Show me the infinity He-3 and Mega-Billions in platinum I can make in an exclusive environment mankind is
obligated to conquer on the timeline of a few short hundred years and I will show you some Multi-Billionaires willing to invest heavily as soon as the intersection of orbital access and autonomous robotics is potent enough to mine the crap our of that, and any other, 'Alaska'... Some imagine it will be many decades [
never done those before!], until it's cost viable and some imagine 2020 or 2025 [0].
And I think my vision, and Elon Musks, has something more like autonomous driven lunar vehicles powered by machine learning and mesh networks for robust exploration. Like... 15 Teslas talking over wifi but with no traffic, no time limits, no pedestrians, no speed limits or laws against having jump rockets...
I totally agree we have to build PoCs, and test new equipment, and do science, and do engineering. But most of the "hard parts" WRT to survival have been done on earth [for a poor ROI on earth!], and the really hard parts WRT time differentials and manufacturing look very much like self driving cars and robots made for the moon or mars. Teslas and Foxconn, friend. Europa is just... what we do every day in Subsea exploration + what we do every day with our _amazing_ rover program.
I'm not saying we're there tomorrow. I'm saying that if our robots are there next week making oxygen generators and water pumps and harvesting and collecting, with steady resupplies of better robots and smarter factories, we could Kerbal ourselves f-ing far. H2O is rocket fuel - pure delta-v. Independent mining robots could extract the raw ore for our Expanse/BSG-ish space fleets over the next hundred years, and your grandkids could figure out how to spend an asteroids belt worth of mineral fortune :)
There are many Billions being spent on this pursuit today, in 2018. Cynicism aside, sometimes the VCs know a thing or two...
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[0] - https://www.inverse.com/article/33556-asteroid-mining-multi-...