Colonizing Ceres

Summary

This script envisions the future of asteroid mining, focusing on Ceres, the largest object in the Asteroid Belt. It explores the challenges and possibilities of life on Ceres, including weak gravity, resource exploitation, and agriculture within domes. The narrative follows an aspiring miner who becomes wealthy from a gold strike and contributes to the Belt's development, envisioning habitats within mined asteroids and the potential for interstellar travel.

Takeaways

• 🌌 The script discusses the potential for future gold rushes in space, particularly asteroid mining, with Ceres being a focal point of interest due to its significant mass within the Asteroid Belt.
• 📐 Ceres is not the central hub of the Asteroid Belt, but it is the largest object, comprising about a third of the belt's mass, which makes it an important location for potential colonization and resource exploitation.
• 🏔️ The script mentions that Ceres has a vast crater named Occator, which is rich in resources such as ammonia-rich clays and water ice, making it a prime area for mining operations.
• 🌱 The idea of growing food on Ceres, like blueberries, is introduced, indicating that agriculture could be a significant industry there, providing fresh produce to miners and base personnel.
• 🌞 The script explains that despite being far from the Sun, the Asteroid Belt receives sufficient light for plant growth due to the lack of atmospheric interference and the potential for artificial lighting.
• 🛠️ The challenges of weak gravity on asteroids are highlighted, with the script noting that even on Ceres, gravity is only 3% of Earth's, affecting both colonization and daily life.
• 🚀 The script describes the use of a 'Big Fettling Gun', a mass driver used to launch spacecraft, illustrating innovative solutions to the challenges of space travel and resource transportation.
• 💼 The economic aspects of asteroid mining are touched upon, with the script detailing the process of buying mining rights and the potential for wealth generation through successful mining operations.
• 🏭 The concept of transforming depleted mining sites into habitats or communities within the Belt is introduced, suggesting a sustainable and expansive future for space colonization.
• 🌟 The script concludes with a vision of the Asteroid Belt as a critical component in the colonization of our solar system and the potential for interstellar travel, emphasizing the importance of Ceres as a hub for these endeavors.
• 🔗 The video also promotes a link to Brilliant.org for learning physics and problem-solving skills, essential for understanding and navigating the complexities of space mining and colonization.

Q & A

What is the significance of Ceres in the context of the asteroid belt?

Ceres is significant because it makes up about a third of the mass of the asteroid belt. It is often considered the focal point of the belt, despite not being central in the way a planet is to its moons.

Why might future miners travel to asteroids similar to past gold rushes?

Future miners might travel to asteroids because they contain valuable resources such as gold, making them attractive targets for mining operations.

What is the main challenge of colonizing asteroids with weak gravity?

The weak gravity on asteroids makes it difficult for humans to move around and perform tasks. Even simple actions like walking or throwing a ball can result in objects floating off into space.

How do asteroid families form in the asteroid belt?

Asteroid families often form around a larger asteroid. These groups of asteroids tend to stay close together, creating a kind of family structure within the belt.

What is the role of Occator Company in the script?

Occator Company is the biggest consortium on Ceres, running the crater and base there. They manage resources and provide services to the inhabitants of Ceres.

Why is agriculture a viable industry on Ceres?

Agriculture is viable on Ceres due to the availability of resources like water ice and the ability to control lighting conditions within domes, which can be adjusted to suit various types of plants.

What is the 'Big Fettling Gun' and how does it function?

The 'Big Fettling Gun' is a mass driver used to launch spacecraft. Smaller ships can race around it to gain speed, which helps save fuel for their journeys.

How does the script describe the living conditions on Ceres?

The script describes living conditions on Ceres as having domes for growing plants, insulated to retain heat, and a variety of services and industries, including entertainment and mining. However, living quarters can be cramped and basic.

What is the process of mining an asteroid as described in the script?

The process involves shooting harpoons into the asteroid, winching the ship against it, and using drones to explore and mine the asteroid. Miners may also erect domes for working without suits and use pykrete for protection against micro-meteor strikes.

What are the long-term implications of asteroid mining for the asteroid belt?

The long-term implications include the potential for creating habitats inside depleted asteroids, forming small communities, and possibly moving asteroids or megastructures closer to other celestial bodies like Mars.

How does the script suggest utilizing depleted asteroid mines for future space habitats?

