Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
if we can't learn to utilize space resources then we will never significantly be able to travel in space. We should put most of our effort in autmation that can accomplish things in space like mining and refining right up to eventual manufacturing.
Yes and no. I don’t really see how robots in space is usually an end goal. Sure, we need satellites, probes, telescopes like we already do.
But mining is a great example where there’s no point . Of course robots can do it cheaper than humans but there are extremely few, if any, resources valuable enough to be worth mining in space and bringing back. Maybe helium-3 if we ever get fusion working.
Where it is worth machines mining in space is to support human space activities. Being able to, for example, build habitats or at least radiation shielding from simple local rock saves huge amounts over bringing that weight from earth. The reason people are excited about craters near the South Pole of the moon is the prospect mining water, oxygen, even rocket fuel for use to make human space activities radically cheaper. At that point you’ve drastically cut the weight of things needing to be lifted from earth, radically cut costs, while making life in space generally safer and easier.
See. The point is a complete space chain. so mining is not to bring back. space mining is for space smelting which is for space manufacture to make vehicles, robots, computers, and such to do more of the same. Once we have that then adding humans to the mix is just some earth resources and some manufactured goods may be worth landing on earth.