The Astronomy Thread

[Mk_C]

A lot of people think that when oil deposits get rarer, price for oil will rise and make exploiting more challenging deposits worthwhile and thus the supply of oil and energy will remain the same. However, we need resources for this exploitation, meaning the EROI keeps sinking. The danger of a low EROI is that we can be lacking the energy surplus to maintain higher industry, extensive schooling or the ability to feed the population. We've had an EROI of 100 barrels/barrel in 1900.

Can it be really simplified that way?

[Werra]

Yes, of course.

[danuis]

There's some Phosphate on Mars, according to Zubrin, and if we never terraform the thing, why not use it here.... We're almost out of it. We're almost out of a LOT of metals, not just Rare Earth Stuff, in the decades range. That is far, far too low to be comfortable. This will only decrease as the population expands to its peak and the rest of the world demands a higher living standard.

Exploit Mars, exploit the Moon. Exploit the system; we only need to do it for around two hundred years, a hundred fifty, or less, as the population goes back down and demands for living standards change and tech leapfrogs; even at a low estimate the system has 'enough' for 500 years. And of course, we must work here, to secularize the world, or at the least, develop as much of it as possible to get everyone to a equal birth rate, education rate, to protect and rebound the biosphere, and see what we can do then.

The only fear I have is that if our technological civilization collapses too soon, humanity will be capped at a 1700ish-1800ish level (wood, charcoal steam, and even then pre-industrial man was damn good at deforestation...) for, well, ever, when it rebounds; or if we're lucky we collapse before the Arctic and Antarctic Oil is drained, giving a successor world a small chance to...I dunno, get computers again.

[Mk_C]

We're almost out of it. We're almost out of a LOT of metals, n

We are?

[Werra]

Yes.

[Mk_C]

Yes.

Oh, thank God it's "someone's pissed they are not making as much money as they could by exploiting a natural resource" and not "natural resource is approaching exhaustion".

[danuis]

Yes.

Oh, thank God it's "someone's pissed they are not making as much money as they could by exploiting a natural resource" and not "natural resource is approaching exhaustion".

We're almost out of it. We're almost out of a LOT of metals, n

We are?

I refer not to just sand, nor just general profiteering, but actual physical reaching of those metals;

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2012 ... tock-check - for some reason, this was a hell of a thing to find; it seems the BBC has deprecated it, but this is what I remember,

Now, you can shelve this off by opening new mines, digging deeper, dirtier, not giving a damn about the environment, mining the sea bed, actually recycle worth a damn of a percentage - but even then that can only do so much. The United States staved off a oil crisis in the '15 range due to horizontal drilling and fracking taking of, and we're going to see similar stories and tech used for everything on that chart.

We're going to see a back and forth this century. North Korea, for instance, might liberalize or at the very least develop their economy to crack open their mountains, they got trillions down there to use. It looked much worse from the 90s, but new tech and a new willingness to blow everything up, again, opened up new deposits of everything, everywhere.

And that's going to continue - we'll probably slump in total resources accrued in the 30s, 40s, then Siberia and Antarctica and the Arctic would be opened and we'll see Russia, the US, China, Norway, Canada, Chile, Argentina, Greenland, South Africa, India, and Australia go hog-wild. They HAVE to, just to keep their economies afloat, and the environment will suffer for it, but ah well.

If we're lucky, it'll last another half-century. By now we're in the 2090s, 2100s... and I hope by then we've either reached peak population, gotten fusion power, and started some asteroid mining by then to alleviate the pressure of Earth here....

[vr0ck]

How hopeful the people who provide the data for that article were back in 2012, giving almost 200 years do complete deforestation of brazilian rainforest.

[Mk_C]

I refer not to just sand, nor just general profiteering, but actual physical reaching of those metals;
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2012 ... tock-check - for some reason, this was a hell of a thing to find; it seems the BBC has deprecated it, but this is what I remember,

[Press X to doubt]
Profit-oriented development is not a hallmark of sustainability, but somehow I have troubles buying back-of-a-napkin calculations for exhaustion of natural resources, especially the ones that explicitly state that they just project the current consumption growth rates without accounting for literally anything else, including changes in production and consumption, and according to which our planet should be plain zero on Antimony right now, and finishing dusting up the last grains of Indium like, tomorrow.

Now, you can shelve this off by opening new mines, digging deeper, dirtier, not giving a damn about the environment, mining the sea bed, actually recycle worth a damn of a percentage - but even then that can only do so much.

So can consumption. We're not annihilating those materials into pure nothingness - most of them are used for products that get discarded after use as acquiring more of the raw stuff at the source is cheaper than recycling. Stuff that used to be prime consumption material before entering extremely high recycling rates underwent this shift not because we've drained the wells or got overly-conscious about the environment, it happened because unrecycled material became so abundant and kept occurring at such scale that it became economically unviable not to exploit it.

