Mining in Space Could Lead to Conflicts on Earth
nautil.us
nautil.us
Additionally, the '67 Outer Space Treaty was specifically written with open-ended provisions to allow for the commercial exploitation of space - at the time, they quite honestly thought that Hilton and Pan Am (yes, 2001 did it) would be operating in space within decades. They even thought so as far back as '58, before man had even been to space. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120712-where-is-hiltons-lu...
None of the space treaties were written with the anticipation of actual profits in mind.
You could make the same argument about Antarctica, but [actually I don't have a good argument why we haven't exploited the resources there and would be interested to hear one. Just political suicide? Too expensive?]
When it's feasible to make money space mining absolutely all of these things will be rewritten, probably with a heavy dose of realpolitik.
Penguins are cute.
We ought to leave somewhere untouched, so let's pick the poles, because they're too bloody cold, and all.
/s
Also yes if there were space penguins: no chance
The treaty doesn't really protect Antarctica from anything other than nuclear tests, in the future if countries want to actually develop claims it can and will be revisited. That said there isn't much interest in this atm mostly because we do not have the technology and we aren't that desperate heck even if the largest oil field in the would would've been found there no one atm would try to develop it as it would most likely be financially non-viable but nothing would really stop anyone from doing so.
Outerspace on the other hand defines the universe as the heritage of all mankind where no one can claim any stake, which will shortly be changed probably to something along the side of what was used to be used in the US during expansion, where claims would be made by private individuals and corporations rather than countries.
The difference is that conspiracy theorists and others will fear that an asteroid would be used to destroy a major city.
But we've got to learn how to deflect asteroids anyhow, in order to save the Earth. So some international body formed out of NASA should start crashing them into the Moon, or into parking orbit around the Moon.
We can then offer mining rights to any company which is simply able to get up there. Presto. There'll be a lunar base within decades!
Who is "we" in this case?
Yeah there will be some nice absurd law fights before the wars.
I wonder if generally law applies to earth only.
Also See: Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", which features space colonists seeking to break away from Earth dropping rocks on us to persuade us to let them go.
It was a rational assumption. There was good data suggesting we could expect a significant drop in launch cost. Then the two nations who could do this decided instead to spend all their money on nuclear weapons and conventional military forces as well as proxy conflicts which starved whatever civilian rocket innovations could have or should have happened in the 70s and 80s. They both had classic designs by then that worked well enough and competing on cost per lbs didn't matter to them as it wasn't incentivized by anyone.
As a show not top notch, but not bad either. It was interesting that it was exploring the Solar system as opposed the traditional space sci fi plot with aliens invading or having to go through wormholes to outer rims of the universe.
It is also a complex history that rewards repeated views.
Given our poor track record at establishing transnational bodies with actual powers, I wouldn't want to wait until the UN Space Mining Commission has worked out rules and can actually enforce them.
Does it solve world hunger ? Don't we already have more than enough food ?
Does it solve cancer ? ..
Does it solve the economical crisis we are in ? Its mostly due to lack of political organization and lack of education.
I think the argument that Neil Degrasse Tyson makes - about inspiring the young - it can be done by trying to solve world hunger, cancer, etc. We do not need to burn more fossil fuels to try to figure out how to mine the moon.
The biggest argument would be that we already have infinite resources here on earth. Space mining doesn't make much sense when you can much more cheaply extract resources from earth.
I think the biggest issues in society is education and healthcare. And the free market seems to direct us towards that anyway.
Healthy and educated people are inspiring - space mining seems to be trying to solve the wrong problem for the right reasons.
Earth's resources are very much finite and that's a fact. It's only a matter of a couple of decades before fossil fuels become extinct, our oceans are dying due to overfishing and pollution, rainforests are cut to make room for more agricultural land, existing agricultural land is acidified due to overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, potable water sources are vanishing, those solar panels that people keep talking about and the iPhone in your pocket need rare metals to be mined, etc, etc.
Also have you seen how open pit mining looks like, have you seen what it leaves behind? Earth mining is cheap only because the costs are subsidized by the environment. But of course, our children will pay the real bills.
So you think rain-forests and clean water exists on space ??
