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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

What has always bothered me about this "interstellar mining" plot device (which is not only used in Alien, but also in e.g. Avatar): is it really somehow plausible to find minerals in other solar systems that can't be found much cheaper in our own solar system? Of course, you need some kind of McGuffin to justify your heroes going to other planets, but "to seek out new life and new civilizations" is much better IMHO than "just looking for substance XYZ that for some reason can't be found in our own solar system or synthesized much cheaper than the cost of ferrying it over several light years"...

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In Avatar they are literally mining a room-temperature superconductor. If you had to think of a way to make interstellar mining plausible that certainly would be a candidate.

I think you have to assume that faster-than-light travel is both possible and economical. At that point, far-flung supply chains across the galaxy really aren't any more surprising than the far-flung supply chains across the globe of our current reality. When distance becomes less economically relevant, other factors (like labor availability and costs, regulations, ease of access, security, etc) become more important.

FTL isn't even necessary. Consider the majority of tanker ships travel at bicycle speeds[1]. If you're transporting sufficiently profitable nonperishable goods in extremely high quantities, and have enough automated ships, you could have a functional interstellar supply line at a fraction of light speed.

Of course, this isn't how it's usually presented in science fiction, but that's because a sci-fi story about a non-sentient fully automated mining machine wouldn't be very interesting. Gotta get humans out there.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_steaming

And they said five year plans struggled with predicting demand ;)

I'd rather go with "for any delta in mining convenience between solar systems, there exists a level of FTL magic where shipping would become economically feasible"

Perhaps space slow steaming might be an option if your goal was to make a Dyson sphere exist before the star inside burns out?

Hogwash! We can do it much faster than that. With a machine in Alpha Centauri capable of flinging rocks full of rare earth metals back towards the solar system at 1/10th the speed of light, we could be up and running in <150 years.

This feels about as realistic as most of the spacetech proposals I hear.

I'd imagine insurance premiums to get quite ugly with all those 0.1c rocks passing by

Not my problem, I'll be long dead.

If interstellar travel is possible then it probably means intrastellar travel had been possible for a long time. Which means most readily accessible minerals had already been mined in the solar system. Not to mention humans probably have settled throughout the solar system. Which means solar ecological movements have gained momentum throughout the solar system. After all, who would want mining near their vacation properties on the moon or mars.

The fact that interstellar mining is happening is evidence that it's cheaper than mining locally. Otherwise it wouldn't happen.

What a bizarre take. It's not a mcguffin. Both Alien and Avatar were based on economic/historical realities of their times and throughout history. Why do you think companies mine or drill for oil all over the world. Why not just stay within their national borders? You exhaust resources locally and you look for resources elsewhere. It's just common sense.

And the fact that superman can fly is evidence that people are lighter than air. Otherwise it wouldn't happen.

The costs (in money and energy) of the infrastructure to mine another solar system would pay for a lot of R&D to synthesize whatever it is here in our solar system.

Unlike the other poster, I don't think interstellar mining needs finding, I'm perfectly happy to lean back and enjoy the show. But whatever they mine would have to be very magical indeed to not be cheaper from any other process.

> And the fact that superman can fly is evidence that people are lighter than air. Otherwise it wouldn't happen.

Is this a serious response? What is your point?

> The costs (in money and energy) of the infrastructure to mine another solar system would pay for a lot of R&D to synthesize whatever it is here in our solar system.

Sure. Just like infrastructure to mine another continent would pay for a lot of R&D to synthesize whatever. And yet, we mine other continents. Not only that, in the not too distant future, we are going to mine the moon, asteroids, etc. I wonder why we don't just synthesize gold rather than mining for gold in south africa or some far distant place?

> But whatever they mine would have to be very magical indeed to not be cheaper from any other process.

And yet, history, science, economics and reality says you are wrong.

You do realize that costs come down right? Just because intercontinental travel was expensive in the past doesn't mean it is expensive today. In a world of engineers and xenomorphs, it's the least crazy aspect of the film that simpletons are hung up about.

This has always been a sticky thing for me as well. These kinds of McGuffins lean towards physics are different in other parts of the galaxy/universe if there are minerals found only in certain parts of the galaxy. That would also imply there are other elements that we do not have on our periodic table. Unless someone has become able to stabilize some of the unstable elements to keep them around long enough to make some sort of material out of them, there's only so much unobtanium or dilithium nonsense I'm willing to accept.

> These kinds of McGuffins lean towards physics are different in other parts of the galaxy/universe if there are minerals found only in certain parts of the galaxy.

Or the local conditions are such that they produce different chemical compounds.

I'm not going to strike gold in my backyard, but people in Colorado might. There's not a lot of diamond production happening within reach underneath my location, but there's plenty in parts of Africa.

If we want to take it to space, there's not a lot of Helium-3 to be easily extracted on Earth, but apparently there's quite a bit more on the Moon.

But seeking out new civilizations etc is a noble cause, mining is dirty industrial space trucking types with an evil mega corp trying to make a buck out deadly aliens. Well that's my guess anyway!

Well if you put yourself in the perspective of a time period where something like _The Nostromo_ actually exists - our scientific understanding is literally lightyears ahead of where it is right now. Meaning, our periodic table as it stands today is 1/10th the size of the future table. So it's reasonable to conclude that there are large swaths of never before even imagined materials out in the universe.

Novel materials - even those that occur naturally - are almost certainly molecules of elements that we already are familiar with. There might be some interesting things to find in the island of stability, but I'd say that practical FTL is a more plausible discovery than would be finding gross quantities of elements with 1000 protons.

You could perhaps find different concentrations of different isotopes of elements which could be useful. For some kind of super advanced material science/design.

Yes, isotopes too. Interesting point. Isotopes are sometimes just as novel as new elements - though I wouldn't consider their discovery to be expanding the periodic table.

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