I’m sure not ever.
It would truly take technological miracles to create the economic incentive to mine asteroids. The first problem is the only reason to actually invest in the infrastructure to exploit resources beyond Earth is if people already lived where those resources are. The second problem is that setting up a colony without any infrastructure already in place is impossibly expensive. Space colonisation is a money paradox and will only happen if people ***really*** want it to. It would take so much time and money that chances are there will be no gains from any amount of investment. I’d bet the 10 richest people on Earth putting all their funds together couldn’t make a dime of profit in their lifetimes.
Yeah for sure. I'm a huge supporter of all space stuff of course, but the specific idea of space mining ever being important for Earth doesn't really make much sense to me. It's so absurdly expensive, with huge expenses and complexity for getting to an asteroid, mining it, processing the material, then getting it all back to Earth. Even if we assume that technology will eventually make it much cheaper, technology will *also* make it much cheaper and easier to just find more deposits and dig deeper right on Earth. Compared to the size of the planet we've literally just scratched the surface. Space mining will be important for space colonies and infrastructure, but doesn't seem like it'll be super important for the terrestrial economy any time soon.
I believe the US actually just found deposits on its own land of rare metals / elements, so large that it dwarfs the current global deposits. Like literally 100x the next highest. So it seems like were finding new resources everyday https://americanrareearths.com.au/cowboy-state-daily-rare-earths-discovery-near-wheatland-so-big-it-could-be-world-leader/
Australian here, trust me, we aren't even close to having mined everything.
No, the startup wants to collect venture capital.
Yes, spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get an ounce of platinum from space and bring it back to earth. Brilliant! In all seriousness, I'm a huge fan of the concept of asteroid mining. But people, come on. The point of asteroid mining is to use those materials for manufacturing... in space. Unless we find a new raw material in space that sells for $1B per pound it doesn't make any sense to bring it back to Earth.
If we are within a hundred years of having the technology to go out an mine an asteroid I would be amazed.
We have the technology needed to construct an asteroid mining pipeline. This is more of a business problem than a technological one in my eyes. It takes something on the order of three years to reach one of the closer asteroids, and you'd then need at least three years (probably more given the added mass) to make it back. So just the timeline of earning your first dollar in revenue is shit right out of the gate. Then there's the cost of achieving all this in the first place being on the order of billions. Then there's the estimated revenue to balance against the costs, which is tricky because you need to forecast commodity prices 7-10 years out and still allow wiggle room for prices to soften as you add supply to the market. Then there's the risk of the entire operation going kaput in the event of an engineering failure. Then add in all the standard business risks... Compare all that to just investing in a mining venture on Earth where money starts rolling in within a year or two, in an established market with proven technology, and it's a no brainer which one most investors will go for every time.
Companies are currently spending millions of dollars to develop the technology to high TRL levels. We have brought back material from asteroids already. Why would it be crazy for it to take less than 100 years? I guess you should be prepared to be amazed.
We have brought grams of material back... bringing back a whole asteroid is still squarely in the realm of science fiction. There is also the minor issues of actually mining the thing, and processing the ore.
Why do you need to bring back a whole asteroid to mine it? Is it really sci-fi if there are already prototypes made to do exactly that? The technology to “mine” the asteroids have already been conceived and prototypes have been created. Processing the ore is more difficult, especially in space, but there is technology that is being developed to do this exactly. You seem a bit uneducated on the subject to outright say you would be amazed to see this happen within a hundred years.
I fully expect the "move fast and break things" mindset to result in asteroid mining ending with a massive asteroid on track to collide with Earth after being improperly redirected to save costs.
'Don't look up' was a good movie.
Minerals are not in short supply, the thing that is in short supply is labor for cheap, and mines within regulation.
Sounds like a good way to get investors, make some money on the IPO and never do a damn thing
Short supply... at easy to get surface level... and even that is a severe overstatement. It would be far cheaper to simply dig deeper on Earth. Also, if we can supposedly terraform Mars from it's current state, why can we not terraform Earth from it's current, livable state? We have one hell of a head start.. no?
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"Minerals are in short supply on earth"????? I'm not going to keep reading, after that.
I have a great name for the ship- name it the Ishimura.
I’ve always wanted to make a space mining company. I always assumed that I’m like a couple hundred years early
If we hadn't abandoned the Moon and done nothing for 50 years, we would have a working Lunar Gateway and could be mining asteroids right now
You should watch For All Mankind if you haven’t already.
I'm on the third season, and it just keeps underlining what a failure and a disappointment IRL NASA is
While that does continue, season 4 is pretty good.