The script suggests that depleted asteroid mines can be used to house O’Neill Cylinders, large habitats capable of supporting tens of thousands of people, by placing these habitats inside the hollowed-out asteroids.

Outlines

00:00

🌌 Asteroid Belt Colonization and Ceres

This paragraph introduces the concept of asteroid belt colonization, focusing on Ceres, the largest object in the belt. It discusses how Ceres, despite not being the central focus of the belt, is a significant location due to its substantial mass, making up about a third of the belt's total mass. The paragraph also touches on the challenges of living in low-gravity environments, the potential for agriculture on Ceres, and the economic opportunities presented by mining in the asteroid belt. The narrative follows an aspiring asteroid miner who travels to Ceres, highlighting the journey and the miner's motivations.

05:03

🌱 Agriculture and Life Support on Ceres

The second paragraph delves into the agricultural potential of Ceres, describing how an individual has invested in seeds and microbial cultures to grow blueberries in a rented dome. It discusses the importance of light and temperature for plant growth, explaining how the domes are designed to filter harmful frequencies and retain heat. The paragraph also touches on the energy sources used on Ceres, such as fission and solar power, and the innovative use of a mass driver, or 'Big Fettling Gun,' for launching spacecraft. The social and economic aspects of Ceres are explored, including the entertainment industry and the diverse range of services available to its inhabitants.

10:05

🚀 Joining the Asteroid Mining Community

This paragraph follows the journey of a miner who has arrived on Ceres and is seeking to join a mining crew. It describes the miner's experiences in finding a crew, the cultural aspects of miners wearing jewelry made from precious metals they mine, and the challenges of securing a position on a mining ship. The miner eventually gains a place on a ship called the Rockhopper, which is described as being less technologically advanced than expected. The paragraph also touches on the bureaucratic aspects of mining rights and the financial arrangements for sharing profits from mining operations.

15:08

💰 The Wealth of Asteroid Mining

The fourth paragraph details the miner's experience aboard the Rockhopper, where they discover a rich deposit of gold on an asteroid. The crew decides to mine and refine the minerals, setting up a temporary base with an inflatable dome for easier work. The paragraph discusses the logistics of sending refined minerals back to Earth and the financial implications of selling the asteroid claim. The miner becomes wealthy from the successful mining operation, leading to a decision to stay on Ceres and eventually buy their own mining ship, the Rockhopper 2.

20:09

🏙️ Expanding Habitats in the Asteroid Belt

This paragraph explores the idea of expanding human habitats in the asteroid belt by utilizing depleted mining sites. The concept of O'Neill Cylinders, large space habitats that could house tens of thousands of people, is introduced. The narrator discusses the potential for converting mined-out asteroids into habitats, highlighting the vast amount of living space that could be created. The paragraph also touches on the idea of moving asteroids closer to Mars or Earth for various purposes, such as generating tidal forces or providing additional living space.

25:10

🚀 The Future of Space Travel and Colonization

The final paragraph discusses the implications of building habitats inside asteroids and the potential for interstellar travel. It suggests that space stations in the asteroid belt could be repurposed as spaceships for long-distance travel. The paragraph also promotes a link to Brilliant.org for learning more about physics and problem-solving skills, which are essential for understanding the complexities of space travel and colonization. The narrator concludes by encouraging viewers to subscribe to the channel for updates on future episodes discussing generation ships and the colonization of the galaxy.

Keywords

💡Asteroid Belt

The Asteroid Belt refers to the region in our solar system located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, consisting of numerous irregularly shaped bodies known as asteroids. In the video, the Asteroid Belt is a focal point for potential mining and colonization, with Ceres being a significant celestial body within it, making up about a third of the belt's mass.

💡Ceres

Ceres is the largest object in the Asteroid Belt and is classified as a dwarf planet. It is highlighted in the video as a likely location for human settlement and resource extraction, with its own unique economy and living conditions that differ from Earth.

💡Gravity

Gravity is the force that attracts two bodies towards each other, proportional to their mass and the distance between them. In the context of the video, the weak gravity on asteroids and Ceres presents challenges for colonization, such as the difficulty of retaining an atmosphere and the low escape velocities that could cause objects to float off into space.

💡Colonization

Colonization refers to the process of establishing a community or population in a new area or among a different people. The video discusses the potential for human colonization of the Asteroid Belt, particularly Ceres, and the various industries and living conditions that could develop there.

