How Mining On Mars Could Save The Earth

let's talk about mining in space the final frontier of resource extraction because everything that we could ever need every rock metal and gas to support a boundless human civilization from now until the day that the sun explodes it's all readily available right here in our own Celestial neighborhood the tricky part is going out and getting those resources then figuring out how to use them effectively it's going to be spectacularly difficult preposterously expensive and more than a little dangerous but space mining will be an essential part of making human life multi-planetary and it will even help us to save the Earth at the same time this is the space race foreign we are going to cover three flavors of space mining today asteroids the moon and other planets namely Mars and we are going to start off with asteroids because they offer The Highest Potential reward and also the highest level of complication the reason we like asteroids is because they are essentially leftover raw materials from billions of years ago when the solar system was formed all of the metal rock dust and gas that never got the chance to become a planet instead became an asteroid that means that asteroids are made up of the same stuff as planets but in a much more concentrated and accessible format when a planet forms everything gets very hot and molten which means that the heavy metals will sink down into the surface and the heaviest Metals will gather in the middle and form the core that concentrated Mass creates a gravity well which then pulls in more stuff and eventually makes a planet many asteroids never went through that melting and settling process says so you can still find massive chunks of heavy metals just floating around out there and these are the most interesting in terms of mining them for resources m-type or metallic asteroids are typically composed of 80 iron and a 20 mixture of nickel iridium Palladium platinum gold magnesium and other precious metals such as osmium ruthenium and rhodium there are single asteroids out there that contain more nickel than all of the available Nickel in the Earth's crust put together even more interesting than that is the presence of these rare earth metals like Platinum Palladium and rhodium these elements are the reason that catalytic converters from gasoline-powered vehicles have become such a hot commodity in recent years and why yours may have been sawn off in the middle of the night and stolen by a bunch of gangsters rare earth metals aren't exactly rare on Earth so much as they are just very difficult to find Platinum Group Metals don't concentrate into large veins the way that gold does they're just scattered all over the place in small amounts but this isn't the case on a metallic asteroid again just one space Rock a few hundred meters across might yield you more Platinum than has ever been produced on Earth or will ever be produced on Earth and wouldn't it be amazing if we could just Source all of the Exotic Metals and things that we would ever need from asteroids if we could just stop mining the Earth and mine outer space instead so we have all of these amazing resources out there in the open just floating around all we need to do is reach them and that's where things get difficult not every asteroid is inherently valuable they're all interesting we can do some incredible sides just by studying literally any asteroid but in terms of resources they're a mixed bag so before settling on one to mine we would need to first run a scouting Mission just to verify that the rock actually contains what we think it does as with just about everything in planetary science we are basically just making educated guesses based on the data that we have collected so far things that we think we know today could easily be proven wrong tomorrow and even with a confirmed jackpot on our hands reaching these asteroids will be incredibly difficult most of these m-class asteroids orbit right in between Mars and Jupiter and the center of the main belt that is pretty far away from Earth not on the cosmic scale but on the human scale that's a lot further than we typically Venture we're already pretty good at sending refrigerator sized probes into deep space and we can land cars on Mars but asteroids present a unique challenge when we send a vehicle to a planet like Jupiter we can maneuver the probe in such a way that it gets captured by the gravity of the planet and inserted into a stable orbit and when we land something on a planet like Mars or Venus we can use the atmosphere as an air brake to slow down neither of these Maneuvers work with asteroids many of them do do have enough Mass to generate gravity and some asteroids will have a small moon sometimes two asteroids will actually orbit each other but the force holding it all together is very weak so arriving at the asteroid without just sailing right past it and then figuring out how to slow down enough to land softly those are going to be very tricky to figure out it can be accomplished with propulsion but propulsion requires Fuel and if our goal is to land a mining rig on an asteroid and then return home with enough heavy metal to make this whole Venture worthwhile then we're going to need a Preposterous amount of fuel then we also need to consider that landing on an asteroid is not nearly as easy as Bruce Willett made it look in the movie asteroids generally aren't even solid they're more like flying piles of rubble all stuck together by a weak force of gravity as the