I have two responses​ to news like this, first my child self thinking how cool it is to have giant deep sea robots, and then the more cynical adult me realizing we're in a mad extinction event with multiple paths to our own destruction and oil, mining, animal ag, and governments generally not doing anything, or actively resisting change while chasing the next gold mine. It's depressing.

That's a shame because the world is a hell of a lot better place than when you were a child and also has lots of cool stuff.

And it's only getting better.

I wonder why old age makes many people despondent.

"Better" is entirely too vague. Sure, I can get a VR headset now which is awesome, but the middle east is even more unstable now and thousands of species have gone extinct since then.

For a lot of people the core idea that "the world is slowly improving" is so fundamental they miss seeing basic ways many things have gotten worse.

The world is getting better and worse. Technology is better but the natural world is suffering destruction at a rate that is increasing. Animal populations have been decimated[1] and natural forests have been too.

If you care about what the planet will be like in 200 years, things haven't gotten better.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37775622

That's a fair bit of dissonance for anyone who's following climate change research.

It makes people despondent because they realize that cynicism takes decades to learn.

BTW, around here in Finland we had an undersea iron mine at the island of Jussarö. It last operated in 1954-1967.

Location: https://goo.gl/maps/FoJeqJRUS6R2

It's probably not unique; are there similar mines elsewhere? (I.e. the mine shaft is on dry land, but mine tunnels reach to dig minerals from areas that are actually underneath the sea floor).

Similar island in Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashima_Island

Indeed - the world's largest salt mine operates largely beneath Lake Huron:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKIuj4n_8PQ

I remember an '80s-era middle school science textbook touting seabed manganese nodules as the future of mining, driving mass underwater settlement.

> manganese nodules

Hah! Except that was a CIA cover story used when they tried to recover a sunken Russian sub: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSF_Explorer

Well, manganese nodules are a real thing, and are of some value. They just used them as the cover when they needed to develop underwater recovery technology.

Manganese nodules also feature heavily in Desmond Bagley's thriller "Night of error", which was published posthumously in 1984. Not quite as good as his earlier books but still enjoyable.

What the article neglects to mention is that there are sea mining operations which have been operating for decades now (for the most vivid example see diamonds in Namibia). What sets this apart is the depth at which they're mining and the type of mining (grinding as opposed to, effectively, sieving)

> The cargo is then transferred to a transport vessel and sent directly to customers in China.

Because China does not have the environmental and safety laws that we do and can therefore process ore at a fraction of the cost. This is a major loophole that let's Western companies pollute indirectly and not pay for it.

Quick - time to start an "Ocean Free - Environmentally Controlled Metals" certification. We could make....10's of dollars

Glomar Explorer

That (and "this is how you create Kaiju" [2]) is what I was thinking.

For those who don't recognize it, "Glomar" is short for "Global Marine" and was a fake company setup by Howard Huges to do seafloor mining. It was actually a front where Huges helped the US government try to recover a sunken Russian sub. It's notable for being the case that caused the phrase "Can neither confirm nor deny" to have to be created, which is why it's called the "Glomar response".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiju

Came here pretty much to see if anyone would make this comment. Kudos

> The smallest of the robots weighs 200 tons.

How will they do work on these robots, or bring them home, if they break? I just saw a zany Mark Wahlberg movie about how hard it was to do underwater repairs... they should give it a watch.

Float them to the surface, likely. There's already something similar set up to float the collected materials up to the surface.

That article got dark, fast.

"The robots will lumber across the ocean floor on mammoth treads, grinding and chewing the encrusted seabed, sending plumes of sediment into the surrounding waters and killing marine life that gets in their way."

In this debate over climate change the pollution human activity causes gets lost in the debate. Extractive mining is terrible for the environment and ecosystems.

One of the biggest reasons why I am supporter of SpaceX is that they will facilitate asteroid mining.

It'd be kind of funny if Ridley-Scott retconned the origin the Weyland-Yutani Corp to make them eco-saviors for taking resource extraction completely off-world

> Extractive mining is terrible for the environment and ecosystems.

