If you like to think about interstellar travel, one interesting option is that somebody (something?) could develop the ability to live independently of stars based on fusion. In this scenario you wouldn't have to move very fast, 10,000 years to get to the nearest star is about right, but you might lose all interest in dry inner solar system planets like the Earth (compared to something like Pluto which is closer to 50% water) before you get there.
If you could find lithium you could breed tritium and run a D + T fuel cycle, which creates a massive flux of neutrons (maybe need Pb or Be for multiplication) and will let you breed extra T that you can let decay to He3. D + He3 is a good candidate for a fuel for "fast" interstellar travel that might make the crossing in 50 years.
Alternately if you can make D + D work you can certainly live between the stars and you can still harvest some bred T and He3 for "mobile" applications.
Once you are out of a gravity well as a civ, why would you bother with them economically aside from tourism? Unless we get antigravity, or loop launch / space elevator / space hook sized planetoids (I think Mars is the practical limit of space elevators last I looked).
Red dwarfs appear ideal. Very long lived, and there do seem to be planets and asteroid material in them. A globular cluster of mostly red dwarfs would be an ideal long-term place for an "interstellar" civ. The stars drift as close as 1/3 light year.
Look at what some of the projected mineral yields of asteroids are. And comets can probably get you other element mixes as needed.
Yes, I think Lithium will be be available artificially with some form of fusion. Or you capture solar wind material perhaps.
But do humans really want to live on pluto? We evolved to live in nature, surrounded by plants and animals. I just don't see people wanting to live on a cold rock.
I would love to live on Pluto. I'm sure lots of people would. Anyway, we evolved without Twitter and HN too, but here we are, spending our waking hours online. Many people alive today have never physically even visited 'real' nature and are (probably, mostly) fine without it.
I don't think 'we evolved to X and therefore would never want Y" holds much water.
Seen the actual state of thing I have no interest living on Pluto or some other planet, but I might be interested in the ability to live in a Borg sphere/cube with full autonomy (food, water, weapons, ...) and enough (selected) humans to have enough DNA variability to been able to survive generations, a thing most people forget going to planets just for some natural resources when recycling is not enough...
Sorta unrelated to the article. But it linked to a NASA blog post on how the moon was formed. There's an embedded YouTube video from 2006 that has a computer simulation on how the moon was formed.
Was NOT expecting a (drum'n'bass) banger of a track on that video when the protomoon hits the protoearth. Shazam couldn't properly identify. I love old internet posts
If we're talking about mining lithium from elsewhere in the solar system or even galaxy, I'm willing to be that fusing hydrogen and helium to get there is a much more energy efficient route. Maybe this is something you do where you don't need as dense a form of energy, but still. It's only the 3rd element. Rare earth metal mining in the asteroid belt is the one most likely to be necessary.
I see a couple comments here that don't understand why Lithium is a good choice.
Batteries push electrons around a circuit. This is powered by a redox reaction, with half of the reaction occurring on each terminal. One half of the reaction produces electrons, the other half consumes electrons, and these electrons travel from where they are produced (the oxidation half-reaction) to where they are consumed (the reduction half-reaction).
However, one half reaction simply produced electrons forever, it would accumulate a positive charge. So something inside the battery has to also move charge around to balance things out. This thing that moves should have a positive charge, and move in the same direction as the electrons, except through the battery instead of through the circuit. Your electron moves from the battery anode (-) through the circuit to the battery cathode (+), and something else with a positive charge also moves from the battery anode (-) to the battery cathode (+), except it moves through the battery instead of moving through the circuit.
In other words, a positive ion. Lithium is the smallest positive ion you can normally work with.
You'd think hydrogen would be smaller, but it actually forms a hydronium ion in aqueous solution. Hydrogen fuel cells are a lot like batteries that use hydrogen + oxygen, but the chemistry of hydrogen fuel cells make them not suitable as batteries, and hydrogen is hard to store. I'm sure I'm getting some of this wrong, I did study some very basic electrochemistry in college, so I would encourage people interested in electrochemistry to read more about it or even do simple experiments at home (it's surprisingly easy).
This is a great description. The one thing that's missing is /why/ a smaller ion is better. Is this because of energy lost by some equivalent of drag as the ion travels through the solution?
A small note, just to descend from the dream to reality: lithium is already expensive. Mining lithium in space means making it more expensive than gold. Even if we can source a hyper-abundant source of lithium just on the Moon it's price would be so expensive that's useless. Not only, the quantity we can mine will be ridiculously small.
Space mining might be an option in 200y IF we are able to find ways to escape Earth gravitation with cheap and easy manners, otherwise is just a dream game of some who dream a "private space" to start a new "Alaska-like Gold Rush". Such dreams must be annihilated from the start for the sake of humanity.