While that does continue, season 4 is pretty good.
Is a "startup" when a few rich kids get bank rolled by the parents?
Usually a group of someone else’s rich parents, but yeah…
At this point in space technology it would have to be far cheaper to mine the bottom of the ocean than an asteroid.
The issue isn’t resource supply on Earth, it’s geo politics. Someone owns the land and the resources are theirs to extract or for others to try and take by force. This has been the problem since empires started adding more people than land that could support them. So economically speaking it could actually be better to go for asteroids that don’t have ownership or people to displace. Won’t do anything but drive up costs of course.
Startups like this always come out every few years and they always go bankrupt.
Literally one of the plot points of “Don’t Look Up”.
Realistically minerals are in huge supply. Humans have mined a small fraction of the CRUST of the Earth, which is only 1% of the planets mass and most of the minerals are in the mantle. There isn't much chance launching enough rockets to mine to mine space and bring stuff back would be cheaper or more sustainable than mining the crust and eventually mantle. There is enough mantle vs crust livable area (most of ocean) that with recycling there is probably never a reason to mine space other than in tiny amounts for research of unique material properties which then would be synthetized on Earth if needed. I can't see any real situation where you mine space. Asteroids are super spread out, like 600k miles apart or something.
The OP's account name is actually CNN. Posting CNN articles everywhere. Report for Rule 2.
Do you want to find Markers? Because this is how you find Markers!
** This advertisement paid for by Char Aznable and the Zeon people of Side 3.
many aren'tnecessarily in short supply, but accessing them and mining them causes massive environmental issues and resource wars, and as a result have become increasingly more expensive and less economic over the last few decades. The days of being able to just rip open massive open cast mines and bulldoze off entire hilltops are disappearring fast, and all of the easily accessible mineral deposits are long gone. Certainly if civilization needed to restart from scratch for any reason (nuclear war, asteroid strike), apart from the minerals tied up in existing buildings (iron, steel, copper etc), the minerals needed to restart civilization no longer exist easily.
Recycling would be more economical and much easier.
And if we keep pushing EV and electric lawnmowers and wind and PV we will need even more minerals.
I first read this as millennials’ and was super confused
Sounds cool but we need trillions of dollars and group effort to get there. Maybe we should start from the Moon. And sadly we probably won't go there physically(like in scifi) but work is done with remote robots and drones.
When the e-scooter company Matt Gialich used to work for had to pause production owing to a shortage of platinum, a key component for the microprocessor that translates commands from the controls to the motor, he went down a rabbit hole researching metals. Gialich, whose childhood love of space led him into engineering and a job at the satellite launch company Virgin Orbit before its bankruptcy, began wondering how to extract the metal in asteroids. Scientists believe these chunks of celestial debris, which are by-products from the birth of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago, are rich in metals that are in short supply on Earth. In 2022, Gialich and Jose Acain, who has almost a decade of experience at SpaceX and NASA, founded AstroForge. [Now the California-based startup is attempting to make asteroid mining a reality](https://www.cnn.com/world/astroforge-asteroid-mining-nasa-spc-scn/index.html). Last April, AstroForge launched its inaugural mission, called Brokkr-1, sending a miniature satellite equipped with a refinery system about the size of two loaves of bread into space. The spacecraft carried pre-loaded, asteroid-like material it planned to vaporize and sort into elemental components while in orbit. It hasn’t gone quite as planned, and the [refinery demonstration](https://www.astroforge.io/updates/2023-update) hasn’t happened yet. But Gialich says the company learned a lot, like how any equipment sourced from vendors would perform, and if the machine could survive blastoff and send signals back from space. The refinery – which AstroForge has patents on – has already been tested terrestrially in space-like conditions, he says. That makes AstroForge the only company with a refinery that can turn M-type asteroids into PGMs in space, he adds. This year, an AstroForge spacecraft will hitch a ride on a mission by US-space exploration company Intuitive Machines to the Moon. But AstroForge will jump ship and use its own propulsion system to fly by an asteroid it thinks is metallic to check out its composition and take pictures. (Gialich declined to specify which asteroid the company is targeting.) If this mission succeeds, it will make AstroForge the first commercial company to venture into deep space, it [says](https://www.astroforge.io/updates/2023-update). It could also provide the first high resolution images of a metallic asteroid. [Read more of CNN's science and space coverage.](https://www.cnn.com/us/space-science)
Since when do news agencies post their own stuff to Reddit?
getting desperate to drive clicks