by Becky Ferreira
About a decade ago, the prospect of “asteroid mining” saw a massive surge in interest. This was due largely to the rise of the commercial space sector and the belief that harvesting resources from space would soon become a reality. What had been the stuff of science fiction and futurist predictions was now being talked about seriously in the business sector, with many claiming that the future of resource exploitation and manufacturing lay in space. Since then, there’s been a bit of a cooling off as these hopes failed to materialize in the expected timeframe.
Nevertheless, there is little doubt that a human presence in space will entail harvesting resources from Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and beyond. In a recent paper, a team of researchers from the University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China, examined the potential impact of asteroid mining on the global economy. Based on their detailed assessment that includes market forces, environmental impact, asteroid and mineral type, and the scale of mining, they show how asteroid mining can be done in a way that is consistent with the Outer Space Treaty (i.e., for the benefit of all humanity).
The research was conducted by He Sun, Junfeng Zhu, and Yipeng Xu, three researchers from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham. They are part of a research group known as GemAI (Group for Equity Modeling with AI) that explores the intersection between mathematical modeling, artificial intelligence, and the social sciences (largely focused on equity issues). The paper describing their findings is currently being reviewed for publication in the Annual Review of Sociology.
Simply put, the prospect of asteroid mining comes down to resources and the continued growth of human civilization. There are many reasons cited for this, from ensuring the survival of humanity and life on Earth (having a “backup location” or becoming “multiplanetary”) to fulfilling a basic and ancestral need to explore and “wander.” Then there’s the idea of preventing ecological collapse here on Earth through mining and manufacturing or ushering in a “post-scarcity” society by relocating all of our resource extraction and manufacturing to near-Earth space, Cislunar space, and beyond.
Carl Sagan, the late and great physicist, author, and science communicator, summarized these beautifully and related how the two might be intertwined at the intuitive level. As he put it:
“The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. The appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game—none of them lasts forever. Your own life, or your band’s, or even your species’ might be owed to a restless few—drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.”
https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.02023
Link to UniverseToday.com story:
https://www.universetoday.com/158611/what-would-asteroid-mining-do-to-the-worlds-economy/
AR #130
Life Sustaining Resources from Dead Space Rocks
by J. Douglas Kenyon
