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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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@gerikson @techtakes The thing about Lunar 3He mining is … it presupposes you can build aneutronic fusion reactors (a 3rd generation fusion reactor: not simple!). But if you can fuse 3He, you're almost certainly able to run a P + 11B reactor (which is also an aneutronic reaction), and hydrogen and boron are readily available on Earth. Thereby removing the entire incentive to strip-mine the moon at vast expense.
TLDR: Lunar 3He is a non-working economic justification for space colonization.
Point taken. I still think the Luna series is great!
@gerikson @techtakes Ian is a *very* good writer—but for those books he uncritically adopted the American colonialist ideologues' idea of an good reason for space colonization: and sure, his Lunar colony is a capitalist hellscape, but that's not the point. (The P + 11B aneutronic fusion pathway was already known about at the time.)
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@gerikson @techtakes
Anyway, if I was going to go mining 3He in space I'd bear in mind it's in the regolith because it's part of the solar wind and gets trapped there. Is it possible to collect it more cheaply using a really huge solar sail (with station-keeping as a side-purpose) made out of a membrane that traps it directly and can be reprocessed to outgas the stuff? That way you're not grinding up gigatons of fucking rock to extract an incredibly rare volatile.