💡Asteroid Mining

Asteroid mining is the extraction of valuable minerals and resources from asteroids. The script explores the concept of asteroid mining as a means for individuals to make a living in the future, with Ceres being a hub for such activities.

💡Occator Crater

Occator Crater is a specific location on Ceres mentioned in the video, known for its vast size and unique features such as dark-tinted domes and ammonia-rich clays. It serves as a landing site and base for operations on Ceres, including mining and agriculture.

💡Microgravity

Microgravity refers to an environment where the force of gravity is very weak, as is the case on small celestial bodies like asteroids. The video describes the effects of microgravity on daily life and work, such as the need for creative solutions to keep objects from floating away.

💡Resource Exploitation

Resource exploitation is the process of utilizing natural resources for economic gain. The script discusses the exploitation of resources in the Asteroid Belt, such as water ice and minerals, which are vital for sustaining life and supporting various industries.

💡Interplanetary Transport Network

The Interplanetary Transport Network is a concept for efficient space travel within our solar system using low-energy trajectories. The video mentions this as the cheapest way to travel to Ceres, suggesting the use of Hohmann Transfer Orbits to navigate the solar system's 'trade winds and currents'.

💡O'Neill Cylinder

An O'Neill Cylinder is a theoretical space habitat design proposed by physicist Gerard K. O'Neill, consisting of a large, rotating cylinder to provide artificial gravity through centrifugal force. The video suggests repurposing depleted asteroids to house such cylinders, potentially supporting billions of people.

💡Generation Ships

Generation Ships are theoretical spacecraft designed to support multiple generations of humans on long-duration interstellar voyages. The video hints at the concept of using generation ships for settling other star systems, with the Asteroid Belt potentially serving as a base for their construction.

Highlights

In the future, miners might travel to asteroids for gold, similar to historical gold rushes.

Ceres is a major focus in the asteroid belt, making up about a third of its mass.

Asteroid families often center around a larger asteroid, some even have moons.

The weak gravity on asteroids presents challenges for colonization.

Ceres is likely to be a hub for living and visiting, but not the primary location for work.

The asteroid belt's lighting conditions can support plant growth, despite being far from the Sun.

Occator Crater on Ceres is a significant location for mining and has a thriving food industry.

Miners often wear jewelry made from precious metals they mine, indicating their profession and success.

Ceres has a developed infrastructure, including a mass driver for launching spacecraft.

The entertainment industry is a significant part of Ceres' economy, catering to miners and visitors.

Mining operations in the asteroid belt can be lucrative, but also involve risks and challenges.

Asteroid mining involves complex treaties and agreements involving Earth-based entities.

Mining ships in the asteroid belt are often makeshift and not as high-tech as one might expect.

The process of mining asteroids can involve setting up temporary habitats and using drones for exploration.

The wealth generated from asteroid mining can lead to significant lifestyle changes and new business opportunities.

The concept of using depleted asteroids as habitats, such as O'Neill Cylinders, is explored.

The potential for the asteroid belt to support a vast population through asteroid-based habitats is discussed.

The idea of moving asteroids or megastructures closer to Earth or Mars for various purposes is considered.

The asteroid belt is a strategic location for building spaceships and preparing for interstellar travel.

Transcripts

In gold rushes in the past, prospective miners traveled for months to reach a site.

In the future they might do it again,

because there’s gold in them thar asteroids!

So today we return to the Outward Bound Series to look at Ceres and the rest of the Asteroid

Belt.

Sort of like when we looked at Colonizing Jupiter and Saturn, where the planet itself

is not where most of the people live, but on the smaller objects nearby, our focus today

won’t be entirely on Ceres.

Though with one key difference, as we’ll see, Ceres is likely to be where folks tend

to live or visit, but not where a lot of the people actually work.

This is a good point to address earlier on though.

We always say the asteroid belt, referring to a swarm of smaller objects, unlike how

we’d refer to Jupiter and its moons.

But in some ways, while Ceres is not central to the Asteroid Belt the way a planet is to

its moons, it’s better to think of that whole asteroid belt as focused around Ceres.

There may be millions of asteroids in the belt, but Ceres makes up about a third of

the mass.

To match its size, you’d need to include the next dozen biggest asteroids , leaving

the remaining third of the Belt’s Mass to be distributed among its remaining millions

of members.