This depends on how and where it is done. For example, underground hard rock mining in a western country, eg Canada, is relatively benign. By far the biggest impact is caused by road building, and these are decommissioned after the mine's lifetime (which can be decades).

Clearcut logging has much greater long-term repercussions. Mining is often maligned unfairly.

>Clearcut logging has much greater long-term repercussions. Mining is often maligned unfairly.

Definitely. The biggest damage to the Amazon rainforest is the development of farms. People advocating for more inefficient farming (e.g. 'organic', 'local') are doing significantly more damage to the environment than extractive mining. One important caveat, I'm only applying this to modern mining operations like those in US/Canada that follow pollution regs.

> I'm only applying this to modern mining operations like those in US/Canada that follow pollution regs.

I am by no means a mining expert, but most of my exposure comes from east-coast US, where a lot of the mines (well...a lot of the mines you hear about - there could a great many very nice mines that I never heard of) have problems with acidic wash off, strip mining, etc.

I know SOME of the issues I've listed are impacted by modern environment regs (at least until those get rolled back under the current lawmakers), but I don't know if they all are.

Can you expand your point?

Last I looked at a map, the Amazon wasn't in the US / Canada. Where I can assure you the mining does a lot more damage.

Perhaps I just haven't found it yet, but I haven't read articles about organic / permaculture farms in the amazon poisoning river systems, poisoning the land, causing increased rates of cancer in the local populations, corrupting local politicians etc etc

You should have read about restrictive production systems poisoning the Amazon. It is European production restrictions that cause them to need cultivation in virgin rain forest to feed their population. USA on the other hand, is one of the largest agricultural exporters.

Organic, sure. Local? I disagree. I'm sure it's hard to measure, but I imagine the impact of transporting perishable foods long distances is pretty great.

More than either of those things though, a heavy meat diet is much more inefficient than a vegetarian one. And if I'm not mistaken, a lot of the rainforest is becoming pastures for raising cattle.

> I'm sure it's hard to measure, but I imagine the impact of transporting perishable foods long distances is pretty great.

You would be incorrect. The modern food distribution system is a high-volume, low-margin system that runs incredibly efficiently and any advance you could come up with that can squeeze even a tenth of a percent more energy efficiency into the process would make you incredibly wealthy. There are an order of magnitude more 'food miles' racked up when consumers drive to the local grocery store and return home that went into delivering that food to the store in the first place.

In fact, local food is often _less_ efficient in terms of transportation energy costs because it lacks the economies of scale and the efficiencies that come from that in the regular food distribution system.

Coming from a town that does underground, hard rock mining in western Canada, I would agree with this idea generally speaking, with an add-on, though: While the act of extraction is relatively benign, the act of processing and refining for use is anything but benign. Technology has changed but the town and surrounding area bear many, many, many visible (and in some cases, permanent) scars of the processing methods.

But mining does produce nasty long term effects from time to time.

Particularly acidic runoffs leaching through metals and into the water supply.

Certainly not all mining operations though.

The energy requirements of getting things into space, and moving things in space around makes asteroid mining an unmitigated environmental disaster.

What do you think creates more pollution between:

  1. All airlines in the world.
  2. All cars in the world.
  3. All factories in the world.
  4. All rockets in the world.

Right now, I think that 1, 2 and 3 combined have much deeper consequences than 4.

What economic value do all airlines, cars, factories in the world produce? They are the reason we don't live in mud huts, poking at eachother with sharp sticks.

Now, what economic value do all rockets in the world produce? Satellite TV and GPS? Satellite weather reports that we complain about, and climate studies that we ignore?

And those are the low-hanging fruits. The ROI of a GPS network, a communication network, and orbital climate satellites is miles better then that of asteroid mining.

I guess that we see things differently.

On one hand, you see the economic value of airlines, cars and factories, so for you it justifies the environmental consequences that they have. Fair enough.

On the other hand, you don't see the economic value of asteroid mining and of getting things into space, so you talk about the consequences that it might have on the environment.

Did you know that asteroids represent an endless supply of rare metals (gold, platinum, etc.)? Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining#Purpose if you don't believe me. This might represent the biggest economic opportunity of all times. And if we want to become a "multi-planetary species" as Elon Musk suggests, this will probably be essential.

