Are we ready for space economy? Mining outer-space

I was always fascinated from a young age with Freeman Dyson Sphere, I remember reading an article in the 80’s and I was fascinated with all these illustrations of space explorations and construction of the ring around the sun, and what will involve in building such mega-structure. Then again time passes and here we are in the age of space startups and private sector pioneers. Where are we from our dreams?
History of transition between last two centuries
It becomes obvious each time we try to release our dreams toward the outer space to hit the wall of the budget, there was a time when the budget was open, the cold war allowed spending in a mad race that benefits the fast discovery of the moon, then all halted. It is not worth the trouble anymore, it was time for a break. I guess over the decades that followed the focus was on improving other technologies that wasn’t in the plan that time, the internet, artificial intelligence, automation, new composite material, and many other wonders, it seems this halt on the bleeding budget contributed in optimizing the way we use our current resources, in a way it was beneficial for starting another round.
Although we should not forget that not everything was related to the cold war, the middle east crises contributed in slowing and affecting the whole world economy, the changes in the European Union membership and the effect in managing the budget, the end of the cold war itself contributed in become more efficient in spending, the CERN research contributed in an immense way in information technology applications, we witnessed the birth of the Web, which pushed economy in a new frontier with the help of the PC and mobile technology. Globalization pushed the economic domination to become tense, the rise of China and the dragons accelerated this process of domination to a new horizon, reaching the peak, and that where mining started to be a new issue, our new technology becomes unstoppable and more resource demanding.
Is space mining needed at this stage?
If we are to analyze our human history and try to come to a conclusion, we may come to observe a pattern that forms over and over in the way we evolve and expand in our wealth, each time we come to changing path that contributes to the growth of wealth, we tend to go limitless in our expansion until an obstacle appear that could range from economic crises, politic struggles to a calamity such as plagues, the grow then shift toward knowledge and research then once it reaches a gate such as a critical discovery it shift back and start a new cycle, during that halt we can observe a remarkable recovery from the damage done by the uncontrolled growth.
Meaning…
Take western Europe forest recovery after uncontrolled deforestation to build armadas that were needed for trade and war, same trade that brought black death that reduced the population by the millions and as a result, the forest of western Europe reached an amazing recovery. This may sound cynical but it is facts of humans evolution and activities.
What do we need to do before starting Space Mining?
If we take the same analogy previously talked about, as a pattern to follow in our next step in human evolution, we need to act smarter than fall in a cynical loop in these areas:
- Money between wealth and growth: a lot of enthusiasm regarding mining space is driven by glorifying the profits by the trillions, while actually, the real benefit is to extend our dependence to unexpected and impossible resources that will help to reduce the cost and improve our high technology demands. Money should evolve to stop being a subjective interpretation and to take a more abstract value that purely objective and become a more global unit of measuring growth and evolution, not individual accumulation and wealth.
- Humans capabilities between Automation and Artificial Intelligence :automation has to evolve to a mean to save time and be more efficient without being a mean to retire the use of human labor, many plans for enhancing human skills lead by enthusiasts such as Elon Musk or Bryan Johnson are reaching to such enhancement in order to be more efficient, it is true that our biological evolution can’t match our intellectual evolution and it is maybe time to give a push rather thinking to replace humans by robots and advanced AI, we need AI and Robots, but for the right place, to complete not to compete. If we are to value high the cost of sending humans to mine the space, it will be much more cost effective to send robots with Advanced Artificial intelligence, capable of self-repair and decision making without human intervention and less worry of outer-space dangers and can withstand far more critical missions than humans.
- Industry between waste and recycle: accumulating money and overuse of automation have lead to push the humans evolution to ignore the capacity of the planet to recycle the industrial waste in all its aspects, if companies adopt something enthusiastic such as the Circular Economy motioned by Olivia Saidova that will be a proper achievement toward a real value to the industry in the proper path of human safe evolution. We can’t ignore the fact the more we add to our resources from space will be a real benefit, but that can’t take away the fact that unless we know how to recycle 90% of our added waste we will not skip the nightmare of turning our planet to a dumpster of the solar system.
- Technology and new materials: Good industry evolves better and faster with the existence of an optimized technology and introduction of new revolutionary materials, something that is very promising if more investment is diverted toward nano-material and new composites. Promising future of nano-carbon based material if it reaches a commercialization level faster, space traveling technology is moving toward reducing waste in use of material SpaceX and the reusable rockets and maybe improving or radically changing propulsion, space habitat, labs, assembly units to allow the creation of a chain of relay of continuous process for mining, many sectors in the fields need to be revolutionized in other to allow such operations cost effective.
We are witnessing many pioneers from private sector coming with more and more enthusiasm to efficiently monetize space I like the enthusiasm of Naveen Jain and Moon Express Adventure a project that is an advanced step toward planning for a future that will witness a great push toward manning effective clean energy, and an impressive return on investment but there is responsibility and a certain level of maturity need to be maintained toward our planet and all the livings, we need to clean the planet and learn to be less wasteful before acquiring more.
I would like to apologise in advanced for any inaccuracy in this post, I am just a reader with good wishes.