asteroid moves through space it accumulates more loose rocks and dust it's like the roombas of the solar system so best case would be like trying to land a spacecraft on a pile of gravel worst case you might encounter something that acts like quicksand and the probe just gets absorbed into the asteroid and even if that somehow does work now we've got to figure out how to actually do the mining process typically on Earth if we're looking for the easiest way to access a mineral we just set an explosive charge in the Rock blow it up and then sort through the rubble looking for the good stuff that is an oversimplification but the point is you can't do that on an asteroid because all of the debris would just go flying out into space so we would need a very precise and efficient process for locating the resources and removing it from the body of the asteroid no one knows how to do that yet more access to resources especially for technology are solely needed besides a few companies riding the AI wave the tech industry has been getting destroyed the last 18 months even losing 800 billion dollars in a single day last year in fact the most successful hedge fund manager of all time says U.S capitalism is breaking down before our eyes now nearly 90 percent of financial advisors are going big into alternative Investments outside of just a company's stock Morgan Stanley themselves released a recent report on alts saying that for the last 30 years including them could have potentially lowered your volatility and increased your returns additionally Bank of America's investment head has discussed one specific High performing alternative to help rescue your cash Fine Art in fact the art investing platform Masterworks today's sponsor has already sold over 45 million dollars worth of artwork Distributing the Ned proceeds right to their investors Masterworks offers art from Legends like Picasso by filing an offering circular with the SEC allowing anyone to invest every one of Masterworks sales to date has delivered a positive return with recent sales netting 10 13 and even 35 returns paintings can sell out on their site in hours not days but right now you can get Priority Access to skip the wait list below mining on a closer more familiar body like our own moon is going to be a lot more practical than an asteroid although the moon doesn't quite offer the same level of reward for the effort that's not to say there isn't good stuff to be found out there our moon has two very important factors working in its favor for one it was volcanically active in the distant past so a bunch of those heavy metals that sunk down into the structure when the moon was forming eventually got ejected up through volcanoes and hardened on the surface that's left vast amounts of iron and titanium on the surface of the Moon there's actually a very unusually high concentration of titanium in Moon Rock about 10 times higher than what we would find in a similar rock type on Earth we're not sure why that is but regardless titanium and iron are fantastic construction materials for future Moon infrastructure and for two the moon has virtually zero atmosphere which means it has a wide collection of asteroids that reached the surface over billions of years we just talked about why asteroids are so valuable and the moon has one at the bottom of every crater there is also a large amount of helium on the moon this is important because we are in the midst of a helium shortage right now on Earth and we actually really need this stuff helium is incredibly non-reactive so it makes for an excellent way to create an inert protective atmosphere basically something that won't cause corrosion or combustion we use helium in making fiber optics and semiconductors it's in hard drives microscopes airbags cell phones it's even used as coolant in nuclear reactors but most importantly liquid helium is a coolant used in MRI machines at hospitals the moon also contains a lot of helium-3 which is an isotope of helium that only exists in very small quantities on Earth but is much more common on the moon because the surface has much more interaction with the solar wind again due to the lack of atmosphere year this helium-3 is an ideal material to fuel nuclear fusion reactions if we can ever figure out how to do that but if we can then the potential energy that can be released even from a small amount of helium-3 would power the Earth 10 times over the moon is also covered in water even the sunlight areas of the lunar surface contain some water molecules but it's likely pretty common in the shadowy bottoms of craters around the South Pole water is really heavy and human beings need a lot to stay alive so having to ship vast quantities of water to our future space stations and moon bases is going to be very costly and resource intensive they say it costs about ten thousand dollars to put one kilogram of mass into low earth orbit so that means if we can produce drinkable water on the moon for anything less than 10 grand per kilo then Moon water becomes more economical than launching It Off the Earth mining the moon does present its own list of problems though with the primary concerned being lunar dust on Earth the process of erosion smoothes out and rounds over all of the rough edges on rocks and small particles it's why sand feels so nice lunar dust is like the opposite of beach sand it's Jagged sharp and abrasive even in the short time that the Apollo Astronauts spent on the moon they struggled with dust it cut through their spacesuits scratched