I know this whole thing is just a thought experiment, but I had to wonder about not only the cost of all of this per "astronaut" (off the cuff - $10M per person per year), but the massive amount of energy needed for "life and food production". Just a single line item on my list of "doubtful, but not impossible" is the three quarters of a million Joules of energy needed to melt just 1000 grams of asteroid ice inside your protective environment. And you are gonna need a LOT of liquid water to accomplish all of this out in space...
In space, assuming you're not too far out, heat is abundant. Literally just put the ice in an insulated room with a window facing the sun. If you want to get fancy, use mirrors to focus the sunlight.
This sounds wrong. Firstly, it is generally around -450 degrees F in space (not toward the sun obviously), and to get that asteroid to continuously point toward the sun on one side is probably not gonna happen, and then that "insulated room" built on the asteroid is exorbitantly expensive by itself if it is of any consequential size, and finally, it is impossibly expensive (from energy cost to time cost to equipment cost) to 'mine' that ice from the asteroid. It ain't just sitting out there in cubes... (not to mention there aren't any asteroids hanging out around the Earth anywhere close, so you WILL be far away)
If we can talk long term, then a survey of the asteroid belt would reveal two special bands of density: close to ice, and close to gold. Returning a gold asteroid to Earth orbit has straightforward economics. Build a small cylinder or globe around an ice asteroid and melt just enough of it to kickstart the greenhouse effect.
Gold is only really valuable because we agreed it is; it has industrial applications (good conductor, malleable) but mostly it is priced based on its prettiness. If we were suddenly totally awash in gold, I guess the price would go down.
It is fairly dense, so maybe the best application for gold if you have lots of it in space (and not many morals) might be to threaten to drop it on people/cities/whatever.
> If we were suddenly totally awash in gold, I guess the price would go down.
Yes, and this has happened at least twice in history: when Europeans discovered the Americas and moved a bunch of gold into Europe, and when Europeans discovered World Wars and moved a bunch of gold back to the Americas.
Europeans stole so much gold from S America it messed up the economy in China.
https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2008/1/7/cngold106bi...
This is a neat chart.
Yet 75% of all gold was mined after 1965, and that chart doesn’t seem to notice.
In space, ices are valuable than gold. But, as part of private financing for a survey of the asteroid belt, Earth should prepare for disruptions to precious metals.
In fact, a disruption from even the whiff of effectively returning a glut of precious metals to Earth. Even a lie about such a mission.
