Timeline for Resources to justify long-distance space mining missions
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
19 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 12, 2017 at 7:31 | comment | added | JDługosz | See @Peteris’s comment on the OP. With the stated shipping speed, it will consume more antimatter than you are shipping. Would someone plug that into the rocket equasion and see how bad it really is? | |
| May 11, 2016 at 21:44 | vote | accept | Seth | ||
| May 11, 2015 at 6:48 | comment | added | SF. | ...and due to the low intensity of gamma radiation due to the "matter" bodies receiving only scarce surface damage, it would be difficult to detect from Earth. | |
| May 11, 2015 at 6:42 | comment | added | SF. | Instead of planets/stars made of antimatter, make it an antimatter gas cloud, a nebula; medium not dense enough to cause explosions, just burn away at any asteroids that fly through - possibly burning them away, but maybe just letting them through with just some surface erosion. Such gas/dust cloud would be tricky to mine but not impossible. And it could be, say, 200AU from Tau Ceti (maybe orbiting it a'la Oort's Cloud) which would make the system a good place for solid base of operations while keeping the actual mining off-system. | |
| Apr 30, 2015 at 12:40 | comment | added | Tim B | Yes, I think this only works if the entire solar system is anti matter, or if there is some utterly bizarre mechanism protecting the antimatter from the normal matter. | |
| Apr 30, 2015 at 7:24 | comment | added | Taemyr | @DanSmolinske In the Niven story the whole star system was anti-matter, meaning it tended to collide with anti-matter. If only parts of a star system was anti-matter we would know, because we would be able to detect the gamma radiation from the system. | |
| Apr 29, 2015 at 15:38 | comment | added | Dan Smolinske | @ckersch: There was a Niven short story I recall that had an antimatter planet flying through interstellar space, this answer is roughly based on that. That's why I said a "fragment of a fragment" - only a small portion of the original would be left, but that would still be an insanely huge amount of antimatter compared to artificial production. | |
| Apr 29, 2015 at 15:08 | comment | added | ckersch | While an interesting thought, I'm not sure large chunks of antimatter could exist floating around Tau Ceti. There's too much matter floating around for them to react with, and even a small reaction would be likely to blow the asteroid into chunks too small to effectively mine. | |
| Apr 29, 2015 at 6:34 | comment | added | SF. | Note one more thing: After the initial investment of getting there, we obtain a very cheap fuel for awesome interstellar propulsion! Getting the antimatter back to the Solar System would only require developing an anti-matter powered drive. Even if you consume 95% of the "fuel" getting it back to Earth it would leave enough to allow interstellar travel on a tiny fraction of current costs and allow travel at relativistic speeds. | |
| Apr 29, 2015 at 3:02 | comment | added | user8827 | @user6511, the anti particles can't be used to heat water, or anything we might do with normal matter. So - you're right, but we still have to aim the photons at normal matter to cause excitations we can do something with. Massive tanks of water are not something we want to take to space, and other methods of controlling direction are particle accelerators in and of themselves. | |
| Apr 29, 2015 at 1:38 | comment | added | user6511 | The trick would be to find (invent) a reaction that produces high-energy charged particles. High-energy neutrons would work too. We can do energy capture on those with ease (and at efficiencies that make them worthwhile). | |
| Apr 29, 2015 at 1:14 | comment | added | user8827 | @user6511, yes - if you can do something useful with it, and that something is efficient enough to pay for the travel there and back. Any ideas? | |
| Apr 28, 2015 at 23:46 | comment | added | user6511 | Producing anti-matter requires boatloads of energy. More energy than we get out of a matter/anti-matter reaction. Producing it isn't good for energy production - only energy storage. Going and scooping up the stuff, after a natural process has made it, is a fantastic source of energy. | |
| Apr 28, 2015 at 20:37 | comment | added | user8827 | Matter antimatter reactions don't just get hot, they turn mostly into gamma ray photons. It's still very much an engineering barrier. It can't even be used for propulsion until you have a way to guarantee to direction that the photons take upon annihilating, and not irradiate the crew and electronics via gamma ray burst. | |
| Apr 28, 2015 at 20:22 | comment | added | Dan Smolinske | @SeanBoddy: So I found a reference that the worldwide production of antimatter, to date, would only power a light bulb for a couple of minutes. But that's a limitation on how much fuel we've produced, not on using an existing source. Fusion is difficult because you have to maintain high temperatures and pressure - antimatter just needs to be introduced with matter. I'm sure it's a lot harder than it sounds, but it doesn't seem like there's an engineering barrier that would make it impossible. | |
| Apr 28, 2015 at 20:00 | comment | added | user8827 | I read it somewhere - a brief history of time, maybe? You can get a sense of the problem by asking "How do I turn raw photons into something I can use with existing technology?" This is a solar panel. Then, "how do I control reaction rates of antihydrogen?" This requires a bonkers magnetic field, and only works after you strip the positrons so the particles have a net negative charge. Cheap fusion would be easy to fix if the magnetic field didn't take so much power to sustain - same problem with antimatter reactions. | |
| Apr 28, 2015 at 19:53 | comment | added | Dan Smolinske | @SeanBoddy: Link? That sounds interesting, I wasn't aware of any issues with implementation (not that we currently have the quantities necessary to develop one). | |
| Apr 28, 2015 at 19:46 | comment | added | user8827 | I love the answer, but it has to be coupled with a technology to use it more efficiently than we have now. There was an estimate that covered the planet Earth with facilities to power a single light bulb. Its the Dilithium Crystal hand wave problem. | |
| Apr 28, 2015 at 19:23 | history | answered | Dan Smolinske | CC BY-SA 3.0 |