visors and instruments clogged up mechanical systems and it's so clingy that they couldn't help but track dust back into their lunar lander where they ended up breathing the stuff and experiencing respiratory issues from it Gene cernan the commander of Apollo 17 said that the dust would be the single greatest obstacle against operations on the moon and it may not be something that we can overcome it's hard to imagine a more effective way to kick up dust than Mining and because of the low gravity combined with the lack of atmosphere the dust isn't just going to fall down or blow away it's going to linger above the surface for a really long time in reality all of our operations on the moon are going to create a significant dust Hazard if we start making a habit of Landing spaceships driving around in Rovers and digging up the surface then we could essentially end up creating a low atmosphere of dust all around the Moon which would be catastrophic and then there's Mars we know that Mars already has a gigantic dust storms all on its own so we can't do any harm there and we've already had really great success at Landing some pretty big stuff on the planet the perseverance Rover is like the size of a Honda Civic and Mars definitely does have some good potential for mining same with the moon we are looking for volcanic areas where the valuable metals from inside the planet bubbled up onto the surface Mars just so happens to contain the largest mountain in the entire solar system an ancient volcano called Olympus Mons it's so huge that it sticks up off the surface of the planet like a big pimple this formed because Mars doesn't have plate tectonics so the surface never moves around or refreshes itself like the Earth that volcano just sat there in the same place slowly erupting for billions of years and there are a bunch of similar volcanic areas on Mars that are going to be rich with valuable minerals also like the Moon Mars has a lot of crater so we know where to find the remains of asteroids and all of the important resources that they bring but unlike the Moon Mars had liquid water at one point in the ancient past this also helps us out with locating resources because water is a very effective solvent it dissolves The Rock and transports the minerals as it flows along then those heavier elements gather and condense in low-lying areas so we know that anywhere on Mars that had flowing water will be rich in useful minerals and then obviously there's water on Mars plenty of it and a lot of it is still just Frozen on the surface and will be easy to find and collect in many ways mining on Mars is probably the most cost effective and most vital of the potential ideas that we've talked about if we are going to have people living on Mars someday or even just exploring there on long-term missions they need to be able to live off the land so to say getting Mass into low earth orbit is difficult and expensive getting Mass onto the moon is even more so getting Mass all the way to Mars and Landing it on the surface is a whole level up in difficulty it's not going to be sustainable to just ship everything that people will ever need in a rocket so at the very least mining water and oxygen will be essential for survival mining hydrogen and carbon will be important for making new rocket fuel over the long term iron nickel copper gold and titanium will need to be extracted from volcanic regions to build new infrastructure and Technology on Mars either way the logistics around this kind of operation is going to be spectacularly complicated and it's going to require a broad cooperation among the people of the earth to accomplish no one company or Nation or space agency can realistically do this on their own so it's going to be fascinating to watch these ideas play out over the decades to come meet us back here every week for more updates on everything Aerospace industry and Interstellar exploration related make sure to give the video a thumbs up today if you liked it that really helps us out for real and subscribe to the Space Race for more videos just like this we do one long form essay and one news update every week and if you'd like more we've got two more on the screen for you right now

Channel: The Space Race

Views: 50,592

Keywords: space mining, space exploration, mars mining, moon mining, mining on mars, asteroid mining, mars colony, mars base, moon colony, moon base, earth, nasa, spacex, space

Id: _pzwVwhcjtY

Length: 15min 42sec (942 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/LunaticBZ]

Having watched the video.

I lost count of how many times he said a phrase similar to "But no ones solved this problem yet." As he brings up the difficulties of mining in space.

When really every problem he brought up has known solutions. None of them particularly unsolvable, every issue he brought up with Lunar mining... The Artemis program has been working on those issues, the dust, the water sourcing etc.

When it comes to asteroid mining, assumptions are being made with out of date information, and then assuming zero progress.

Shortly after he started talking about the advantage of mars atmosphere I just gave up. :p Yeah it helps you land... That doesn't help you get anything back though, and why would you mine mars to send to Earth in the first place? If your mining on Mars your going to want those resources for Mars.

[u/CMVB]

Haven’t finished this video yet, but I’ve had pretty good luck with Space Race so far.

Also, the video is not just about Mars, despite the title/thumbnail.