Even then, while we always warn people not think of the Asteroid belt as a dense place

you’d have to dodge around, a lot of the Belt is composed of Asteroid families, often

centering on a larger asteroid, and some, like Sylvia, the eighth largest asteroid,

even have moons.

Fairly impressive ones too, from a visual perspective.

Some small rock a few kilometers across is fairly impressive when it’s only a few hundred

kilometers away, and from the surface of such a tiny moon, its parent asteroid would dominate

the sky more than Jupiter does to the Galilean Moons, and the gravity is so weak you could

jump off and float there.

That weak gravity is a big issue for colonization too.

Even the biggest ones have escape velocities so low you could shoot a gun and the bullet

would never land, and a baseball tossed upwards would take many minutes to land.

On the smaller ones, you’d float off into space just by trying to take a step.

We’ve talked about enhancing gravity on larger moons or places like Mars or Mercury

by using large bowl or vase shaped habitat, which could spin around, combining centrifugal

force with regular gravity, but even on the largest asteroid, Ceres, such things are fairly

redundant.

A cylinder set on the surface, with its axis of rotation parallel to gravity, would just

have a slow creep toward the bottom you could manage with some minor sloping or walls.

One turned perpendicular to gravity would simply result in gravity feeling a little

higher when your feet were pointing down, and a little lower when you were upside down.

For that perpendicular version, on Ceres where gravity is 3% of Earth’s, if you weighed

100 pounds and stood on a scale, you could watch it slide from 97 to 103 as you spun.

Almost anywhere besides Ceres and those handful of largest asteroids, you wouldn’t be able

to notice.

It’s a big place in some ways.

Ceres, again, is a full third of the Belt’s mass, and yet Earth’s Moon is about 80 times

more massive than Ceres, and in turn, the Earth is about 80 times more massive than

the Moon.

We talk about exploiting the resources of the Belt, indeed we’ve done a whole episode

on Asteroid Mining, and yet every single asteroid combined has only 1% of the mass and resources

of Mercury, the place we last visited in the series and spoke of mining for resources.

So what is the attraction of the belt?

Traditionally in this series we followed a storyline of a traveler visiting place after

place as we colonized them.

We left the Traveler out in Alpha Centauri, but let’s join an aspiring asteroid miner

on their way to Ceres, not to be the first to land and plant a flag, not for great honor

or prestige, but just to make a living.

The half year trip from Earth was long and uncomfortable, but our ship has finally arrived

at Ceres and will land in Occator, a vast crater almost a hundred kilometers across,

dotted with dark-tinted domes showing a bit of green shade and roving tractors, scooping

up ammonia rich clays for nitrogen, and the other deposits rich in sodium carbonate, magnesium,

and sulfates.

Water ice is quite plentiful on Ceres, as everyone knows, but as we get on a crawler

with some of our shipmates for the trip from the landing site to the main base, one of

them points out that what makes Ceres so nice as a port of call is that it has an awful

lot of what we need for life.

We came out here to do some mining, but he did not.

He spent all his funds on his ticket and a box full of seeds and microbial cultures.

He’s renting a whole small dome from Occator Company, the biggest consortium on Ceres and

the one that runs this crater and base.

He’s going to start growing blueberries, the first blueberries in the Belt, and selling

them to the hungry miners and base personnel, who are particularly eager for something fresh.

Food is a big industry on Ceres.

The domes are tinted to keep out more harmful frequencies and help keep in heat.

This surprises us though, as we are far from the Sun, surely plants can’t grow here.

But he gestures around, and points out it isn’t dim at all, even way out at Pluto

the daylight is as bright as a cloudy day on Earth.

See, light’s a tricky thing and our eyes don’t really realize that the light of noon-time

Sun is carrying a million times more photons to our eyes compared to what the Moon does

at night, and a thousand times what we tend to think of as comfortable indoor lighting.

The asteroid belt is farther from the Sun, with most of asteroids between twice and thrice

as far away as Earth, but also has no air interfering with light reaching the ground,

or filtering out the harmful parts of the spectrum, so lighting in the belt can range

from nearly a quarter what it is at Earth’s equator to as little as a ten percent in the

outer parts of it.

Our companion tells us that between the dome filtering and the latitude here at Occator

Crater, the domes get a peak illumination of 10,000 Lux.

