Earth's resources are very much finite and that's a fact. It's only a matter of a couple of decades before fossil fuels become extinct, our oceans are dying due to overfishing and pollution, rainforests are cut to make room for more agricultural land, existing agricultural land is acidified due to overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, potable water sources are vanishing, those solar panels that people keep talking about and the iPhone in your pocket need rare metals to be mined, etc, etc.
Also have you seen how open pit mining looks like, have you seen what it leaves behind? Earth mining is cheap only because the costs are subsidized by the environment. But of course, our children will pay the real bills.
So you think rain-forests and clean water exists on space ??
We can solve those problems withing sending more rockets to space - which ends up burning more fossil fuel. Remember, every day that you are alive ( assuming you are living a developed country ) you are emitting huge amount of carbon.
Just keeping you alive is making the earth more inhospitable - dont talk about sending rockets to space ( with other people's money ) as a method to combat climate change and solving the resource constraint on planet earth.
Are you aware that advancements made for space exploration have helped the medical field? Things like NASA's digital image processing of the moon helping with MRIs and CAT scans. Or LVAD leading to artificial heart pumps. NASA is basically able to claim at least partial credit for things like ear thermometers, automatic insulin pumps, implantable heart defibrillators, improvements in digital mammography technology, programmable pacemakers, LEDs, etc.
The discussion is about mining and I see no reason for why space mining colonies couldn't be self-sustainable. If they cannot be, then space mining isn't feasible or too costly. And if they are self sustainable, then the fossil fuel mined and burned on earth would be worth it. If this was meant for me to feel shame of being alive and consuming carbon, take note that this is reductionist thinking, the same reason for why we find ourselves in the current predicament. Carbon emissions are only important as long as we have an impending global warming phenomenon potentially pushing us over a dangerous threshold. And while that's certainly a potential catastrophe, it's reductionist thinking in the sense that carbon emission isn't the real problem, just a reaction in a long chain of reactions and focusing just on carbon emissions will spell our doom.
But going back to your first question, we'd have plenty of water if we wouldn't pollute it, I don't see the need for mining decreasing, quite the contrary, so instead of dynamiting mountains and filling the area with cyanide for extracting gold or whatever, I'd rather have all of this happen in space, instead of our backyard. Mining on earth is only cheap because the costs are subsidized, being implicit in the damage to the environment, a cost that we'll pay sooner or later. If we'd factor in the real cost, if space mining is possible, I don't think it will look that expensive.
We can find lots of resources and turn them into useful energy and things.
But that only exacerbates the pollution issue, regardless of where we obtain the resources. Especially noxious is the non biodegradable pollution and the millions of years worth of carbon released from the ground.
Factually untrue!
Obtaining resources on Earth generates pollution that stays on Earth. If we move mining off-world, the byproducts of mining don't go into streams, soil, etc.
Furthermore, generating energy in space and beaming it down to the planet means not having to burn coal, reducing the risk of nuclear accidents, and eliminating the need for dams that disrupt ecological systems.
Yes, we'll need to burn more fuel to get there, but that's the nature of progress. The other alternative is to fall back to a pre-industrial lifestyle limited to only those parts of the globe where the temperature is mild year-round - unless you want to keep burning wood for heat in the winter.
What, did you think there are no byproducts from operations done with raw resources AFTER they are mined?
And how about the mere transport of resources?
As for the Carbon - it doesnt matter how slowly we do it, we will still remove it all from the ground. It is a non renewable resource. Look at what we've done to slowly renewable resources like species - how many have gone extinct in the last 100 years? So yeah I think with carbon it's a foregone conclusion that we will floodthe atmosphere with it. But non biodegradable plastics etc. at least we can phase out.
And I understand the concern, but if reducing CO2 emissions is the goal, the first targets should be the production of electricity, heat, transport and agriculture. Food gets transported nowadays by airplane and maybe we shouldn't shut down nuclear power plants to replace them with coal plants. Plenty of low hanging fruits if you ask me.
The point was that they (in the "all around us" / Earth sense) do not, so it is therefore more difficult to pollute them via space industry.
There's something to be said for an environment where you can run an unshielded nuclear reactor without causing any particular damage around your craft...