We can solve those problems withing sending more rockets to space - which ends up burning more fossil fuel. Remember, every day that you are alive ( assuming you are living a developed country ) you are emitting huge amount of carbon.
Just keeping you alive is making the earth more inhospitable - dont talk about sending rockets to space ( with other people's money ) as a method to combat climate change and solving the resource constraint on planet earth.
Very much yes.
The point was that they (in the "all around us" / Earth sense) do not, so it is therefore more difficult to pollute them via space industry.
There's something to be said for an environment where you can run an unshielded nuclear reactor without causing any particular damage around your craft...
Are you aware that advancements made for space exploration have helped the medical field? Things like NASA's digital image processing of the moon helping with MRIs and CAT scans. Or LVAD leading to artificial heart pumps. NASA is basically able to claim at least partial credit for things like ear thermometers, automatic insulin pumps, implantable heart defibrillators, improvements in digital mammography technology, programmable pacemakers, LEDs, etc.
The discussion is about mining and I see no reason for why space mining colonies couldn't be self-sustainable. If they cannot be, then space mining isn't feasible or too costly. And if they are self sustainable, then the fossil fuel mined and burned on earth would be worth it. If this was meant for me to feel shame of being alive and consuming carbon, take note that this is reductionist thinking, the same reason for why we find ourselves in the current predicament. Carbon emissions are only important as long as we have an impending global warming phenomenon potentially pushing us over a dangerous threshold. And while that's certainly a potential catastrophe, it's reductionist thinking in the sense that carbon emission isn't the real problem, just a reaction in a long chain of reactions and focusing just on carbon emissions will spell our doom.
But going back to your first question, we'd have plenty of water if we wouldn't pollute it, I don't see the need for mining decreasing, quite the contrary, so instead of dynamiting mountains and filling the area with cyanide for extracting gold or whatever, I'd rather have all of this happen in space, instead of our backyard. Mining on earth is only cheap because the costs are subsidized, being implicit in the damage to the environment, a cost that we'll pay sooner or later. If we'd factor in the real cost, if space mining is possible, I don't think it will look that expensive.
We can find lots of resources and turn them into useful energy and things.
But that only exacerbates the pollution issue, regardless of where we obtain the resources. Especially noxious is the non biodegradable pollution and the millions of years worth of carbon released from the ground.
And I understand the concern, but if reducing CO2 emissions is the goal, the first targets should be the production of electricity, heat, transport and agriculture. Food gets transported nowadays by airplane and maybe we shouldn't shut down nuclear power plants to replace them with coal plants. Plenty of low hanging fruits if you ask me.
Factually untrue!
Obtaining resources on Earth generates pollution that stays on Earth. If we move mining off-world, the byproducts of mining don't go into streams, soil, etc.
Furthermore, generating energy in space and beaming it down to the planet means not having to burn coal, reducing the risk of nuclear accidents, and eliminating the need for dams that disrupt ecological systems.
Yes, we'll need to burn more fuel to get there, but that's the nature of progress. The other alternative is to fall back to a pre-industrial lifestyle limited to only those parts of the globe where the temperature is mild year-round - unless you want to keep burning wood for heat in the winter.
What, did you think there are no byproducts from operations done with raw resources AFTER they are mined?
And how about the mere transport of resources?
As for the Carbon - it doesnt matter how slowly we do it, we will still remove it all from the ground. It is a non renewable resource. Look at what we've done to slowly renewable resources like species - how many have gone extinct in the last 100 years? So yeah I think with carbon it's a foregone conclusion that we will floodthe atmosphere with it. But non biodegradable plastics etc. at least we can phase out.
Space is between us and all the ones not on Earth. If we're going to spread to other solar systems we're going to have to get used to living in space.
Even if you launched 10 rockets a day, it's a tiny percentage of combustion compared to hundreds of millions of cars, trucks, buses, planes, coal and oil and gas boilers, etc.
I don't understand your second point.
But regarding "clean water on[sic] space", there are in fact ice comets containing tons of water that could be harvested by a future space colony. It makes sense that we'd want to exploit that source rather than try to move H2O into orbit from the Earth's surface. The Jupiter moon Europa is thought to possibly have a vast water ocean beneath its icy shell. The Moon may also harbor vast amounts of water locked in minerals or in subsurface ice.