A lux, one lumen per square meter, is how bright stuff is in the visible range of light,

which is more or less the one plants use, even though they do best with boosts to red

light.

Very approximately, one Watt per square meter of visible light is 125 lux, and it’s about

what we find comfortably bright indoor lighting.

Plants fall into four loose lighting types, low, medium, high, and very high.

They can often live, but be slow growing and weak, at as little as 10% of their preferred

lighting, so you can grow anything under the sunlight anywhere in the Belt, even its outer

reaches.

However many hardly need that much light.

Low light plants are 500-2500 Lux, Medium is 2500-10,000, high is 10-20,000, and very

high is 20-50,000.

Here at Ceres, in the middle belt, any of the first three categories do just fine, and

the very high category can be accommodated by just having some LED lights in the Red

range boosting things a bit.

The domes are very insulated to keep heat in because it’s still quite cold here and

we need to domes warm.

Plants tend to like it warmer than people too, so every insulation trick has been used

to cut down on the energy needed.

Occator’s a big company, the biggest located only in the Belt, but still not big and rich

enough to afford a fusion reactor, in these early days of colonization.

So they use fission and solar, and have big pipes running around the crater carrying steam

off from the reactors and running back through when it condenses back to water.

This helps warm the domes.

Some of that power runs mineral processing and manufacturing, some supplemental red lighting

for the growth domes, some for human comforts, but a lot is for the “Big Fettling Gun”,

a mass driver stretching around the crater rim wall that smaller ships can race around

and get some speed up to launch into space.

Racing around that, clutching on to a small but sturdy rail, they can build up to 1400

meters per second at 4 gees of acceleration before letting go to sail off around the belt.

We ask a technician why it’s called the “Big Fettling Gun”.

He replies that fettling is trimming the rough edges off a piece of metal, or in this case,

a spacecraft.

If the craft is falling apart or things aren’t strapped down, the crew finds that out the

hard way when they get slung.

That and the abbreviation, BFG, he smirks.

Another of our companions is going to work on the launcher, and tells us how much fuel

it saves.

Big ships, like the one we came in on, with their own reactors, don’t use it or need

to, but for small ships or drones it’s a big deal.

One of our other companions is here to work in the entertainment industry, and that’s

a big industry here too.

Of course all the TV and virtual reality comes straight from Earth, other than the Belt News

Network, but there’s a lot of call for recreation.

Tourism from Earth isn’t too common, but folks spend a lot of time cramped on board

ships, and often come home to Ceres with lots of money to spend on leave.

Such services vary a lot, from the cheap to the expensive, the wholesome to the downright

indecent.

If you’ve seen one extraterrestrial entertainment precinct, you’ve seen them all and we’re

neither much interested in that and nor is our meager bank balance.

And that is a key point, most of our companions are planning on living here.

Out of the whole arriving group, we seem to be the only miner, although even most of the

miners already in the belt live here when they’re not out prospecting and mining.

One of companions objects, and says she’s going to be in mining too, just here on Ceres.

But she doesn’t mean mining the dwarf planet itself, though that’s a common enough occupation.

She runs drones.

Small packages of not much more than some sensors and guidance.

They fly off, make a close pass on an asteroid, take some readings and photos, and do a small

course correction to the next one.

The thing about the Belt is that everything is sort of meandering around on its own trajectory,

and except for the asteroid families that tend to huddle up a bit, your neighbors are

constantly changing.

Not everything orbits on the same path or period so it is a big ever-shifting cloud.

If one asteroid gets mined out near Ceres, another will eventually enter the area too.

She’ll be keeping track of hundreds of drones, and doing first analysis for signs of a rich

strike.

Our bank account is mighty thin, but we still make sure to buy her a drink before heading

off to our temporary quarters here.

That, and most areas meant for people, are deep underground, and we’ll be staying in

a cheap small rotating cylinder block with marginal gravity and where the floor isn’t

quite lined up with the direction of that gravity.

It’s minor, but when we spill a glass of juice we can watch the puddle creep under

our bed.

Standing up in a hurry or moving quickly are also nauseating experiences as the changes

in perceived gravity are easily picked up by our inner ear.

We decide that we’ll want to upgrade to some place nicer as soon as possible.

For the moment our goal is to get on board a mining ship, and it doesn’t take us long

to find where the crews hang out when on shore leave.

