So, We Built a Moon Base. What's Next? | Q&A 433

[00:00:00]What does a nation gain from being on the moon? Will it ever make sense to mine asteroids? What question should we ask aliens? And what should we tell them first? And in Q&A plus, don't believe everything you see. All this and more in this question show. It's time for the question show. Your questions, my answers, as always, wherever you are across my channel. If a question pops in your brains, write it down. I'll gather them up and I will answer them here. All right, let's get into the questions.

[00:00:24]Floater 81 floats. Will it ever make sense to mine asteroids for materials that will be used on Earth? Even if it is possible to safely de-orbit large chunks of asteroid, it will probably never make sense to mine asteroids to bring back the stuff back to Earth that the costs of sending a mission into space to go to an asteroid, the amount of hardware that's going to be required, the propellant, it's going to cost you billions of dollars. And the the classic joke, the quote, the thing that we always talk about is that if there were, you know, like what's the most expensive thing that you could find on an aster?

[00:00:57]You could find aridium. You could find palladium. You could find platinum.

[00:01:01]Well, if there were bars of aridium just sitting there nicely mined on the surface of an asteroid, it would be too expensive to pick them up and not worth it. That it's still going to be cheaper to dig a hole in the ground here on Earth and collect the palladium and platinum and aridium and all of that kind of stuff. You know, people talk about how much asteroids are worth. Like this asteroid is worth eight quadrillion dollars or something like that, right?

[00:01:26]Well, the Earth is made of asteroids.

[00:01:28]The Earth has all of the same stuff that asteroids have in them. Now, the thing that asteroids have is they have those metals in a more concentrated way. The Earth, all of those heavier metals sunk down into the planet and so they're not as easily accessible as they are on asteroids. But that stuff is in seawater. Like people are working on technologies to be able to harvest gold and uranium and other heavy elements and platinum and aridium from seawater and that stuff is just in the ground and that it will still for the long future be cheaper for us to just dig holes in the ground and mine this stuff out than to consider bringing it back from space.

[00:02:11]That said, where mining asteroids is going to make a ton of sense is when you need that stuff in space. And so you imagine, let's say you're going to build some kind of facility that's going to require aridium or platinum or palladium or even just iron. Well, you could either launch that stuff off of the surface of planet Earth. You're going to have to pay ludicrous amounts of money.

[00:02:31]I mean, like really think about how much it costs. Like say it costs you $5,000 per kilogram to launch something off of the surface of the Earth into low Earth orbit. If you want to launch something to the surface of the moon, you are looking at millions of dollars per kilogram. Like there's just there's nothing that is worth millions of dollars per kilogram. Gold, not gold, not platinum arium, nothing. So there's just no value in that. But once you're in space and you need to add these metals and minerals to your spacecraft, then it actually does make sense that you mine from an asteroid. You then spend just a tiny little bit of propellant to get from your asteroid because the, you know, the gravity is very low on the asteroid. you just spend tiny amounts to get to wherever you you need this. Whether you're building trusses for your giant 100 kilometer across space telescope um and you're pulling those resources from space. So, a lot of of asteroid mining is not about can we bring this stuff back to Earth.

[00:03:32]It is about can we make this stuff available to other stuff that's already in space. And I find that idea really exciting that right now we see space as this, you know, we have to deliver everything from the surface of the earth and that is not sustainable. But imagine this future where we've got robots that are mining asteroids and they are automatically using mass drivers to send material to other locations and other robots are are building things into larger and larger structures. Like it doesn't feel like like that is well, you know, here's the new mission and it's going to cost you $8 billion and here's how long it's going to take and here's the timeline. It's just the robot factory is out there spinning out new spacecraft chassis or something and it can produce three chassis per year and the distribution system is working. It's much more like Factorio than than it is sort of a a giant project management task the way it is today. There is one idea that I kind of like though, which is, you know, you talk about like how could you get the stuff back down to the surface of the Earth that if you were going to try and drop bricks of palladium through the Earth's atmosphere, well, they would burn up and so you're going to need some kind of descent capsule. Well, you're going to have to then launch the descent capsule.

[00:04:43]Well, there was this idea, and I I don't know how valid this is. Um, I heard this from Peter Diamandis, uh, who was the founder of the X-Prize. And the gist is that if you spin it into like this giant ball, very very low density, that it will then slow down as it hits the Earth's atmosphere and it won't burn up and then it'll just fall and and make its way down to the surface of the Earth, which is pretty cool. So maybe that's the way we you have uh asteroid mining that is spinning out fluff, palladium fluff into giant fluffy balls and then throwing those at the Earth.

