It’s extremely centralized which makes things terrible for those close by, but that does not extend over all that much of the earth.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_mine_drainage [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ok_Tedi_environmental_disaster
There are bigger fish to fry in terms of the environment.
Getting something in orbit will always be expensive and prohibitive, even when space elevators are built, so there will be enough incentive to start building things in space.
Orbital fabrication and mining are intertwined, but together they're the key to any long-term human presence outside Earth.
Four/eight year military service spent policing/polluting the world could be replaced by short "tours" in asteroid belt operations.
The key to all of this would be constant launches and flow of material/labor, ideally with international cooperation. The high frequency of launches in itself is a safety feature - stranded crews would be able to expect fly-bys.
It would be expensive at first because we would essentially be ejecting many resources away from the planet. But the promise of heavy-industry eventually zoned outside of our natural atmosphere could be the [non-classical] incentive.
It would seem more efficient with a field rather than constantly ejecting usable material.
How is the inverse squared law applied to space fission? Ease of cooling?
If you double the distance, the radiation hazard reduces by a factor of four. This is why the Sun — an unshielded fusion reactor — hasn’t already killed everyone.
Yes, rockets emit a lot, but in the overall, less than automobiles when taking into the frequency of use into account:
> Space shuttle fuel consumed in a launch: 3.5 million pounds. Gasoline consumed in one day in the US - 2,500 million pounds. In other words, one space shuttle launch is equivalent to about two minutes of gasoline consumption in the United States. [1]
If we use rockets more often, then this would become a larger component of overall pollution.
[1] http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2000-10/973014746.Es.r....
Edit: actually it burnt both solid fuel and hydrogen, about 2.2 million pounds of the former.
Ideally we could set up a mining operation that didn't require additional fuel from earth. That would be costly in CO2 if we used that as a measure.
However, after being set up all that would be required for getting gold to earth from space would be de-orbiting the gold. I'm assuming that recovering a de-orbited chunk of gold would probably be cheaper than mining and transporting that gold on the surface of earth.
While you are spot on to question the air pollution to get set up mining gold in space, it would require a really detailed analysis to figure out if it would be a net positive or negative for CO2 emissions.
It would also need to be considered what happens when humans can start re-fueling spacecraft in space. What would that do to the shipping industry where materials are prevalent in space and can be moved to earth with minimal CO2 from earth.
I am failing to see much difference between this definition and your ycombinator definition.
I am failing to see how this title represents the engineering concept of wealth.