I suspect asteroid mining would produce metals mostly for use in space but I’m sure there would be plenty of products manufactured in space for use here.
sounds like a good place illegals and unions to get a first shot at the jobs
So, there’s this rock — it’s about a mile across, OK? And it’s zipping past at ... I dunno ... a couple thousand miles an hour or something. Anyway, that doesn’t matter. The thing is, I want you reach out — and grab that bad boy!! You with me? Just — grab it!! And we’ll all be rich!
I’m sure he has. But descendants of some of the families formerly involved in manufacturing on U.S. soil (decades back) sent much of the scrap steel to other countries in order to avoid being shown-up by new, small shops and to generally prevent competition. And yes, such international transportation is very costly.
The more “precious metals” you discover in space, the lower the market value is here on Earth.
Isn’t the Earth’s atmosphere made up of 78 percent nitrogen? I would bet in the future liberals will be protesting the addition of mass added to the planet and guys like Algore will try to institute a mass trading scheme in the inner planets that would only enrich themselves and deny others ease of self enrichment.
“For now, only protection and better resource management can safeguard the planet. As we burn through Earth’s resources, a wealth of physical resources like metals, water, and hydrocarbons are floating around in asteroids, moons, and other planets, ready to be harvested. If human civilization is to continue to grow and expand over the centuries and millennia to come, hunger for resources is likely to drive us to explore and mine what’s way, way out there.”
I swear I can hear a violin being played while reading this crap...
Asteroid mining is a science fiction writer’s fantasy. It would cost trillion$ to get it using technology we do not have. Hexk, we barely made it to the moon.
all i know is, I put stuff out on the sidewalk. the only stuff that is there in the morning for the trash men is trash.
Along with adding more mass to the planet. What do they think will happen if they add more water to the planet? The water levels will rise. The world climate cycle keeps water shifting, as well as transforming it between solid, liquid and gas. The amount of water also stays at more or less a constant amount I’d assume. Adding more would burden the world’s climate, and really change it irreversibly.
This isn’t hard to figure out.
If the UN has anything to do with the report it is a bogus screed of lies!
Fantasy...just like the millions of Green jobs we were told to expect.
all we need is Delos D. Harriman
I'm sure that if someone tossed that idea out there, liberals would actually believe it!
A United Nations report on resource depletion says that between 1980 and 2008 natural resources per capita declined by 20 percent in the United States, 33 percent in South Africa, 25 percent in Brazil, and 17 percent in China.
PER CAPITA... where South Africa's population went form 29m to 50m (an increase of 73%), the US went from 227m to 313m (37%), Brazil went from 119m to 193m (62%) and China went from 981m to 1.3b (33%)... thus the resources in EVERY case have actually INCREASED since 1980.
everybody familiar with economic history knows about the great tulip speculative bubble of the 1600’s in holland. people bid up the price of tulips to astronomical values. and then prices crashed.
What’s not so well known is the answer to the question...where did all the money to make this speculative boom come from...because...as far as we know this was the first known financial bubble of the modern age—or any age.
The answer to that question is in the spanish silver mines of the new world. There were a couple big ones in Peru and Mexico. Pirates like sir francis drake got only a small percentage of the vast troves of the metal that were shipped to europe from the new world.
Later in this century something similiar will happen with asteroid mining.
obama immediately said they could do it, but that he’d tax them out of this world.
Apparently the author forgot about conservation of matter. For most materials the problem isn't whether or not we have them on the earth, it is whether the material is concentrated enough in one location to be worth mining. Someday our trash dumps may well be worth mining. Probably long before grabbing an asteroid is economical.
“a relatively small metallic asteroid with a diameter of 0.99 miles”
I’m horizontal tapping on an iPad or I’d do some calculations on the amount of energy it would take to drop that down to the Earth at a reasonable descent rate. You drop that thing at full speed and i bet it would make the Hiroshima bomb look like a picnic.