The Chinchillas and the Gold Mine (2020)
undark.org
undark.org
The feeling it instills is simultaneously awe and disgust. The scale is like nothing I have ever seen. An open wound on the earth that makes 30 foot tall bulldozers look like specks of dust with a huge pool of arsenic laced fluid at the bottom.
Overall I'm on the side of the chinchillas. When will we stop ravaging this planet in the name of greed?
When we look to migrate form fossil fuels to electric and need batteries for storage and transport, we necessarily will scar Earth mining for minerals. Do we stop?
My problem with open pit gold mines in particular is that, while gold does have industrial uses, the primary function is to be a shiny thing worth money and I find this activity to be arbitrary and not clear the bar of "worth destroying and toxifying a landscape" and thus greedful.
What’s the cutoff?
Massively inefficient and requires huge amounts of energy beyond traditional mining.
Yeah, about half of gold is used in jewelry. About a third is electronics.
I bring this up because I just can't help but feel that open pit mining isn't technically necessary to advance as a civilization - it's just a practical choice that maximizes returns for proverbial shareholders.
I feel we can do better as the apex species of our solar system.
There's also kinetic launching - address the bootstrap problem by concentrating an amount of fancy metals and such in one giant motor that can be reused many times.
Overall, asteroid mining is pretty idiotic. It will not be economical within our lifetimes and certainly will not play a role in producing the resources necessary for combating climate change.
People want to have children. Those children want a first world standard of living. The governments want population and per capita consumption to continue growing, because that's what drives our economy.
I feel we are at the point where we can't meet those needs and desires sustainably for everyone. If anything, industrialization and scale of industrial activity will continue to grow.
Interestingly that's similar to one hypothesis as to how the Bronze Age collapsed - climate refugees from a non-man-made disaster destabilizing a complex economy where each civilization relied on another for goods and services.