Mining asteroids is tricky and will be so expensive no one can currently fathom that kind of money. Many asteroids are small and so you would not be able to do a "long range" scan of its resources before the most likely unmanned probe arrived. Even if space mining was a thing before the Great White it would be next to impossible for any society to bring the operation back online.Sian
And if that's their motivation, war or world domination are unlikely goals because much of the (shallow) crust would have been mined out by their time. It occurs to me that maybe they want the slaves and old time weapons for another purpose; to access to deeper mineral deposits (slaves), or to help them get into space (missiles). Asteroids are very rich in resources compared to Earth's surface which was depleted by the planet forming process.
Herder Sympathizer
Mining asteroids is tricky and will be so expensive no one can currently fathom that kind of money.
Herder Sympathizer
Many asteroids are small and so you would not be able to do a "long range" scan of its resources before the most likely unmanned probe arrived. Even if space mining was a thing before the Great White it would be next to impossible for any society to bring the operation back online.
Every person whose read a sci-fi novel has thought of mining in space and if it were cheap and easy we would have done it already. Its nice to see that some people are taking it seriously but it won't become a reality unless the world's government's finally unify out efforts in space. I have no doubt that space will one day be as commercialized as the Earth but I hope it becomes so after we are well and truly a space faring race.
Erm, actually....not really.
I'm no expert on mining but I know that in general one type of metal or stone is mined at once. Sometimes certain metals or stones may indicate that another is present and efforts are made to harvest both. Its seems like any mining done in space would have to overcome the limits of the equipment itself. Equipment used to mine gold may not be the same equipment used to mine diamonds(can you imagine the expense of a diamond formed in space!?!?). Also, you would need a way to reduce waste. By waste I mean the material that will inevitably fly free in the mining process and the post-processing waste. I guess you could send the material to Earth for processing but doing it in space would cut down on pollution and probably save money if its done by robots with a few human overseers.
See, the problem here is that you're thinking of mining asteroids in the same way that people think about mining on Earth and it really just doesn't apply.
There are a number of asteroids that are more easily accessible than the moon (which we got done with 1960s tech) and certainly way easier than getting to Mars (to which our only impediment is motivation). Long range scanning might not be necessary because asteroids have a higher concentration of metals than the Earth's crust, pretty much by definition.
When you form a planet, all of the siderophiles literally get sucked in to form the core during planet differentiation (the process which makes the planet round). What siderophiles we have at the surface were brought here by crashed asteroids and there's so little that concentration processes are needed to form an ore body in order to make mining economical. Because those concentration proccesses are rare, and thus so are the ore bodies. But asteroids that are uneconomical to mine would be the exception rather than the rule (as they'd have to be chunks of shattered differentiated planet and the silicic bit of them at that, chunks of the core would be more economical).
The real challenge would be mining in 0g, but, its not even the making the tech for it that's the problem, its the thinking of the tech for it. In fact, the biggest problem with mining space, probably has nothing to do with mining space, it's probably to do with the mental barrier that comes with something so completely other.
I agree that perhaps the Chinon may only now be venturing into space travel but they would have had to never have relapsed and totally missed the Age of Chaos. Books and other reminders of the Beforetime were destroyed during that period and even an intact society would have had some riots and uprisings. Just imagine that one day your TV and internet don't work anymore and now you have to rely totally on word of mouth, newspapers, and the government for news. That would be cause for even an oppressed society to rebel.For this reason, if the beforetimers didn't need to, they wouldn't necessarily have tried to mine space. The Americans are looking into it because the Chinese are looking into it because they want to control global access to resources and to do that it's one of the things they need to lock up. If there were a global disaster, they probably wouldn't bother, even if they had the tech, because they've been stock piling resources for a while and have large reserves within their borders. The need would have disappeared. But if reserves were drying up, that brings back the need factor in a larger way than ever and need is the mother of invention.
Sian
It depends on how far away the mining operation is from Earth. Space junk regularly falls to Earth but is burned up in the atmosphere. A large mining operation would make a lot of waste and we would need to find a place to dispose of it or recycle it. I would love it if we turned the waste into something useful like soil. No doubt we'll need it for out nifty moon bases. :DSian
As to waste, why would they care about that? It would literally probably just get dumped into space and doing that would be unlikely to cause any problems at all whatsoever. Waste disposal would be much more efficient in space than it is on Earth. :P
Getting the stuff out and processing it in 0g is the difficulty and as I said, need is the mother of invention. Though I'd put my money on bacterial processing. Bioprocessing is making leaps and bounds atm.
Sian
That would be good to see, but I think you're still stuck in the Earth mining paradigm. (This isn't an argument against you, I'm just trying to express why a different paradigm of thinking is necessary for mining in space.)
Mining in 0g would be completely different and as it hasn't been figured out yet, so predicting how much or the type of waste it would produce is a little premature. It would depend on how much of the asteroid was water and/or metal and how you got the resources out.
Given the concentrations of metals, you could very well end up taking the entire asteroid apart, in which case there could be far too much waste to do anything with it at all. Alternatively, something like some sort of specialised in situ bio-leaching process could potentially just suck out the metals and leave the rest of the asteroid alone, not producing much waste at all. Or you could have a fragment of a destroyed planetismal's core which would be entirely metal and would all end up in your cargo.
That's not to say that you wouldn't use asteroids as soil sources for moon bases, I'm just trying to get you to think outside the box :)
Herder Sympathizer
it just seems like we would use more traditional methods first