Just the dream of private Moon/Mars colonies should be allowed only when single individuals can form a small society, buy a transport means, start a colony independently under their own State's laws. Otherwise those colonies will NOT be colonies like the west rush in the USA but dictatorship where the private holder can do essentially anything shielded by the fact that State's laws we have are valid only on Earth. That must not be happen.
Beside that: we can't even really know how much minerals in general we have in the Earth crust. We have estimation, reasoned, tried a bit, but nothing really certain so before working on something we should have been framed the scalability up front or live them as experiment.
We will probably come up with alternative chemistries. NiFe while not portable, is great for stationary applications. I would prefer to have a bank of NiFe batteries at home than a tesla wall. And probably my insurance company would think the same.
I love articles like these for their optimism — as they imply we will not be mining it in the metaverse for schrute bucks, or scouting new vegas for bottle caps.
Readit News
If you could find lithium you could breed tritium and run a D + T fuel cycle, which creates a massive flux of neutrons (maybe need Pb or Be for multiplication) and will let you breed extra T that you can let decay to He3. D + He3 is a good candidate for a fuel for "fast" interstellar travel that might make the crossing in 50 years.
Alternately if you can make D + D work you can certainly live between the stars and you can still harvest some bred T and He3 for "mobile" applications.
Red dwarfs appear ideal. Very long lived, and there do seem to be planets and asteroid material in them. A globular cluster of mostly red dwarfs would be an ideal long-term place for an "interstellar" civ. The stars drift as close as 1/3 light year.
Look at what some of the projected mineral yields of asteroids are. And comets can probably get you other element mixes as needed.
Yes, I think Lithium will be be available artificially with some form of fusion. Or you capture solar wind material perhaps.
I would love to live on Pluto. I'm sure lots of people would. Anyway, we evolved without Twitter and HN too, but here we are, spending our waking hours online. Many people alive today have never physically even visited 'real' nature and are (probably, mostly) fine without it.
I don't think 'we evolved to X and therefore would never want Y" holds much water.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3y8AIEX_dU
Was NOT expecting a (drum'n'bass) banger of a track on that video when the protomoon hits the protoearth. Shazam couldn't properly identify. I love old internet posts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sr-MriOCzw
Says at the end of the video “Music - Kyo Ichinose” but I didn’t have much luck hunting down the actual track.
Additional lol. Found a NYT link to the animation again, but it's in a obsolete format. (Requires Real Player)
Nuclear fusion seems much more achievable than interstellar space travel.
Batteries push electrons around a circuit. This is powered by a redox reaction, with half of the reaction occurring on each terminal. One half of the reaction produces electrons, the other half consumes electrons, and these electrons travel from where they are produced (the oxidation half-reaction) to where they are consumed (the reduction half-reaction).
However, one half reaction simply produced electrons forever, it would accumulate a positive charge. So something inside the battery has to also move charge around to balance things out. This thing that moves should have a positive charge, and move in the same direction as the electrons, except through the battery instead of through the circuit. Your electron moves from the battery anode (-) through the circuit to the battery cathode (+), and something else with a positive charge also moves from the battery anode (-) to the battery cathode (+), except it moves through the battery instead of moving through the circuit.
In other words, a positive ion. Lithium is the smallest positive ion you can normally work with.
You'd think hydrogen would be smaller, but it actually forms a hydronium ion in aqueous solution. Hydrogen fuel cells are a lot like batteries that use hydrogen + oxygen, but the chemistry of hydrogen fuel cells make them not suitable as batteries, and hydrogen is hard to store. I'm sure I'm getting some of this wrong, I did study some very basic electrochemistry in college, so I would encourage people interested in electrochemistry to read more about it or even do simple experiments at home (it's surprisingly easy).
Other group of very reactive elements are in the second-last column such as Fluorine but they can't be as easily used in batteries for other reasons.
Lithium is also very light - 0.534 g/cm³ compared to copper with 8.96 g/cm³.
Space mining might be an option in 200y IF we are able to find ways to escape Earth gravitation with cheap and easy manners, otherwise is just a dream game of some who dream a "private space" to start a new "Alaska-like Gold Rush". Such dreams must be annihilated from the start for the sake of humanity.
Just the dream of private Moon/Mars colonies should be allowed only when single individuals can form a small society, buy a transport means, start a colony independently under their own State's laws. Otherwise those colonies will NOT be colonies like the west rush in the USA but dictatorship where the private holder can do essentially anything shielded by the fact that State's laws we have are valid only on Earth. That must not be happen.
Beside that: we can't even really know how much minerals in general we have in the Earth crust. We have estimation, reasoned, tried a bit, but nothing really certain so before working on something we should have been framed the scalability up front or live them as experiment.