Unsurprisingly, it is in the less wholesome and more expensive portions of the station.

The crews are easy to spot because a lot of them sport precious metals as jewelry.

Out here mining for gold and platinum, apparently the jewelry shows one is a miner and a successful

one will sport a lot of bling.

We figured a lot of openings would be free, from folks coming home after making their

fortune, but to our surprise, not so much.

Many inquiries we make are waved aside by miners trying to unwind after long stints

in space and not wanting to talk business.

Especially the ones from crews who just struck a big find, and are not yet interested in

looking for the next.

We thought these would have plenty of open slots, folks heading home, but we start noticing

that when we say home, most think you’re referring to their place here in Occator,

not Earth.

A ride to Earth takes a long time, costs a lot of money, and luxuries are getting more

common here, for those who can afford them.

Many see no reason to return to Earth.

Most of the folks on Ceres aren’t miners, they work in other trades and provide other

services, but miners do seem to be the default job here, and again are easy to spot by all

the bling they wear.

After a week, we have reached a dangerously low bank balance.

We finally find a ship’s captain who is almost willing to bring us on board but declines.

Fortunately for us, our friend from the drone department is in a celebratory mood from finding

a pair of nice promising strikes, and lets us know about one she forgot to record, a

smaller one that could be chalked up to a distraction.

It turns out, this sort of thing is fairly common here in Occator, and she agrees to

give the captain coordinates for it in exchange for some reciprocation.

We sigh a bit, disappointed that people are people everywhere, even here on the hopeful

frontier of humanity, but we’re not going to complain, it got us a slot on the ship

and a share of the claim.

No pay though, just room and board and a share, a historical common practice.

We head out, and our ship is a decent-sized one, home to a dozen crew, of which we are

the most junior and unsurprisingly stuck with the least fun jobs.

We also assumed spaceships would be a lot nicer and more high-tech, and the ship we

came out on was a bit of a let-down but the mining vessel, the good ship Rockhopper, looks

like it was clapped together in someone’s garage.

One upside about moving around the Belt is it doesn’t take the cream of the crop to

design, build, or maintain a ship meant for use only in the Belt.

It doesn’t have or need any fission reactor, we’ll buy fuel here on Ceres where it’s

made, along with most of our supplies.

But first we have to buy mining rights on the small metallic asteroid a week’s travel

away.

We will be doing all that through Occator company, but the rights are actually held

back on Earth.

Some bizarre and labyrinthine treaty that requires a fee and a share of any spoils that

gets divided up by all the countries back on Earth.

So we pray to whatever mining gods might be listening that Rockhopper is stronger than

it looks as we go off, whirling around on Rockhopper in Occator Crater’s Big Fettling

Gun.

Mercifully, we survive with a few metallic groans and bits of equipment that haven’t

been properly stowed smacking into the bulkheads, but we’re off to space.

Quarters are cramped, nothing seems clean, and the food is all packaged stuff because

the ship is too small to bother with spin-gravity or its own hydroponics.

The captain says nicer ships have extending sections that can provide gravity during flights

or when the ship settles into an asteroid to mine, but not the Rockhopper, which literally

has duct tape holding components together.

But we do get there and shoot a bunch of harpoons into the asteroid and winch the ship up against

it, inside a nice crater next to our find.

We don’t walk out, because there’s just no gravity, and because we have our own drones

to fly over and look.

It is a good chunk of minerals, rich in gold, and when we start going EVA and poking around,

we find there’s tons of it deeper down.

Indeed there’s more than we have fuel to refine down and send back to Earth directly,

or take on board the ship to fly back.

The captain decides that in order to find out just how much there is, we’ll do some

mining and refining.

We’re are going to settle in for a while, and decide to erect a dome over the ship so

we pop up an inflatable dome.

The nice thing about micro-gravity is even a thin sheet of plastic won’t break under

the weight of whole boulders.

We pressurize that area so we can work without suits, and get to work.

As an added precaution against micro-meteor strikes, we cover the plastic in pykrete,

and then cover it more with soil we dig up.

Pykrete is basically frozen water plus some fibrous material.

It’s sturdy enough to hold air in, and being opaque makes it hard for anyone to see what

we’ve found.

Pykrete’s handy stuff in space, it’s much tougher than ice, and while not permanent,

it’s easy to make and lasts more than enough time for what we need it for.

