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[Trekkin]

Iridium and Platinum are our spices, Space is our Atlantic Ocean - All we need is a Queen of Spain mad enough to fund the venture, a "caravel" capable of crossing the void, and a Colombus dumb enough or daring enough to put his life at risk going out there, and we roll the dice on another explosion of wealth for the entire damn species. Even if there's a chance it'll come up snake-eyes, it's still worth it in my opinion, particularly since Space Exploration isn't actually all that expensive on a national scale compared to things like defense infrastructure and social services. If we actually turned our national attention to the project for more than just optical reasons I could definitely see great leaps being made.

So "all" we need is someone to pay for it, the technology to make it possible, and the expertise to make it work, and then we can very expensively put human lives at unnecessary risk doing mining better done by robots anyway to mine vast quantities of minerals valued principally for their rarity. That's a hard sell.

It's never a good sign when you call the people who would do what you want insane and/or stupid, you know.

[Dorsidwarf]

I mean, putting long-term fully-autonomous robots into the equation (And for asteroid mining they have to be) raises questions of expense and “isn’t possible in the current day” era very much comparable to human life support for the same issues.

Also to be somewhat flippant,
1) People will fund just about anything if it has the words space in it these days
2) “geee we don’t know how we will do Objective X. If only there was some sort of government funded scientific body that could perform hundreds of millions of dollars worth of aerospace research around here....”
3)Everything advanced is expensive these days
4) Why not apply the same logic to all the hundreds of thousands of people employed worldwide in dangerous jobs?
5) duBiers seems to do quite well for themselves 😎

[Kagus]

5) duBiers seems to do quite well for themselves 😎

DuBiers? Do you mean De Beers?

Do you not know De Beers, brudda?

[thompson]

There really isn't any hurry to start some industry or colonization of space. It's not as if its going anywhere. And there's nothing we can do to Earth that will make it less habitable than any other body in the solar system. The death of the Sun is the big long-term risk, but we'd need interstellar technology to escape that one. Best to wait for robotics to get good enough before doing anything beyond pissing contests.

[Trekkin]

Also to be somewhat flippant,
1) People will fund just about anything if it has the words space in it these days
2) “geee we don’t know how we will do Objective X. If only there was some sort of government funded scientific body that could perform hundreds of millions of dollars worth of aerospace research around here....”
3)Everything advanced is expensive these days
4) Why not apply the same logic to all the hundreds of thousands of people employed worldwide in dangerous jobs?
5) duBiers seems to do quite well for themselves 😎

1) No, they will not, at least if by "people" you mean the agencies who actually fund space exploration. It looks like it if you're watching pop science for news of new space missions, since of course 100% of the missions that actually launch have been funded, but the funding process is as competitive as you'd expect given the costs involved. If by "people" you mean the public, they still won't. Not in America. Americans don't love space exploration any more than they love science; it's all well and good as long as they can say "we" (meaning other people who happen to live in the same country) made some momentous discovery, but as soon as it disagrees with them or requires some personal contribution they start endlessly nattering about priorities. Thus the climate change "debate." When Americans say they love science, including space exploration, they mean they love it as a product to be consumed. That doesn't translate into producing it.

2) Yes, there exist agencies to fund hundreds of millions of dollars of research. That's actually not enough for a project of this scale, particularly since the ongoing costs aren't research-related. Musk's estimate just to get people to Mars runs to $10 billion a person; moon base costs are about that, with about three times as much spent on ongoing construction and maintenance with no science value. Nobody learns anything from sending a tenth rocketload of necessary widgets to the moonbase that couldn't be learned from a more novel use for that hardware. The ISS ran into this problem and it crippled NASA. Building the equivalent of many, many ISSes is just not tenable.

3) Like I said, the problem is not absolute cost. The problem is that what we get for that money isn't worth it to the people who determine how it is spent.

4) You can. We do. Then people complain about automation.

5) De Beers was also infamous for controlling the supply of diamonds. The ongoing costs of space mining require the sale of enough output to significantly drive down the price of the elements involved. Plus which, much like Columbus and his efforts to find gold in the New World by mutilating the natives until they brought it to him, much of De Beers' wealth is built on exploitative practices that are literally impossible in space because there's nobody out there to exploit -- and therefore nobody to absorb the infrastructure costs.

[smjjames]

Not sure whether to attempt to offramp the tangent to the space thread or not.....

Iridium and Platinum are our spices, Space is our Atlantic Ocean - All we need is a Queen of Spain mad enough to fund the venture, a "caravel" capable of crossing the void, and a Colombus dumb enough or daring enough to put his life at risk going out there, and we roll the dice on another explosion of wealth for the entire damn species. Even if there's a chance it'll come up snake-eyes, it's still worth it in my opinion, particularly since Space Exploration isn't actually all that expensive on a national scale compared to things like defense infrastructure and social services. If we actually turned our national attention to the project for more than just optical reasons I could definitely see great leaps being made.

So "all" we need is someone to pay for it, the technology to make it possible, and the expertise to make it work, and then we can very expensively put human lives at unnecessary risk doing mining better done by robots anyway to mine vast quantities of minerals valued principally for their rarity. That's a hard sell.

It's never a good sign when you call the people who would do what you want insane and/or stupid, you know.

I took it to mean more that all we need is someone who is willing to take such a risk, even if they're called 'mad' or 'dumb' for doing so. Columbus might not be the best example to use because he stiffed the King and Queen of Spain on payment I believe, among other reasons, but the metaphor works.

