Space rock can be used to create hull space. Lots of hull space, can't have too much of that. Besides, hauling a whole asteroid down to Earth is wasteful, considering that 95% of it is likely to be garbage as far as Earth is concerned, but in space all that garbage can come in handy. Now, if you managed to find an asteroid made of solid gold, then yeah, down to Earth it goes. Barring that, might as well maximize the usefulness of those rocks.
"And if the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war and not popularity seeking. If they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war." - William Tecumseh Sherman
“The market, like the Lord, helps those who help themselves. But unlike the Lord, the market does not forgive those who know not what they do.” - Warren Buffett
"And if the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war and not popularity seeking. If they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war." - William Tecumseh Sherman
“The market, like the Lord, helps those who help themselves. But unlike the Lord, the market does not forgive those who know not what they do.” - Warren Buffett
That said, we're still only a few days from the moon and a few months from Mars with everything we have now. So while the distances are certainly immense, I'd say that we could at least put a few bases down, perhaps get as far as our settlement of Antarctica.
But if the time scale is hundreds of thousands of years then space colonization is not our most urgent problem--that would be ensuring nothing severe happens in the next couple hundred years.
But asteroid mining at least sounds like a reasonable project to restart the space age with...
This is a non-issue. Current hulls provide no more protection than rock would, all that matters is how thick the hull can be made.
Sure they do. Lack of building materials and huge costs associated with transporting them are major impediments. Asteroids can help alleviate that problem.Your notions of "cheap and plentiful" have no bearing on what needs to be done to survive space.
Last edited by rvg; 04-25-2012 at 13:18.
"And if the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war and not popularity seeking. If they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war." - William Tecumseh Sherman
“The market, like the Lord, helps those who help themselves. But unlike the Lord, the market does not forgive those who know not what they do.” - Warren Buffett
That is simply not true and I am telling you that. Metals can be fabricated to have many multiple thin layers with space in between them. This may be better for micrometeorite protection because the impact usually liquifies the object that is crashing into the space station. The thin layer with gaps may ensure minimum damage because the liquified meteorite will not have the cohesion after the first few layers to puncture the other layers. This is something that simply can't be done with rock.
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