Now, I personally tend to be more on the environment's side. So as long as we use those metals to build things on other planets and in space, I don't see any problem. We'll need to be responsible with this.

> Now, what economic value do all rockets in the world produce?

The development of rocket technology and the resulting space program has had the greatest effect on our modern world save pretty much produced our connected, modern world and developments from our space program probably form the bedrock of many of our most advanced industries. Have you ever been in an airplane that doesn't have GPS? Let' s just say I'd be drving, taking the train a lot more places than go back to planes using old landing technology

It is simply disingenuous of you to completely dismiss and reduce the importance of GPS and Satellitle communications. Major communications networks, banking systems, financial markets and power grids depend heavily on GPS for precise time synchronization. Nearly all new military assets — from vehicles to munitions — come equipped with GPS. We're conducting whole wars by drone.

If you actually do care about the economic and security importance of the satellite (It's more than just DishTV) and GPS network, here's an actual study:

http://marshall.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Day-without-S...

Or you could just google "what would happen to us if satellites disappeared" Here are some results:

“Apart from the fact that everyone has forgotten to navigate without GPS in their cars, many airplanes use GPS as well,” says McDowell.

Though backup systems exist, airlines use GPS to chart the most fuel-efficient and expeditious routes. Without GPS and telecomm-sats, aircraft controllers would have tremendous difficulty communicating with and routing airplanes. Airlines would have to fall back to legacy systems and procedures. Given the sheer volume of airline traffic today, accidents would be all but guaranteed.

Other affected navigation systems would include those aboard cargo vessels, supply-chain management systems, and transportation hubs driven by GPS.

But GPS does more than just provide positioning — it also provides for timing. Ground-based atomic clocks can perform the same function, but GPS is increasingly being used to distribute the universal time standard via satellites. Within hours of a terminated service, any distributing networks requiring tight synchronization would start to suffer from “clock drift,” leading to serious performance issues and outright service outages. Such disruptions could affect everything from the power grid through to the financial sector.

In the report, “A Day Without Space: Economic and National Security Ramifications,” Ed Morris, the Executive Director of the Office of Space Commerce at the Department of Commerce, writes:

If you think it is hard to get work done when your internet connection goes out at the office, imagine losing that plus your cell phone, TV, radio, ATM access, credit cards, and possibly even your electricity. [...]

Wireless services, especially those built to CDMA standard, would fail to hand off calls from one cell to the next, leading to dropped connections. Computer networks would experience slowdowns as data is pushed through finite pipelines at reduced bit rates. The same would be true for major networks for communication and entertainment, since they are all IP-based today and require ultra-precise timing to ensure digital traffic reaches its destination. The lack of effective synch would hit especially hard in banking, where the timing of transactions needs to be recorded. Credit card payments and bank accounts would likely freeze, as billions of dollars could be sucked away from businesses. A financial crash is not out of the question.

The Loss of Military Capability

The sudden loss of satellite capability would have a profound effect on the military.

Useless without GPS: The U.S. Navy’s Harpoon missile (U.S. Navy)

The Marshall Institute puts it this way: “Space is a critical enabler to all U.S. warfare domains,” including intelligence, navigation, communications, weather prediction, and warfare. McDowell describes satellite capability as as the “backbone” of the U.S. military.

And as 21st century warfare expert Peter W. Singer from New America Foundation tells io9, “He who controls the heavens will control what happens in the battles of Earth.” Singer summarized the military consequences of losing satellites in an email to us:

Today there are some 1,100 active satellites which act as the nervous system of not just our economy, but also our military. Everything from communications to GPS to intelligence all depend on it. Potential foes have noticed, which is why Russia and China have recently begun testing a new generation of anti-satellite weapons, which in turn has sparked the U.S. military to recently budget $5 billion for various space warfare systems.

What would happen if we lost access to space? Well, the battles would, as one U.S. military officer put it, take us back to the “pre digital age.” Our drones, our missiles, even our ground units wouldn’t be able to operate the way we plan. It would force a rewrite of all our assumptions of 21st century high tech war. We might have a new generation of stealthy battleships...but the loss of space would mean naval battles would in many ways be like the game of Battleship, where the two sides would struggle to even find each other. Moreover, and as McDowell explains to io9, the loss of satellite capability would have a profound effect on arms control capabilities. Space systems can monitor compliance; without them, we’d be running blind.