We have a pod on board and we fuel it up and send it to Earth on the slowest trajectory.

The captain says it’s already sold.

Not at a great price though, the company buying is getting a good price because it won’t

get home for years, and it has security and fraud concerns.

The money is handy though because it can get a remote cargo pod sent off to us with some

supplies and fuel so we can keep working.

It doesn’t take much fuel to go from the Belt to Earth’s orbit, especially if you

don’t mind it taking years, and precious metals on their way are almost as valuable

as ones already in your vaults.

We never do finish though, once the ship is loaded to capacity we head back.

Same as we sold the gold we’d refined years before it will get home, the captain sells

the whole asteroid claim, with its documented mineral wealth, and notes that more undocumented

materials may be there too.

We didn’t get as much as if we worked it ourselves, but we also don’t have to worry

about guarding it from claim jumpers or outright pirates.

Stealth may be impossible in space, but that only applies to the ability to actually hide,

not to someone bribing the folks who watch claims not to alert us and Occator on Ceres

is not the most honorable place.

Its rivals in other craters or other major asteroids probably aren’t any better.

Back on Occator Station, we are very wealthy now.

You might normally go many missions without finding a good strike, even with probes doing

advanced looks, but all it takes is one good one to make you phenomenally rich.

Even after the loss from selling most of it at a fraction of its real value, even after

the bribes and taxes, and even being the junior-most crewmember with the smallest share, we are

quite rich and can easily afford a nice fast trip home to Earth.

But the next one leaving isn’t for a few days and we’ve barely been here a couple

months, only a week on Ceres and several on the Rockhopper.

We spent months getting out here.

There’s a lot going on here so we just can’t bring ourselves to leave yet.

No rush, we’ll take another ship back.

We’re getting a bit restless and thinking about leaving again when we bump into the

captain, who is not going home and in fact buying a new and nicer ship, to be christened

the Lucky Strike.

He invites us to join the crew with a bigger share, nicer quarters, and more seniority

and we do, and next thing we know it’s been a few years and while we’ve never had another

strike like the first one, we’ve done pretty well down the years and eventually buy our

own ship to captain, which we dub the Rockhopper 2, the original long since sold for scrap

after it finally broke apart during a BFG sling.

We’ve never gone home to Earth, but Ceres is home now, and indeed we’ve got a place

there we stay when not out prospecting, we even bought a share in our friends expanding

blueberry business.

Ceres is growing quite well and more people come in every day.

What’s interesting is that more and more folks are just stopping in for a while to

buy supplies and refuel for elsewhere in the Belt or the long haul to new colonies on Jupiter’s

moons.

We bump into one Traveller en route to Callisto and after talking to them we start seeing

whole new possibilities for the Belt.

All those asteroids being mined out mostly leave some sort of infrastructure in place.

Folks move on when the main mineral strike gets dug out but a lot of folks are increasingly

setting up protracted operations on these.

What’s more, it’s always handy to have smaller outposts around, and while there’s

a lot of fast money on shipping precious metals back to Earth, a lot more folks are going

into mining and manufacture of more mundane stuff, and agriculture.

Many of those old mining sites are getting small cylinder habs installed in them and

becoming small communities.

They’re close enough to get quick signals back to Ceres, or even Earth, but they can’t

get a ship to Ceres or one of the other major asteroid colonies like Vesta fast.

A ship carrying goods, just a remote drone in many cases, can get supplies to them though,

and Occator is increasingly becoming a company involved in shipping goods out to those, the

Amazon of the Asteroid Belt.

At first we wonder how long before such things drop off, but even ignoring that vast supplies

of valuable minerals lie still untouched out there, we realize that even though the Earth

has thousands of times the mass of the whole Belt, it actually hasn’t got nearly as much

living area.

So, using our wealth, and our contacts with other miners, we open a new business, buying

up asteroids with depleted excavated deep mines.

Folks are bemused.

Why would you buy up depleted claims?

We explain that one little asteroid only a kilometer across, of which there are nearly

a million, can house a smaller O’Neill Cylinder.

Those, even the smaller versions, can house tens of thousands of people easily.

With a million such asteroids each supporting a cylinder habitat inside them each housing

tens of thousands, or tens of billions of people total, versus seven billion back on

Earth.

Much of the hard work has already been done for us because the miners subtracted material

from inside the asteroid, mined it out and without much more work we are now putting

hollow cylinders in it.

