Mining the Asteroids

Recently there have been some news reports about a new business venture formed by a number of prominent billionaires from the IT industry that aims to do something that science fiction writers and futurists have been talking about for a long time -- mining asteroids. While this may strike some people as overly ambitious, they do seem to have a fairly well thought out plan. Some commentators have nevertheless pointed out that it may still take decades to make money on such a venture. While the platinum-group metals that the consortium wants to mine are immensely valuable, the up-front costs of prospecting, mining, and transporting all those heavy metals back to Earth will be immense as well. Others, however, believe that it will be feasible for the group to make a profit in the foreseeable future. Furthermore, as far as humanity as a whole is concerned, if the venture succeeds, it will have benefits beyond financial profits for its backers. Humanity will have taken the first major step toward long term exploitation of space, and the material the group mines will provide a great boost to technological development, as many of the metals in question are vital to many modern devices.

Another question that has been raised about this kind of venture is an ethical one. Is it right for humanity to start strip-mining in space, considering all the damage that has been done by such practices on Earth? I have mixed feelings about this question myself. Some may argue that we shouldn't worry about environmental issues in an environment that lacks any form of life and therefore has no ecology to be disrupted by our destructiveness. But I disagree with the notion that life alone has real value. After all, the value most people see in a place like the Grand Canyon doesn't come primarily from the plant and animal life it is home to. There are a lot of spectacular spots in other places in the Solar System, such as the canyons and volcanoes of Mars, that should be preserved as much as possible. Certainly, as has been pointed out when people talk about mining the Moon for helium-3 (for use as a fuel for nuclear fusion), few people on Earth would be particularly happy to see the familiar face of the Moon covered with huge scars left by the kind of mining that would probably be necessary.

On the other hand, for humanity to have any hope of expanding beyond the Earth, it will be necessary to exploit the resources of space in some way, and asteroids seem like a reasonable place to start. While many of them are no doubt very fascinating places, the fact remains that most of them do not have the aesthetic appeal of most larger Solar System bodies. What's more, there are a lot of them, so taking one or two of them apart doesn't seem like as great a loss as it might be if that were not the case, especially since many of the near-Earth asteroids that are the most likely targets may well end up being destroyed sometime in the next few hundred million years anyway by hitting the Earth. Since mining a few of them will eliminate any threat they might pose someday, I would on the whole be in favor of doing it. However, I would also be in favor of insisting that the targets for mining be chosen with great care, and that planetary scientists be given an opportunity to take a good look at them before the mining robots move in. While I am not against exploiting the resources of the Solar System, I think it should be done as responsibly as possible, in contrast to the careless destruction that humanity has often unleashed on Earth.