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Comment by CRUDite | Hacker News Reader

There are trillions of dollars worth of manganese nodules from golf ball to basketball size just sat on ocean floors, many not far off from coast lines, many far deeper. Pumping them up has been an unsolved problem but Perhaps autonomous drone hoovers or shovelers could work. A usecase like this would spark enough interest / money spent on the problem to solve it. A ship that had a fleet of drones unloading to it 24/7 could pick up a lot of it. There is not just manganese in the nodules either.. I seem to remember most nations strategically banning collecting them a few hundred miles of their coasts should there be any.

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There is also (theoretically) a near-infinite supply of it on 16 Psyche, an M-type asteroid that will, seemingly, radically alter the meaning of human wealth if we are able to harness its resources.

Exciting times to be building Starships.

If we cant explore and map our sea's, do we have a hope in exploring space in any great way?

At least the crushing sea pressure could be likened to crushing forces on a space ship in a black hole.

The difference is, both environments create conditions intolerably difficult to operate, but if we're going to be experimenting with hostile environment industry, I think its best done a few million km's from Earth rather than, literally, in the bosom of all life.

If you cant master whats immediately around you, what makes you think you can master something few million km's away?

We can't master some things because they are too close to us. Mastering things is not space-relative, its survival-relative.

I wonder I wonder what horrific ecological damage we'll be creating once we start exploiting these.

Biologically its a fantastic Super Oxide Dismutase, but if it gets into a mammalian system without being bound in Metallothionein, you'll end up with Parkinson's like symptoms.

Its possibly one of the reasons why some sea born mammals (whales) live for so long, considering its transported in much the same way as Iron.

I sometimes think the Victorians with their sea bathing were onto a thing or two because for humans, their greatest environmental exposure to Manganese is bathing in the sea, the concentration of Manganese is highest in coastal regions, despite the fact you can find the Manganese nodules out to sea on the sea bed. Cant help but notice that Uranium can also be found in similar sized nodules in certain geographical environments.

In terms of damage, this perhaps should be tackled like Oyster farming, so its a perfect case for using specialist drone equipment to do the harvesting, you cant deep sea dive farm these nodules.

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