We’re not shipping most of that mass anywhere.

We can make a very large cylinder, or network of cylinders, inside an asteroid that’s

been slowly hollowed out during mining.

All we need to do is dump the spill outside of it.

A typical kilometer-diameter asteroid contains around a gigaton, enough raw material for

a full-sized O’Neill Cylinder, the kind 8 kilometers across and 32 kilometers long,

and able to house a million people comfortably, albeit that cylinder would be thinner than

I’d like, but protected by the walls of the asteroid from radiation and meteor strikes.

While a majority of asteroids are in this size range, the majority of the raw materials

in the Belt are not.

You could get a good billion full-sized O’Neill Cylinders out there each with a million folks.

That’s a Quadrillion people, and that’s without stretching any comforts or pushing

the envelope on food production.

You don’t have to bring those any closer to the Sun either, even sunlight can be concentrated

by having mirrors nearby, which would be quite thin, though you could, bring them either

nearer to Earth or Mars or in-between them.

See that episode, O’Neill Cylinders, for more discussion on the topic.

Others are discussing other options for the Belt.

They want to move asteroids, and bring them or megastructures made from them nearer Earth.

Another idea is to bring Ceres closer to Mars, much closer than our own Moon is to Earth

but still well above where you’d be keeping Martian Orbital Infrastructure, even long

space elevators.

That might be pretty, Mars’s own moons being rather tiny and uninteresting, but more importantly

could be used to generate tidal forces and maybe get the inner core of Mars spinning

up again for a decent magnetosphere and warm the place up a bit to release some much needed

gases into the atmosphere.

This is quite a big project compared to our plans but small compared to many we’ve discussed

on this channel.

As an aside, it would be a bit silly for me to say it’s hard to move something just

a percent of a percent of Earth’s mass around when we’ve discussed moving Earth or even

the whole solar system before.

But discussing building big habitats inside asteroids or moving them large distances brings

up the notion of interstellar travel too.

Any good space station can be made a spaceship too, and the Belt is a good place to make

spaceships at.

Although more so, since while the Belt is far from the Sun, a fairly developed asteroid

colony will likely have lasers for pushing ships around inside the Belt all over the

place, not mention dealing with debris hazards and meteors, and lasers are a nice way to

give a ship some free speed without the mass of extra fuel.

We’ll be talking about that more in next week’s episode as we get into generation

ships, vessels meant for getting us out to the stars, something we’ll be looking at

a lot in the coming months.

But before we can settle other star systems, we need to settle our own first, and the Asteroid

Belt is likely to be a big factor, and Ceres is probably the best focalpoint for doing

that.

For our aspiring asteroid miner on their way to Ceres, the cheapest way will always be

by the Interplanetary Transport Network, a series of slow but low energy transfer maneuvers

that are essentially the trade winds and currents of the solar system.

The key to understanding those is the Hohmann Transfer Orbit, and if you want to learn more

about that, then I recommend that you check out Brilliant.org.

You learn about the physics by breaking the problem down into relevant concepts, thinking

clearly through each part, and then building it back up to the conclusion.

This approach to problem solving is extremely crucial for the asteroid miner, as it allows

them to figure out what to do when faced with novel situations in the mining and O'Neill

Cylinder business.

If you want to learn how to quickly understand the depths of everything an asteroid miner

would need to know, then go to brilliant.org/IsaacArthur and sign up for free.

And also, the first 200 people that go to that link will get 20% off the annual Premium

subscription.

That's the subscription I've been using to build up my problem solving skills.

As mentioned, we’ll be discussing Generation Ships a lot for the next few months and we’ll

be beginning next week with an overview of the basic topics and talking about the key

aspects of how to manufacture them and why you might use this approach over some other

approaches for settling the galaxy, along with looking at some fictional examples of

them, such as our Book of the Month, Arthur C. Clarke’s classic novel, Rendezvous with

Rama, which is a type of O’Neill cylinder itself.

The week after that we’ll be teaming up again with John Michael Godier for a two-part

look at what the galaxy might be like after we colonized it, if we encountered no aliens

as we colonized the galaxy, or at least no civilizations that naturally occurred on their

own.

For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel,

and if you enjoyed this episode, please like it and share it with others.

Until next time, thanks for watching,

and have a great week!