Rather than asteroid mining, what I want in my lifetime is an end to mining, period, an end to exploitative adventurism, an end to expanding our rapaciousness across the cosmos. I want the development of organic, sustainable technologies that don't depend on endless inputs. I want people to love the beauty on this planet before lusting to see another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPACE_Act_of_2015
>The update to US law explicitly allows "US citizens to engage in the commercial exploration and exploitation of 'space resources' [including ... water and minerals]."
Also, the only thing that will end mining on this planet is if all humans are dead. Until the Zharnog Mining Fleet from Seeplebop 14 strip mines the entire planet, that is.
No, we just need to stop depending on metals and fossil fuels, both of which are possible and desirable. We've already come close to achieving the latter; the work of this century will be doing the former. Unless we waste all of our time trying to get into space, that useless, airless desert.
Until then, I'm going to want at least a few crust-extracted materials to keep the Internet operational so we can even have this conversation from casually-anonymous points on the globe.
I have very little doubt we'll be printing long wires using just carbon in the next few decades. Until then, sure, let's use crust-extracted materials, but the advantages to making them obsolete are enormous and available.
80.1 Ah, for a small country with a small population! Though there are highly efficient mechanical contrivances, the people have no use for them. Let them mind death and refrain from migrating to distant places.
80.2 Boats and carriages, weapons and armour there may still be, but there are no occasions for using or displaying them.
80.3 Let the people revert to communication by knotting cords. See to it that they are contented with their food, pleased with their clothing, satisfied with their houses, and inured to their simple way of living.
80.4 Though there may be another country in the neighbourhood so close that they are within sight of each other and the crowing of cocks and barking of dogs in one place can be heard in the other, yet there is no traffic between them, and throughout their lives the two peoples have nothing to do with each other.
The reason we have good things is because we have relatively unlimited energy and raw material goods. It's not like we have some "magic" cave men didn't.
Closed loops are possible. Your carbon inputs and outputs are relatively meager; you are a machine with a small cost in energy and entropy, easily paid. Etc. for our dependencies (buildings, cars, etc.). The big advantage humans have over nature is we don't have to rely on ecosystems to supply our energy budgets; we can generate power directly from the sun, or from atoms, or a dozen other ways.
Involves mining. I'm just saying that you can't have humanity camp out in a forest forever and have a 21st century quality of life.
We mine phosphate rock for fertilizer, since P is one of those elements plants need.
Mined potash provides the K.
We can do without them, but we'll take a huge hit in food crop yield.
But we don't have enough excess power for this to be economical.
The thing about 100 years of history is there's also 100 years of optimization, and 100 years to find something better. And there are many proposals of methods which are better in the lab. Just not at industrial scales that can feed a planet.
Nor is it for lack of trying. There are economic and personal incentives for anyone who can radically improve our understanding - to "grow up" as you so crudely put it. It's a certain Nobel Prize, following in Haber's footsteps. Yes, we know it can be done since bacteria have figured out how to fix soils at STP.
(To correct a point you made earlier, nitrogen fixation is certainly NOT part of the biochemical repertoire of any tree or plant.)
But as I pointed out, ammonia synthesis is only one of several very large industrial processes we use for food production. In addition to phosphates and potash, a lot of crop land is zinc deficient or in other micronutrients. Neither plants nor bacteria have figured out how to replenish those chemicals on their own or through bacteria, and depend instead on glaciers, erosion and volcanoes.
While we mine rock to make fertilizers more quickly.
It is not so easy to get rid of mining and feed the world's billions. There is obviously much profit to be had in finding something renewable which is also cheaper than mining. Most of Australia's farmers, for one, want to replenish the nutrient-poor, ancient soils under their crops.
Probably typed on an aluminum Macbook, containing boron-doped silicon chips, in a house heated by natural gas and powered by the same or by coal
We are in the middle of a project, right now, to make natural gas and coal obsolete. This shouldn't even require any imagination to conceive. Yet, still, you chastise me for doing so?
Recall, we're imagining the future, not regurgitating the present.
Saying you want roughly 100% fossil free energy is bold but might happen in our lifetime.
Saying you want to end all mining period is just environmentalist virtue signalling.