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It's hard not to see this from all sides: the saddening loss of biodiversity, the world's desperate need for these metals, and the needs of poor countries to ex
by ideonexus 9y ago
It's hard not to see this from all sides: the saddening loss of biodiversity, the world's desperate need for these metals, and the needs of poor countries to exploit their natural resources to rise up in the world. At first I was horrified by the mining technique being described here, and then the article got into all the United Nations protections and regulations surrounding this process.
It's encouraging to know the world will be monitoring this as it happens. Often forgotten about American history is how badly we had to destroy our own environment before we took action to make things better. Much of our country was turned into barren wasteland as all the trees were cut down for industry, and it took FDR deploying a literal army of tree-planters to bring the forests back. I think we are watching the same history repeat in China now as they deploy tree-planters along their growing deserts.
So we'll watch this new environmental front. We'll read stories about companies breaking the rules and listen to pundits decry government regulations that protect snails over jobs. Hopefully we'll strike a balance and survive long enough to make asteroid-mining profitable and maybe take all of this off-world where such environmental conflicts don't exist.
- deanCommie 9y agoI'm much less optimistic than you. The amount of willful cognitive dissonance on display here is staggering. > “Where we’ll be operating, it’s cold and dark,” says one senior Nautilus executive. “There are no tuna there, they need entirely different conditions near the surface of the ocean.” I expect nothing less from the mining executive to dismiss concerns that the ocean's ecosystems are directly connected. > "For Michael Lodge, secretary general of the International Seabed Authority, a UN body set up to manage deep sea mining, there’s a clear case for pressing ahead. “Are we going to continue to develop huge mines that destroy villages, alter rivers, pollute water courses, take thousands of years to restore, remove whole mountains? You don’t have any of that with deep seabed mining.”" But this one is from the UN body itself that you are talking about monitoring this. This man just finished saying "pollute water" in the previous sentence then proceeded with the claim that this doesn't occur with deep seabed mining? How can people claim this with a straight face? I don't want to come off as naive. The article is very good at explaining the consumer needs driving this development. 8 billion people with smartphones and 4 billion electric cars does not scale. On the other hand, there are also hundreds of millions of people that rely on fish for their protein. Are we willing to risk destroying our oceans to save our land?
- mhroth 9y ago8e9 + 4e9 > 1e8. We know how this is going to go. /s
- jimmy1 9y ago> On the other hand, there are also hundreds of millions of people that rely on fish for their protein. Are we willing to risk destroying our oceans to save our land? Plenty of fish you can eat that live in tanks of water. Who says they need to come from the ocean?
- ideonexus 9y agoMaybe it was the tone of your comment that got you downvoted, but there's an important point here. Fish farming is a crucial tool in preserving our oceans. We can't keep taking fish from the open seas; we need to set up dedicated farms to grow what we need.