asteroid mining will lose billions for years. we should do it anyway.

Today, nothing can replace terrestrial mining. But if we invest for the long term, we'll have nearly infinite cheap resources, and a cleaner, healthier Earth.

It’s often taken for granted that one day, humanity will start mining asteroids because the countless pieces of floating debris left from the creation of the solar system have enough precious or useful metals on them to meet our every need for billions of years. And that’s just one solar system. Similarly vast caches of practically infinite wealth are floating around other stars too, which is why we’re probably not going to get invaded by alien species for our resources. It would be far easier for them just to catch nearby asteroids and get to work, potentially producing evidence of their existence we could one day pick up using our telescopes.

Of course, you may be asking, if mining big rocks in outer space is such a worthwhile venture, why aren’t we doing it ring now, and why does so much science fiction have us exhaust nearly all of Earth’s resources first at a steep environmental price before we do? Well, the answer is that asteroid mining just isn’t profitable when you first get started. You could bring back a literal truckload of gold and platinum from orbit, but it will cost you more to get it than it could ever fetch on the market, and that’s assuming that we modify the legal framework that could make it impossible for you to actually sell your hard-earned ore. Simply put, it’s murder on the wallet.

That said, however, we have the technology to visit asteroids, and already did this a few times for science. We also know how to use ion engines, which will make trips a lot faster and more fuel-efficient, and there’s even one creative proposal for asteroid hopping involving steam, of all things. Likewise, we also have a good idea for how to capture one of these flying space rocks, park it in a more cost-effective, logistically friendly orbit, then using concentrated sunlight to vaporize layer after layer of rock, cool the end result down enough for centrifuges to separate it by density, then send the extracted ore down to Earth in a shuttles or 3D printed capsules.

how would we pay for mining the cosmos?

So, how much would an asteroid mining mission cost us today? Probably close to $4 billion versus between $500 million to $1 billion to set up a mine on Earth. But there’s good news. As continued mining missions put more and more reusable infrastructure in space and drive economies of scale, each asteroid becomes cheaper to mine. After a dozen missions, we could close the profitability gap between terrestrial and orbital mining without spending sums anywhere close to unreasonable. At that point, we can look at the vast environmental, political, and cultural damage mining does to conclude that the best kind of mining involves rockets and robots rather than wells and pits.

Who’d invest the necessary cash for such a transition? Why not mining companies? They already spend nearly $7 billion per year on exploration alone, then billions more for the right to actually extract the ore they’re after on top of lobbying and regulatory compliance. Mines also take years to become operational, much less profitable, so these businesses understand how to be patient. Spending $50 billion over a decade and a half is entirely within their abilities they’d end up with access to over 800,000 asteroids, each with quadrillions worth of ore and zero environmental regulations to follow in the radioactive vacuum of space, plus glowing PR on Earth.

Over the long term, we will always need to make stuff, it’s just a matter of how quickly and how much we’ll need. All the stuff we’ll make will need to be built out of materials we can mine from asteroids for eons. Being able to get those materials without doing toxic long term damage to the environment, or triggering the wrath of people whose livelihoods are routinely upended by today’s mining practices, and getting embroiled in messy geopolitical conflicts sounds like a win across the board. And being able to do it for less than the annual profit of Apple amortized over 15 years seems like a no-brainer, especially with private space companies ready for creative partnerships.

we need to figure out how to profit from change

Here’s the bottom line. Asteroid mining will happen. At some point, the technology will be good enough, money will be no object, or we’ll be desperate enough for resources to start doing it. In the process, we will create a lot of new jobs, benefit from intensive automation and AI, and when we abandon mining on Earth, environments ravaged by decades of heavy industry will recover while our quality of life improves. Technologies to generate self-sustaining energy in space will make it back down to our world in the form of microgrids, and new, more efficient materials will allow us to get more use out of our technology while using less power.

But the problem with this ominous positivity is that it can come both to anticipate the changes coming over the horizon and make the choice to face them head on, or as a means of rebuilding after decades of inaction and facing certain ruin from seemingly apocalyptic environmental and economic disasters that would rival the effects of the Black Plague and volcanic winters. Right now, we seem to be headed down the latter path as world leaders and financiers seem incapable of understanding that there’s a future beyond the next quarter or election cycle, and often lack even the rudimentary understanding of modern science and technology, or what they can do.

It doesn’t have to be this way. When world banks think nothing of injecting trillions of dollars to temporarily prop up failing stock markets, trying to save $50 billion for the groundwork to effectively colonize the solar system and ensure that we can clean up Earth seems absurd. After all, what good are all those stocks if the real world around the haves rots to its very foundations? It would be far from the first time a civilization collapsed, its money becoming little more than a historical curiosity. And to think how much pain could be avoided and money could be gained with just a tiny bit of forward thinking about space rocks and the treasures they hold…

note: This post was originally published on 08.20.2020 on the old blog, and has been updated for style and grammar, illustration from the game Prosperous Universe.