Same things are happening to other resources - and those that keep getting mined in tremendous amounts have that situations largely bound not by abundance or scarcity, but mostly by the fact that a mining ops in China or Brazil or Russia plus transportation costs are still cheaper than recycling, mostly because the costs on an army of fly-in fly-out Russian mining ops and freight are still cheaper than a minor recycling op in the first world - as the latter demands specialists who want an actual salary that pays for their exorbitantly overpriced education and housing and Medicaid and stuff. That's not a resource scarcity issue. Neither is population numbers or the living standards, as 25% of the worlds resource turnover is consumed by 5% of the global population that doesn't even enjoy sufficiently high living standards compared to many economies that consume exponentially less. All of this loss happens through nothing but cutting costs on labor, regulation and taxation - which is not even an issue in itself, it only illustrates that the economic forces that thrive on such a state of events would have no choice (and no real trouble) in adapting should actual scarcity hit - others have already adapted. The energy sources that Werra brings up are among the few non-renewables that we actually irrevocably use up (as we chew up their energy and leave ourselves with by-products in a lower energy state), and EROI is a real issue for what is or isn't economically viable at the moment, but we'll have to not only chew through all the petroleum, natural gas and coal, but also forget every single source of nuclear and green power and have economic actors throw up their hands and sit on mountains of rapidly devaluating dollars instead of working to keep themselves rich and investing in the next best thing once petrochemicals run dry - the EROI issues with Little Ice Age and slave scarcity might have killed the economy of the Roman Empire and the Rome with it, but it didn't kill the economy of Europe - it merely forced it to adapt to new production approach, hence my doubt in Werra's simplification of "EROI goes up we're back to serfdom". The one thing that everyone loves about markets is how gloriously adaptive they are, yet we have an evident expectation of their utter lack of adaptability in any measure around here. These visions of extraction industries endlessly growing like cancer until they deplete everything and leave us with Medieval tech look like something outta XIX century projections of growing cities being eventually buried in shit, instead of someone finally deciding that plumbing might be a thing you can make good buck on.

Which all comes back to my relevant topical point - it doesn't seem quite reasonable that resource exhaustion will serve to either propel human expansion into space (seeing how ungodly expensive it is in both energy expenditures and the needs for insanely qualified labor to mine shit off-world instead of just recycling the damn antimony and enriching the fucking Uranium), or stifle it (as regulating the energy demands of the population appears to be a trivial tasks once there is an actual incentive for it, and, say, Soviets managed to send landers on Venus when producing less than 10% of energy that US produces today). We might have to look for incentives AND obstacles elsewhere. You don't seem to notice that half the inhabited continents on this planet got populated because some group of people was unwilling to keep sharing their breathing space with some other people and their policies, or how the largest pre-space exploration and colonization fever was driven not by demand in basic resources but rather sales markets and exotic luxury good, or that we got our asses out in space in the first place because reds and blues really felt like having a planet-wide contest to decide who's the growers and who's the showers around here. Not that some fat bearded guy was wrong about economy being the foundation of everything, but it certainly suggests that the cultural side of things have been and still remains full of surprises. And don't we have even more good examples in good fiction to give our thoughts food?

And also, we might want to stop polluting one of 3,5 discussion threads that Jim still willingly posts in with our shitty laymen futurology takes - kinda damaging the fragile ecosystem of Kewl Spess Stuff.

[Werra]

You don't seem aware of what EROI really means. It's not that with a decrease in EROI we'll return to a lower rung on the technological ladder. It means that the portion of the economy involved in energy acquisition will need to be larger. If EROI drops from 100 to 1 to 10 to 1 we would need to use up energy reserves at ten times the rate just to maintain and would have that much more of the brightest minds of humanity bound to upkeep instead of working for our advancement.
Sustainability is a myth, because to maintain our current level of people in a sustainable manner would require far more resources and energy than we are currently spending. One example, perhabs the most important, is food production. We're currently increasing our caloric yields by pumping calories obtained from fossil fuels into the process as fertilizer and energy for indoor growing facilities. To get that process to sustainability would require one of two things. Enough land on which we could farm in a fully natural way or sating its energy demands by renewable energy. The land isn't there. The most fertile land has been in use for millennia by now. Renewable energy has a worse EROI and faces the storage problem, which makes them dependable on precious, difficult to recycle minerals like Lithium.
If we try to cut back resource consumption, we're faced with one very difficult challenge. Reworking the worlds entire industrial structure requires a massive effort that costs resources and energy. Moving from big city life to sustainable, localized farming for instance would require a build-up of rural housing that's hardly possible in a world that's already facing sand shortages. No, it's not a matter of profits. Islands have vanished for sand. If one of the most common materials on the planet is in short supply, what is the situation with rarer resources likely to be?
The next step in technology has always increased resource and energy demands and it will be no different if we implement whatever it's going to be after petrol. The kind of open ended research, engineering projects of doubtful profits and decades long infrastructure construction can not be done by companies operating in a free, capitalistic market. That free market is very good at optimizing for monetary gain, yet crippled when a time comes where goals other need to be reached. Goals that can not be so neatly fit into an Excel-sheet.
We've got one choice. Take what we have now and push ourselves towards a project like space exploration that may yield new, exploitable resource deposits. Or remain in a lifeboat for two that seats eight people today, ten tomorrow and hope that we've prepared until the others make a headcount.

