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Comment by kerryfalk | Hacker News Reader

We are not great at mining.

Fun fact: the manufacturing industry has been able to obtain machine utilization at nearly 100%. Mining is in the 40% range.

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We’re not great at environmentally friendly mining. Mountain top removal mining, open pit mining and strip mining are brute force tactics that demonstrate a capacity for efficiency, but remain controversial because of their destructive qualities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_mining

No one will care about using destructive tactics on an asteroid, freeing everyone’s hand to not be gentle. On the other hand, much of what gets mined in space will need to stay in space. After all, what would happen, if three times the mass of planet earth were mined into managable resources? To add as much to earth’s surface would augment orbit and rotation for starters. Even bringing such mass near earth would wreak havoc on ocean tides.

> The total mass of the asteroid belt is approximately 4% that of the Moon, or 22% that of Pluto, and roughly twice that of Pluto's moon Charon (whose diameter is 1200 km).

(Wikipedia)

It will take a long time before we have mined enough mass to worry about things like tides.

What's the utilization in the construction industry? I think that'd be a more fair analog for mining.

Oh, it's much, much, much worse than mining. Construction is famously the least-improved, in productivity terms, of all industries: https://www.economist.com/news/business/21726714-american-bu...

Fascinating, this is a well-formed argument. To be frank, it's borderline the best argument for space development that I have ever heard. There are many things that we do well on Earth, but there are some industries where the arc of progress has stalled. In a broad, long-term, theoretical sense we all understand that Earth has limited mineral resources, but this is a weak argument. We are not near the depletion limits of this planet for the resources that we need the most - at least nowhere close enough to justify the poor mass economies of space activities.

Space might be the only place we can make heavy industries start to behave similar to software.

I wish that article included Japan in its analysis. Its construction industry is supposedly quite efficient, but I would have liked to seen the hard numbers.

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