Even if you launched 10 rockets a day, it's a tiny percentage of combustion compared to hundreds of millions of cars, trucks, buses, planes, coal and oil and gas boilers, etc.
I don't understand your second point.
But regarding "clean water on[sic] space", there are in fact ice comets containing tons of water that could be harvested by a future space colony. It makes sense that we'd want to exploit that source rather than try to move H2O into orbit from the Earth's surface. The Jupiter moon Europa is thought to possibly have a vast water ocean beneath its icy shell. The Moon may also harbor vast amounts of water locked in minerals or in subsurface ice.
With water, we can have colonies. Colonies can grow trees, entire forests in fact. The sky's the limit, so to speak. Really, there's a lot of exciting possibilities for spreading civilization into orbit and onto other planets and moons.
The spin-offs and economic expansion that space colonization will undoubtedly bring more than justify the costs of exploration. A few space colonies and mining operations will solve poverty on Earth. It's worth it.
Very much yes.
Space is between us and all the ones not on Earth. If we're going to spread to other solar systems we're going to have to get used to living in space.
Also, before you trot out the tired old "oh, we never thought we'd finish polluting the ocean"... first, run the math, it's very different, and second, the universe is already terminally polluted, in the sense that nothing much can live there until we go out and clean some space out. There's no life out there, not within anywhere we can get in your lifetime. It can't get any more uninhabitable than it already is.
But it solves the problem of "ups, something destroyed humankind".
Something that gnaws at the back of my mind is that the survival of our species is contingent on absolutely nothing catastrophic happening to the single planet we inhabit. All of our eggs are in one basket, so to speak.
Until we have a viable network of colonies offworld, we will continue to have this problem.
But space.time is not infinite, far from it. We can easily imagine, eg. computational problems (ie. computer programs that can easily be written) that would require more memory than the number of particule in the universe would allow, or more time than the life expectancy of the universe would allow. So unless we are able within this space.time left to invent a way to create new universe or survive a big crunch/big bang event, or a cold death, no, there's no infinite energy and no infinite resources to be taped, and therefore:
- world hunger is not a problem of resources, but a political problem. The question is whether we're ready to gather in a concentration camp the psychopaths of the world, and exterminate them once for all.
- yes, we have already more than enough food.
- all hints are that cancer is a man-made illness. Once you've removed the psychopaths who build poluting processes to earn more $money or more power, we should revert to a more natural and canceless world.
- nope. It is not an economical crisis, it is an economical system set up by those psychopaths to keep accumulating money and power. They already own 99% of the money and of the power, but they still need to acrrue it at a significant percentage each year.
I should also mention, that assuming a population growth such as we double the population every 20 years, going to space would not solve any "overpopulation" problem if it was any more real than human-made climate change, since that would just mean that you would have to colonize new planets every 20 years. Very soon, the whole galaxy would be "overpopulated", and then soon enough the whole universe.
So going to space, offers no solution to "we".
However, having a space ship, and being able to leave this planet of psychopaths, crazy people, and savages, would solve "MY" problem! I would at least escape from this asylum-prison!
And there's hope the galaxy is big enough that if you escape, the US government and the banksters won't be able to catch you up to make you pay taxes and interests on the debt.
Healthy and educated people are looking for a way out, space mining serves only to build bigger, faster and better space ships to go farther, until we can get out of the reach of the psychopaths. And THIS would be the BEST solution, if you don't like the concentration camp/final solution.
Does it solve world hunger ? Don't we already have more than enough food ?
Does it solve cancer ? ..
Does it solve the economical crisis we are in ? Its mostly due to lack of political organization and lack of education.
I think the argument that Neil Degrasse Tyson makes - about inspiring the young - it can be done by trying to solve world hunger, cancer, etc. We do not need to burn more fossil fuels to try to figure out how to mine the moon.
The biggest argument would be that we already have infinite resources here on earth. Space mining doesn't make much sense when you can much more cheaply extract resources from earth.
I think the biggest issues in society is education and healthcare. And the free market seems to direct us towards that anyway.
Healthy and educated people are inspiring - space mining seems to be trying to solve the wrong problem for the right reasons.