If we hadn't let most forms of idealism and nationalism getting cored out in the last century we, as a society, could still set ourselves a non-monetary dream that could sustain us through the efforts of setting roots in deep space. Spaxe X is nice and all, but the company is only capturing a market that was created by states funneling gigantic sums into it out of nationalistic interests.

[Arioch]

PBS Spacetime did an episode on the Venus phosphine detection, and speculated on what forms Venusian life might take. They address my principal criticism, which is that while evolved microorganisms might be able to enter some kind of inert spore phase to survive the times when atmospheric circulation takes them out of the narrow habitable zone, it would be almost impossible for the first basic life forms to originate in such an environment. They concede this point and point out something that hadn't occurred to me, which is that Venus probably had an Earth-like phase in its early history, before the runaway greenhouse effect turned it into a hellzone. Life might have been able to originate on the surface in conditions similar to those on Earth, and then evolved to adapt to survival in the upper atmosphere as it slowly got hotter and denser (and more acidic) over time.

[Werra]

I've got a quite possibly extremely naive question. Can the phosphine on Venus have originated on earth?

Phosphine escapes earths atmosphere and then gets caught by Venus, over time enriching that atmosphere with phosphine. Microbial life on earth has been going on for a while, afterall.

[Arioch]

I've got a quite possibly extremely naive question. Can the phosphine on Venus have originated on earth?

Phosphine escapes earths atmosphere and then gets caught by Venus, over time enriching that atmosphere with phosphine. Microbial life on earth has been going on for a while, afterall.

There's no mechanism to transport gas from Earth to Venus. Gas stripped from Earth's atmosphere by the solar wind would blow outward from the Sun, not inward toward Venus.

Phosphine is a reactive chemical, so large quantities of it means that some process is creating it faster than it can be destroyed. It doesn't necessarily mean that this process is biological, but that's one of the possibilities.

[icekatze]

hi hi

It'd be interesting to see what kind of method they might use to bring samples back to Earth. They've brought samples back from comets before, so the in-space part of the return leg is already proven. But to escape the atmosphere... a balloon launched rocket? A sample of atmospheric gas isn't a terribly heavy payload, and getting that to work on Venus could prove beneficial on Earth as well. (at least for small cube sat launches?)

We've already had autonomous docking in orbit for decades now, so they wouldn't even need to drop the entire return booster into the atmosphere.

[Arioch]

I think getting out of Venus' gravity well would be more of a concern than the atmosphere -- you can get extremely high with a big enough balloon.

I don't see how they can get any kind of serious detector there (much less a sample return) without a HUGE mission. But fortunately, those guys are more clever at this than I am.

[Mk_C]

Now, hear me out. What if (finishes his vodka), what if we throw a real good nuke at the surface of Venus, while an orbiter hangs in MVO and harvests a kilo or two of the blast ejecta? Getting the cargo out of the well and on a return course to Earth should be easy enough from there.

PTBT lists outer space, not other planets, and a munition that is explicitly launched at Venus does not count as "stationed on any other celestial body or in outer space" for the purposes of OST. So it is not even illegal to nuke the shit out of Venus.

[Ithekro]

Depending on what's there, that could be like declaring war on Venus. While there shouldn't be any civilizations there...its kind of the principle of the thing.

[icekatze]

hi hi

I've heard some talk of using something similar to the SCIM to skim the atmosphere and capture samples in aerogel without orbiting, but at this early stage in the game I bet more people are still in the preliminary stages of figuring out what to do.

[Arioch]

I've heard some talk of using something similar to the SCIM to skim the atmosphere and capture samples in aerogel without orbiting, but at this early stage in the game I bet more people are still in the preliminary stages of figuring out what to do.

Venus' atmosphere is many thousands of times more dense than Mars'. I doubt you'd be able to get deep enough with a skimmer to reach the habitable zone.

[Ithekro]

Maybe a Hypersonic probe?