[00:05:20]Technopile. If China is serious about going to the moon on a continuing basis, how, if anything, do you think that will give them an advantage in determining the future of humanity? So, I do think that China is serious on going to the moon on a continuing basis that, you know, by 2030 they they're hoping to land some humans on the moon, that we will then see follow-on missions to the moon, that we will see some kind of permanent inhabited station on the moon.

[00:05:46]Uh hopefully I would love to see an international collaboration of of many nations, not just the Chinese. But I wouldn't be surprised if we end up with a Chinese station and a not Chinese station. Maybe you know a Europe US collaboration or like who knows how bad international relations will have gotten by 2030. So it's all up for grabs at this point. But what China gets out of sending humans to the moon is they are able to brag about their technological capability in the exact same way that the Americans and the Soviets were racing for back in the 60s and 70s, which was the first nation to be able to land humans on the moon. It can can brag about its technological competence. And it ended up being the Soviets blew up their rocket. The Americans landed humans on the moon. Uh they were in a race though and now the Americans have rightfully got the bragging rights to say we put our minds to it. We did this and all of the other things not because they were easy but because they were hard and that the nation uh dedicated itself to this incredible goal and they pulled it off and they spent the money and they achieved it and then they they realized it was too expensive. We don't need to do it again for a while. That is what Chinese China wants to do. China wants to show that they are not the place where you buy cheap crap at scale.

[00:07:15]Uh they are a world leader in new technology. You know like this is not me uh sort of pariting their uh their perspective. I'm saying like this is this is what China is hoping you will take from this in them having some kind of continued presence on the moon that when you're in the store and you're looking at drones and you're like, "hm, do I buy the American drone or do I buy the Chinese drone?" Well, the Chinese have a base on the moon, so I'm going to buy the Chinese drone. Do I want to buy the European electric bike or do I want to buy the Chinese electric bike? Well, the Chinese have a base on the moon right now, so I'm going to buy the Chinese electric bike because they seem to know a lot about electric bikes. And in fact, this electric bike is used by the astronauts on the moon. Uh, that's that's the goal. There is there is no military advantage. There is no technological advantage. There is no power to be gained by putting humans on the moon. It is 400,000 kilometers away.

[00:08:19]It is nothing. It is very far away and completely insignificant. It is not a base of operations to to dominate pathetic humans. It is just a flex and it's a branding operation. And then you can decide is that impressive to you as more and more of the technology that you use came from China. And and if you start if your perspective of China grows and grows and instead of it being this place where crap gets made to man all the best stuff comes from China. Uh then they will be and then the bases on the moon will be part of that story that narrative that they are hoping you will adopt their brand. It's time to shout out all the new $5 patrons and above.

[00:09:08]Steven Williams, Matt Husted, Linda Barahal, Norman, Harold Fink, Francoile, Jurgen, Jim Johnson, Limalis, Polyphamus, Robert J. Conover, and Michael. Join the club at patreon.com/universeto today. Church discoraphy. What bit of knowledge are humans most likely to ask of an advanced alien race, and what knowledge are they most likely to provide first? I mean, we tackled this question a couple of weeks ago pretty extensively. And the thing that I think, you know, we always need to be really careful about is is information hazards. That if we are communicating with an advanced civilization, they might not have our best interests in mind and so they might be sending us a bad idea. And the the example I always use is contact. you know, in the movie Contact and in the book, they detect this signal coming from space and then they it turns out it's instructions, a blueprint for building a machine, and then they build the machine, and what do you know? It's a wormhole that allows you to transport around the universe. But it could also be a machine that makes a black hole that consumes the Earth and then takes humanity out of the picture. Think of a plurabus, right? Um, a message is received, people just can't help themselves. They have to make what the message tells them, and things turn out badly. So I think we would want we would have to be super careful about even listening to any signal that we get from aliens, not to mention building anything they recommend. And so we will have bits of knowledge that we will want answered.

[00:10:36]Absolutely. You know, we would want some kind of comparison. We would want to know here is what we consider to be science. What is the science that you guys have done? And I I loved in Project Hail Mary, if you read Project Hail Mary or watch the movie, the Epsilon Arerodanians, they are great at materials and yet they didn't know about relativity and they didn't know about physics and so they were able to make a spacecraft, but they didn't understand how long it was going to take for them to get to Taetti and they didn't understand some of the consequences of it. And and so you can imagine a a civilization goes down a very specific rabbit hole of science and technology and gets really really good at it. Um, if you wa if you read Children of Time by AdrienCowski, uh, there are these advanced spiders and they're very good at certain kinds of technology and it's kind of amazing and how the the humans are interacting with these spiders and and they're both good at different things. And so I think that would be the question was just like how are you different from us? What do you know? You know, do you know how stars work? Yes, we know how stars work. Okay.

[00:11:48]Do you know what dark matter is? Right.