With water, we can have colonies. Colonies can grow trees, entire forests in fact. The sky's the limit, so to speak. Really, there's a lot of exciting possibilities for spreading civilization into orbit and onto other planets and moons.
The spin-offs and economic expansion that space colonization will undoubtedly bring more than justify the costs of exploration. A few space colonies and mining operations will solve poverty on Earth. It's worth it.
But it solves the problem of "ups, something destroyed humankind".
Something that gnaws at the back of my mind is that the survival of our species is contingent on absolutely nothing catastrophic happening to the single planet we inhabit. All of our eggs are in one basket, so to speak.
Until we have a viable network of colonies offworld, we will continue to have this problem.
But space.time is not infinite, far from it. We can easily imagine, eg. computational problems (ie. computer programs that can easily be written) that would require more memory than the number of particule in the universe would allow, or more time than the life expectancy of the universe would allow. So unless we are able within this space.time left to invent a way to create new universe or survive a big crunch/big bang event, or a cold death, no, there's no infinite energy and no infinite resources to be taped, and therefore:
- world hunger is not a problem of resources, but a political problem. The question is whether we're ready to gather in a concentration camp the psychopaths of the world, and exterminate them once for all.
- yes, we have already more than enough food.
- all hints are that cancer is a man-made illness. Once you've removed the psychopaths who build poluting processes to earn more $money or more power, we should revert to a more natural and canceless world.
- nope. It is not an economical crisis, it is an economical system set up by those psychopaths to keep accumulating money and power. They already own 99% of the money and of the power, but they still need to acrrue it at a significant percentage each year.
I should also mention, that assuming a population growth such as we double the population every 20 years, going to space would not solve any "overpopulation" problem if it was any more real than human-made climate change, since that would just mean that you would have to colonize new planets every 20 years. Very soon, the whole galaxy would be "overpopulated", and then soon enough the whole universe.
So going to space, offers no solution to "we".
However, having a space ship, and being able to leave this planet of psychopaths, crazy people, and savages, would solve "MY" problem! I would at least escape from this asylum-prison!
And there's hope the galaxy is big enough that if you escape, the US government and the banksters won't be able to catch you up to make you pay taxes and interests on the debt.
Healthy and educated people are looking for a way out, space mining serves only to build bigger, faster and better space ships to go farther, until we can get out of the reach of the psychopaths. And THIS would be the BEST solution, if you don't like the concentration camp/final solution.
Also, before you trot out the tired old "oh, we never thought we'd finish polluting the ocean"... first, run the math, it's very different, and second, the universe is already terminally polluted, in the sense that nothing much can live there until we go out and clean some space out. There's no life out there, not within anywhere we can get in your lifetime. It can't get any more uninhabitable than it already is.
However, what is the financial incentive for this? Are the new investors of SpaceX, really going to want to waste billions upon billions of dollars, for something that will not make money? Hell no.
When Europeans set sail for the "New World" hundreds of years ago, there was a huge financial incentive. Gold and other raw materials.
As much as I respect the idea of getting people living on Mars. It's ass backwards. We have to start with mining or something very profitable. Then we can get people living in space or other planets / astroids.
Religion was actually a big reason too. Perhaps in the modern era after the caliphate fails to establish their Islamic kingdom on earth, they will attempt to do it in space.
Money is a good reason to temporarily get equipment and people into space, but those people ultimately want to come back home. To get colonists to leave earth forever, raise families while risking life and limb (and their children's life and limb) in a hostile, dangerous environment forever, you'll need more than a paycheck. You have to be fanatically devoted to it. Religion will do it.
I would disagree with the author's thesis for one simple reason: space is dangerous. Those nations and groups of nations that establish footholds in space are sacrificing much blood and treasure to get there. The U.S. alone has lost 24 people to accidents in space and space-related test flights and catastrophes like Apollo 1 and the USSR lost several cosmonauts as well. The grim likelihood is that there will be more deaths, an inherent risk of such dangerous exploration.
