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Then there's always asteroid mining. That could be the major profit driver for early space colonization.

The thing about mining that everyone forgets, is that its not enough for the desired element to be present, you also need an energy gradient to drive natural processes to concentrate it into ore.

Mars has this. Actually ALL the same processes as Earth.

Ceres and Luna had radioisotopic heat gradients and hydrothermal systems, so maybe.

Europa and Ganymede have tidal heating and hydrothermal systrems, plus fractional crystalisation of brines in ice diapirs. So maybe, but a bit weird.

Most asteroids are poorly differentiated and probably worthless.

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Discussion

Daniel Wigton 1y ago

Yup. Just the few that were part of proto planet cores that got blasted are useful, but those very much so.

Low Information Voter 1y ago

My boss would love to dissolve Psyche in carbonyl. He has done some unpublished research on this, proving the practicality of separating iron, nickel and cobalt carbonyls.

Don't try this at home, though!

MichaelJ 1y ago

If you can get to the asteroids, though, couldn't you throw the rocks in a hot centrifuge or something to concentrate the elements into ores? Maybe not.

Daniel Wigton 1y ago

Worth a try!

Low Information Voter 1y ago

You certainly can, there are many technologies we could use; but it costs energy, and wear and tear on precision machinery that is hard to repair and harder to replace.

Mars, by contrast, very likely has ores of a purity we mined out on Earth long ago; that mining engineers today can only dream of.

Luna and Ceres will have some too, but not the variety and mostly in deep hydrothermal systems hard to access.

Europa and Ganymede have stronger energy gradients than Earth or Mars ever did, but their geology is WEIRD. Most probably they have ores of amazing purity lying around, but they will be ones we don't see on Earth except in some evaporite sequences.

MichaelJ 1y ago

That's not an angle I'd heard before. Makes Mars look more attractive again, to be sure. We could probably pioneer some of the techniques on Luna before going out to the Red Planet.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 1y ago

"again" is the photo of old green mars in the room with you now?