[Dunamisdeos]

So "all" we need is someone to pay for it, the technology to make it possible, and the expertise to make it work, and then we can very expensively put human lives at unnecessary risk on a trio of ships across the ocean to a place we barely know exists to mine vast quantities of gold valued principally for their rarity. That's a hard sell.

See now if you update it for the time period in the metaphor, you still aren't wrong, but also those are exactly the risks that drive us forward, and that have driven us forward in the past.

I don't think anyone here is saying that you're wrong, only that you can't discard the idea based solely on risk. Those were the only things to gain from settling the Americas, too, from a European perspective.

[Enemy post]

Off topic, but I just wanted to say that I'm pretty sure Columbus may be the luckiest man to ever live.

[PTTG??]

How it feels talking about climate change sometimes.

[Folly]

Why not build a giant autonomous drill that can carry a highly trained team of miners to the center of the earth? We could find diamonds down there, and fossils of ancient species we never knew existed!

Or we could assemble an army of potential magicians to incant random words all day every day, in the hopes that one of them might discover magic! It could revolutionise our understanding of all natural laws!

Or we could start building giant robots, so that we'll be prepared when the kaiju invade! We'll never know how useful they might be unless we try!

[PTTG??]

Why not build a giant autonomous drill that can carry a highly trained team of miners to the center of the earth? We could find diamonds down there, and fossils of ancient species we never knew existed!

Or we could assemble an army of potential magicians to incant random words all day every day, in the hopes that one of them might discover magic! It could revolutionise our understanding of all natural laws!

Or we could start building giant robots, so that we'll be prepared when the kaiju invade! We'll never know how useful they might be unless we try!

So your argument isn't that space exploration is a low priority, your argument is that space travel is completely pointless?

[Il Palazzo]

Goddamnit. All the posts criticising the hurrah-optimistic moonbase arguments are not saying 'space exploration bad'. They're saying 'make a proper argument why it's worth it'. No ridiculous analogies to domestication or Columbus, no cherry-picked bits of data that are meaningless out of context, but at least a first approximation cost-benefit analysis that doesn't try to push an agenda but attempts to honestly figure out if there's any concrete point in doing it. And if the only reason is your concern about species survival or following the spirit of exploration, make it clear that that's what you're going for, instead of trying to paint it as somehow economically viable (without good reason).
By Jove.

[Bumber]

However, the moon is close enough that the delay time between action and confirmation would be sufficiently low that robots could feasibly be used for construction, and that is about the only way it could be feasible.

(You send robots to the moon, and control them from earth. The robots are used to construct a spartan set of human habitations and work areas, and then you cough up the heavy dough to send a small human workforce to continue the work past that point.)

Sending a landing craft with human construction workers onto a barren lunar surface is laughably absurd.
Sending fully built habitats on rockets and landing them on the moon is also laughably absurd.

Sadly, building sufficiently robust construction robots that also meet launch cost budgets... Is also laughably absurd.  (Just less absurd than the first two.)

Could we make concrete from moon rocks and use 3D concrete printing robots?

[Folly]

Why not build a giant autonomous drill that can carry a highly trained team of miners to the center of the earth? We could find diamonds down there, and fossils of ancient species we never knew existed!
Or we could assemble an army of potential magicians to incant random words all day every day, in the hopes that one of them might discover magic! It could revolutionise our understanding of all natural laws!
Or we could start building giant robots, so that we'll be prepared when the kaiju invade! We'll never know how useful they might be unless we try!

So your argument isn't that space exploration is a low priority, your argument is that space travel is completely pointless?

My argument is that we don't do every stupid and expensive thing we can think of just because there might be some potential for profit.

The discovery and colonization of the Americas was largely the result of advancements in naval technology making such journeys practical. When space travel to places worth visiting becomes practical, absolutely re-open this chapter of human exploration. Until then, we're just wasting resources that could be better utilized elsewhere.

[Karnewarrior]

Goddamnit. All the posts criticising the hurrah-optimistic moonbase arguments are not saying 'space exploration bad'. They're saying 'make a proper argument why it's worth it'. No ridiculous analogies to domestication or Columbus, no cherry-picked bits of data that are meaningless out of context, but at least a first approximation cost-benefit analysis that doesn't try to push an agenda but attempts to honestly figure out if there's any concrete point in doing it. And if the only reason is your concern about species survival or following the spirit of exploration, make it clear that that's what you're going for, instead of trying to paint it as somehow economically viable (without good reason).
By Jove.

It is economically viable, I just posted the reasoning not a few pages ago. Iridium alone would pay for the rocket, and a tidy profit could be turned on more mundane metals like Iron and Nickel as well, even if we ignore the rare-earth metals. This isn't speculation, this is reality. Those metals are up there, are in large quantities, and are quite valuable, even ridiculously so in some cases. And we don't need future technology to go get them. There's no reason we need a human to go out and collect the asteroid, and we don't need more than a few humans to overwatch the extraction process in orbit or on the moon. We know how to do it, it's just a matter of convincing people like you who are, honestly, pessimistic to a silly degree about the prospects.

Again, there are actual, known quantities of this stuff. We've been looking at the make-up of asteroids for a long while, we know they're high in Iridium, Iron, and other metals. We know how to get them into orbit, albeit quite slowly with modern techniques. And we know that producing our rockets in space would lower costs significantly. I mean, metal is heavier than water, and water costs a lot to bring up to space. You can't argue that it wouldn't be cheaper to build our rockets up there, mine our water up there, and just focus on the humans and the food and the occasional part - all of which would make space mining even more profitable.

You're acting like the costs are unknown, but if we're honest, they aren't. They're just really expensive right now; and we know that once we put the money into it the costs will only decrease.