In addition, the US, USSR, EU, Japan, China, and India have collectively invested trillions of dollars in space exploration and development since the 1950s. It's hardly likely that these great nations will submit to the authority of an international regulatory body and curtail their exploration; there's simply too much at stake. At most, they'll agree to some standards and shared values, based on the Law of the Sea, e.g. agreed-upon mayday signals, standardized airlock connectors, etc.
I believe that those nations and groups of nations that establish footholds in space and exploit the vast potential mineral wealth in the Belt, on the Moon and on Mars, will be the superpowers of the late 21st Century and the 22nd Century. Far from a cause of conflict, this vast new wealth will usher in a new era of peace and prosperity and technology far advanced beyond even what we can imagine.
Abundance of rare resources would rather make wars less likely than lack of resources and fighting over them.
However, I hardly can remember any wars where coal resources was the main motive.
Both are fossil fuels, but one is more precious than the other.
Regardless, if there is something of worth, people will kill to have it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_King...
The deadliest conflicts, in fact, do seem to be those that involve the two wealthiest great powers in a region who have far more to lose in war than they have to gain. Wealth may make wars rarer, but they make them far more deadly.
The sheer amount of resources in the asteroid belt makes an obsession about possible conflicts an overreaction.
We fight for resources on the earth because we are billions of people with limited resources. That is not the situation in space. It is the opposite. Vast amounts of resources but with nobody to argue over it.
"Space as humanities common heritage", that just makes me wince, what arrogance. We are a tiny insignificant spec in the universe. Space is not our heritage. That is a nonsensical statement. I wonder what the aliens on Alpha Centuri thinks about being labeled the heritage of some bipedals down on Telus.
You need some sort of legal framework, still, because there will be conflicting claims and other problems.
Plus, when it comes to planets, it's still worth trying to keep them as isolated from Earth life as possible - otherwise, you may ruin the chance to discover new types of life and advance science.
But I also see the need for regulations so that one company can't claim all plantes to mine while still having an advantage because they were the first to start mining. How could territories be distributed fairly so that innovation is possible (and encourage by financial gains) and that there are no monopolies (so that only one country or only one space agency from one country, which would be pretty counterproductive).
I think that's where things get interesting and earth politics get involved. Who should have a say? Spacefaring nations or all of earth? [I think this is your point, just being explicit I guess].
You should see the problems we have with illegal fishing about 10 miles off our coast.
I don't disagree with you, I just think the practicalities of monitoring and enforcement would be almost impossible.
You can't sweep space mining under the rug.
We're a long way off freebooters with fusion drives. And when we have those, AI will see you from 5 AUs out
- Time they have access to asteroid
- Type of resource they want to extract
- Quantity of resource they want to extract
Time cost is paid upfront and distributed evenly amongst worlds countries.
Type/Qty is paid for on return to Earth in either cash or using resource itself.
That is physically impossible.
While the international laws and conventions have lapsed, they can easily be brought back, and one of the principles of settling is that you can't claim something you can't defend. The principles will need to be tweaked a bit since the way in which "defense" is used here isn't 100% applicable, but you could easily say that you have to be occupying it, for instance. There is no way to squat on the million best asteroids.
By the time that's not true, our great-grandchildren will have worked out the principles of solving that problem. It may be fun to speculate on their answers, but it's nothing more.
We still can't decide who's allowed to use which bathroom. Of course we'd fight over space resources.
It is a new frontier, vast on a scale that dwarfs everything we are now.
What is the population density required for a cometary level civilisation to develop interstellar technology ?
* http://nix.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20050092385&qs=N%3D42949668...
Raw materials are a national security to all countries.
China in many respects is the leader in raw matters and they are leveraging this anywhere possible; China stopped providing raw materials to Japan, US complained to the national community, and were told they breaking trade laws by the community.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/how-chinas-rare-earth-weapon-went-fro...
US Government Accounting Office recently said it was still an issue: http://breakingdefense.com/2016/03/pentagon-fails-to-act-on-...
It's an issue, but complex, and hard to predict what will happen. Also, given it is a national security issue, it's possible, if not likely that you'll never get a full picture of the issue.
Odd question I know, but I've often wondered this.
Honestly I'd worry about heating up the atmosphere too much from the resources being delivered before mass even vaguely comes into the picture unless we figure out space elevators.