[00:11:52]Oh yeah, we know what. Okay, tell us.

[00:11:55]Right. And so there'll be that back and forth of just finding out what are all the gaps, what are all the the the differences in your knowledge of the universe that you can then be able to come back around and and then start to share. Like imagine you went back in time and you got a chance to sit down with someone like Newton or Galileo and you were a space nerd. You know, you watch a lot of our videos, so you're very familiar with concepts in space and astronomy. And you sit down with Galileo and you know, you Galileo has a bunch of questions for you like like what how does the sun work? You're like, well, I don't really understand, but I you know, hydrogen is being turned into helium at the core and then that releases energy.

[00:12:37]That's fusion, you And he's like, "Oh, okay." Right. Oh, what is what's under what's on Venus? What's on Mars? What are these ears that I see on Saturn? Oh, those are rings. You know that you would you would fill in all of these bits and pieces of his knowledge about the cosmos that he he had a hint of it and now he'd be able to get a much better understanding. I'm sure he would just talk your ear off asking questions because he would be so curious about this stuff that you had concrete answers for him. And that's what I feel like it would be like with the advanced civilization. The aliens show up and we' be like, "Here's what we know. Tell us what you know, and then we we've got a bunch of questions and you're going to have a bunch of questions and let's figure out what we don't know that the other person has already figured out.

[00:13:22]And that will make, you know, we would 50% our knowledge overnight just by getting a chance to to chat with another civilization that independently uncovered the secrets of the cosmos without influence from our biology, our history, our culture, our personality.

[00:13:41]That would be amazing. Did you know that you can watch the same video with no ads and get a bonus question over on Patreon completely for free? We call it Q&A Plus. This week's bonus question, don't believe everything that you see. And I'll put a link in the show notes. All right, those are all the questions that we had this episode. Thank you everyone who put your questions into the YouTube comments, everybody who joined me for the live show. Um, we've got just a couple of live shows left before we go on hiatus. So, I will have those events here on the channel. So, keep an eye out for them. I am going to uh retract a statement that I made about for all mankind. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingston, Andrea Padetti, Brian Bow, Keredin, Chuck Hawkins, Commander Bailock, Darkfinga, David Gilton, and David Mats, Enthall Reading and Math for toddlers, Eric Linds, Evanpro, James Clark, Jeremy Matter, Jim Burke, Jordan Young, Marcel Smith, Michael Orcel, Nordspace, Onestep Animals.org. Please follow my nephew at Vbrook6994, Ren Kaido, Richard Williams, Sean Sergeants, Stephen found the monthly, team49, Telos Canada, Vlad Shiplin, Wolf Gang Clots, and Zelda, Galactic Defender, who support us at the master of the universe level, and all our patrons. All your support means the universe to us.

[00:14:44]So, a couple of weeks ago, I sort of gave you an update on a lot of the media that I am watching. And one of the shows that I talked about that I was a little disappointed with was For All Mankind.

[00:14:55]And this is a show on Apple TV. And this is has been one of my favorite shows. It was in my top 10 list. And this is a show sort of an alternative history where the Soviets are the first to get to the moon. And then that encourages a new space race between the Americans and the Soviets. And it retells the Apollo era, retells the space shuttle era, and then retells the '9s when humans start to build a mission to go to Mars and then tells about the founding of a sort of beginning city on Mars. And it's a very hopeful, very uh scientifically accurate show. There's a lot of times when when I'm watching it and I'm and I will notice something that I think is a a technical inaccuracy and then I will realize that they actually knew the science and they and they had sort of predicted that I was going to go well actually and they did it correctly. So I really enjoyed for all mankind. The new season was season five and this was sort of uh dealing with some trouble on Mars and I had gotten pretty bored by this season within the first, you know, four or five episodes. A lot of what I described as people walking around in corridors on on Mars, but the last three episodes were absolutely terrific and very dramatic, big conflict, a lot of really interesting stuff that moved the story forward. And so, while I had been disappointed, I thought the sort of finale of the of season 5 brought it all together. And then the other thing that's really interesting is that the makers of For All Mankind have started a second show called Star City. And this is telling the story of this alternative history space race from the perspective of the Soviets. Now, I have not watched Star City yet. I'm kind of waiting until they're all gathered up and then I'll be able to watch them in one fell swoop.

[00:16:56]But I've heard really good things about it that people say it's a it's a terrific show. So, uh, you know, Apple TV is sort of like a tricky one to sign up for just because they don't have a lot of content, but they have a lot of really good content. Some of the best shows on all of streaming are on Apple TV. And so, uh, like at some point just, you know, get it for a month, burn through all of the shows that you want to watch and then cancel it again. Um, and definitely watch For All Mankind while you're doing that. All right, we'll see you next