“The overarching consideration is that you wouldn’t really know what’s going on,” says McDowell. “Satellites provide for both global and local views of what’s happening. We would be less connected, less informed — and with considerably degraded situational awareness.”

Compromised Weather Prediction and Climate Science

One great thing satellites have done for us is improve our ability to forecast weather. Predicting a slight chance of cloudiness is all well and good, but some areas, like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, are dependent on such systems to predict potentially hazardous monsoons. And in the U.S., the NOAA has estimated that, during a typical hurricane season, weather satellites save as much as $3 billion in lives and property damage.

Hurricane Ivan (NOAA)

There’s also the effect on science to consider. Much of what we know about climate change comes from satellites.

As McDowell explains, the first couple of weeks without satellites wouldn’t make much of a difference. But over a ten-year span, the lack of satellites would preclude our ability to understand and monitor such things as the ozone layer, carbon dioxide levels, and the distribution of polar ice. Ground-based and balloon-driven systems would help, but much of the data we’re currently tracking would suddenly become much spottier.

Without satellites, you can say goodbye to maps like this (NOAA)

“We’re quite dependent on satellites for a global view of what’s happening on our planet — and at a time when we really, really need to know what’s happening,” says McDowell.

It’s also worth pointing out that, without satellites, we also wouldn’t be able to monitor space weather, such as incoming space storms.

It's also disingenuous to discount the role the space program plays in inspiring people to become scientists and engineers, like myself and I'm sure a hefty number of people on this board.

Not necessarily, if at some point a space colony is sustainable and mostly sends things down the gravity well, rather than up.

Still not the case, because they need to redirect asteroids into low earth orbit/the orbit of the colony. (And then expend a ton of energy to match orbits.)

The economics of asteroid mining only make sense if you're:

1. Using the mined materials for space construction. But why are you doing space construction in the first place? So you can do more asteroid mining? So you can do more space construction?

2. You've found an asteroid made of pure unobtanium.

> The economics of asteroid mining only make sense if you're:

You're using linear projections. Elon Musk's entire goal with SpaceX is the Interplanetary Transit System. I also think that it will be a boon to multinational corporations who want to perform research/experiments that are either not possible, heavily regulated, or outright banned on earth.

> 1. Using the mined materials for space construction. But why are you doing space construction in the first place? So you can do more asteroid mining? So you can do more space construction?

Yes, exactly. Space exploration is a bit limited without construction in space. There's also the likely scenario that as the world becomes wealther, our consumption of technology will also grow. Look at the bet on AI and the huge capital investment necessary to run ML/DL projects. A combination of increased demand and an increase in global wealth which raises people's standards of living is also going to increase the cos of mining as people's environmental awareness is raised.

SpaceX has a plan for the colonization of Mars, so yes, to do more space construction.

Not unobtanium, but 90 million tons of platinum is worth a decent amount.

https://www.rt.com/news/310170-platinum-asteroid-2011-uw-158...

I am so curious what will actually happen when someone tries to mine one of these.

With they retain their mining rights and sell carefully, or will the price of platinum crash?

With a government steal it and will there be wars over it?

Heh yeah, interesting to ponder. I imagine that others will race off to mine other asteroids, and the price of platinum and other rare metals/minerals will plummet.

Or maybe you'll get a resurgence of nation-state-level companies like the old Dutch East Indies company, as well as piracy.

>they need to redirect asteroids into low earth orbit/the orbit of the colony. (And then expend a ton of energy to match orbits.)

Which basically means a sustainable colony must produce a ton of energy. Good news, producing energy in the space is actually cheaper than on Earth: you have a lot of solar, and nuclear is no longer a hazard.

You're probably looking at a price curve that declines linearly. Any industry that's been heavily influenced by information technology will see a Moore's Law-like increase in productivity. Ever since the 1760's or so (little Industrial Rev.), we've been underoing a great acceleration of technological change. Sequencing a human genome in 2003 cost $3 billion. In what is likely the greatest price drop in history, you can get a genome sequenced today for $1000.

