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Protect solar system from mining 'gold rush', say scientists
- anigbrowl 7y agoThis is correct, clever, and wholly counter-productive. It's much easier to get agreement to things in the afterglow of a widely shared success than prior to one. Poorly-timed admonitions like this reduce rather than expand public buy-in for the underlying proposition.
- aurizon 7y agoLet us say that China raises the $$, explores space, claims resources and defends them against all comers and then sell at monopoly prices and owns the world. It eventually leads us to a global chinese oligarchy with the same excess that Russian oligarchs have manifested. We already have man chinese oligarchs buying houses etc all over the world with stolen state money
- mdorazio 7y agoWhile nice in theory, this is the exact opposite of how you get humanity into space in a meaningful way quickly. How much slower would the American frontier have been pushed westward if we said, “wait, 7/8 of everything is off limits”? Expanding into space requires incentives and those incentives need to be available enough for companies and people to chase them despite all the risks.
- thrower123 7y agoLargely, governments tried to wall off unauthorized expansion in North America. It didn't work at all, and people went anyway.
- Robotbeat 7y agoApply exponentials to anything without limit, and you'll get absurdity. Mining anything in space is ridiculously difficult. The only asteroid mining companies basically stalled out. There's no point to this right now. Earth has much richer reserves of basically everything. The only point to space mining is if people want to live out there for their own reasons. Mining for export would only be a minor component of that.