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Mining can be considered a form of destruction, but with an added economic benefit. If we could economically recover the minerals from an asteroid, it might be best to just remove them and ship them to earth. If we do this fast enough, there'd be no asteroid left when it finally reached earth. We don't have to mine away the whole asteroid. If only a small part is left, it would burn up in the atmosphere. Or, what was left would be easier to destroy or divert. It's even possible some of the material mined from the asteroid could be used to construct the engine to divert it, or for fuel in that engine. It's even possible we could mine the materials from the asteroid, use them to construct the apparatus and fuel necessary to move it, then move it to another location where we want to use the rest of the materials in the asteroid. This might be a good approach to take when mining any asteroid. And if we do move the asteroid elsewhere, there's no reason we have to move all of it to the same location. We might break up the asteroid, and move each of the resulting pieces to different locations. I don't know how we would break up the asteroid, but if we have a lot of experience in mining them we might know how. One advantage of mining is that, rather than spend a lot of money on exploration and experiments leading up to destruction or diversion, we would actually make a profit from the asteroid. (Now, if an asteroid threatens civilization, the money spent exploring it and diverting or destroying it is trivial compared to the potential losses — but how often have humans made this kind of mistake?) Another advantage: If, in the next decade or two, asteroid mining becomes a reality, it will be that much easier to use it to protect civilization should it ever be needed. With the diversion and destruction options, we would have to wait for the discovery of a threatening asteroid before developing the technology to protect ourselves. With mining, we could develop the technology relatively soon; it's there if we need it for protection; and in the meantime it's there for making a profit. Although I stated that diversion would be the more appealing option, I may have changed my mind. If we take the asteroid threat seriously (A BIG IF), I believe we should start developing asteroid mining technology to deal with it. I'm not proposing a crash program like Apollo. We should probably use robot technology to mine asteroids, so we would have to wait for that type of technology to mature. And even if we had sufficiently sophisticated robots, the cost of putting things into orbit is currently so high it would be very expensive to do mining experiments. So we would have to wait for launch-to-orbit costs to come down. What I am suggesting is that NASA create a plan to develop asteroid mining technology. The plan would look at what technologies would be necessary, the maturity of those technologies, and approximately what it would cost to develop them to the necessary maturity. Then, for those technologies that are relatively close to the necessary level (and that could be brought to that level relatively cheaply), NASA could fund their development. As more technologies mature, NASA could create experiments that come closer and closer to full-scale asteroid mining. To carry out such a plan, at a reasonable cost, could take decades. But current thinking is, if we detect an asteroid threat, we will probably have decades to build the means necessary to deal with it. By creating an asteroid mining plan (and carrying it out) NASA would: |
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Create the necessary technology a little sooner that it would be created otherwise, and |
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| (2) | Create technology that could earn a profit. | ||||||||||||||||||
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Presumably NASA would, during the early stages of this plan, do what it does now: Hire private contractors to do the work and develop the relevant technologies. As the plan unfolded, these contractors could use the technologies they developed to start mining on their own, as soon as it appeared profitable. Quite a difference from Apollo, which cost approximately $300 billion in today's dollars, and left nothing substantive when it was done (except the engineers with expertise in computer hardware and software, who went on to build Apple, Microsoft, Google . . .). Apollo was a $300 billion publicity stunt. With an asteroid mining plan, we would have technology that could be used as soon as it was developed — even if no asteroid threat appeared for centuries. |
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