You're also thinking we're just going to ship up excavators, cranes and other heavy industrial construction equipment. Smart money says that we'd just launch a series of automonous drones that can either self-replicate or simply construct what it needs from the materials on the asteroid and some stock materials. Think of launching an SCV from Starcraft instead of the crew and equipment from Armageddon.

If Elon Musk is going to get his planetary transit system off the ground, he's going to need space mining to bring down the cost curve....or a space elevator that magically appears. I believe that SpaceX is seriously looking into asteroid mining as well

How bad are the environmental effects other than global warming? I imagine by the time we can mine asteroids we will be able to offset huge amounts of global warming through sunshades and similar ideas.

I wonder if we'll eventually see a day when people debate over the environmental consequences of resource extraction on Mars.

The meaning of your statement isn't clear.

Do you see resource extraction on Earth as something having no consequences whatsoever?

No, I just find it interesting how we only care about places we would inhabit. The parent comment suggested that asteroids are OK for unrestricted mining since it's, well, not a place people could inhabit and develop feelings for, like Earth or Mars.

It also has to do a bit with whether or not other lifeforms inhabit the place. Mars is unlikely to have any life on it, and certainly no pluricellular life without some extensive terraforming. If we ever get to that point, the discussion over preservation of a biosphere we ourselves created is certainly going to be a bit different in its implications...

The author wonders whether there will come a day when see Mars as not just something we exploit but as a home we must protect, just like Earth.

I could see that happening if humanity becomes interplanetary. What if Saturn and Uranus become tourist destinations?

You may hear cries of "Save the Rings" NestleBoeing is pilfering the ice while making monstrous profits!

Well, great efforts have actually been made to prevent contamination of Mars etc. But that's been for scientific reasons, in large part.

Elon Musk has already said that burning fossils fuels and pumping it into the atmosphere is the "dumbest experiment in history".

So I guess we've just found the second dumbest one. I just can't understand why some people think that this is a good idea.

They already have government oversight. They already have a plan for minimizing pollution, which is wasted material that could be mined and therefore lost money. They come from a western country with a decent environmental track record.

It doesn't seem intellectually honest to compare 1 company mining in a situation where polluting is economically disadvantageous and has the science to understand at least some of the risks to climate change.

With climate change we built several giant industries cars, power, and others that burned huge amount of fossil fuels before we knew the risks. And generally polluting is economically advantageous.

Sounds like regular extractive mining to me. I guess it's not talked about as much but terraforming large parts of earth and setting off huge explosions tends to kill whatever was living in the vicinity or its habitat

> I guess it's not talked about as much but terraforming large parts of earth and setting off huge explosions tends to kill whatever was living in the vicinity or its habitat

A typical pit mine covers a smaller area than any kind of reasonable-sized farm. Farming is significantly worse when it comes to displaced things in the habitat.

You could argue about bad mines that pollute downstream rivers, but that's not how all mines operate and has nothing to do with the precision explosions (I suggest you watch videos of how pits are mined to get a sense of how the explosions actually work) or the displaced wildlife.

Wast areas of deep sea floors (abyssal plains) are ecologically desert and they cover wast areas. Very little nutrition and life. Only small oasis like whale carcass is full of life. Of course there may be unintended consequences.

Its unclear to me where these mining operations take place. It seems that these ventures are trying to mine at the depth of 1600 m. Continental shelf has more life than continental slope or abyssal plains.

Wow, they're going after the mid-ocean ridges. That makes sense, I guess. But damn, those are some very unique ecosystems.

That are going to be being mashed by 200+ ton machines. Gotta get in before the regulations!

This is unlikely to happen. I've been following this industry and have seen so many failures thus far, that Nautilus will not be anywhere ready for mining by 2019.

I don't understand how it identifies the valuable metals? Or it just sends all the dirt up?

Seems that the filtering occurs on the ship. A slurry is pumped up to the ship, where filtering occurs, with the sand being returned to the site.

Sand is a very benign word for what is going to be tailings.