Mining in Space Will Surely Save Us

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Perhaps the greatest myth of modernity is that we have no myths. We, especially in the West, tend to think of ourselves as science based rational beings capable of solving any issue. How else could we have unlocked the secrets of the atom, or figure out a way to travel in space? Well, as it turns out, our faith in science and technology is nothing but a dangerous delusion, now slowly morphing into a superstition: ‘a belief or way of behaving that is based on fear of the unknown and faith in magic or luck’.

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In my previous essay I have outlined a future full of uncertainties in the short term, and with a rather, how to say, ‘unflattering’ end game unfolding in the centuries and millennia ahead. Sure enough, the vision of us returning to a hunter gatherer lifestyle (as the best possible outcome on a finite planet ravaged by industrial civilization) sparked an instant push back. Like how I do not take into consideration our unique human ability to produce science, how I dismiss quantum physics applications, space colonization, and that minerals can be found in other planets, or energy production from hydrogen for that matter.

The point that none of the above is physically possible at scale seems to have been missed altogether. All it would take is a good hard look on the facts, like how much more cheap oil and metals we can still extract, or how much climate change has been already locked into the Earth-system, and one would quickly realize that we are facing severe shortages with a rather inglorious descent in the years and decades ahead. Perhaps its no wonder then that in this age of great angst science, it seems, has turned into a source of superstitious beliefs on its own. Devout believers of progress (with the mainstream media in the forefront) keep wildly exaggerating its capabilities to produce practical knowledge and technologies, notwithstanding the many limitations it has encountered so far. Certainly, science and technology has been able to deliver some pretty impressive tricks, like lighting up a miniature sun (fusion) for a second, or sending a space mission to a nearby asteroid. Hollywood movies did their fair share too in exaggerating these hard earned successes into a wide range of possibilities, like fusion reactors powering a starship capable of traveling faster than the speed of light, or people colonizing other planets. At this point though, science has stopped being what it is, and has turned into something it’s practitioners opposed from the get go.

Faced with a dearth of existential “threats” — which in reality are straightforward consequences of civilization itself — the ones who had the most to lose (the professional managerial class) have returned to their basic modus operandi: worshiping a belief system with priests and priestesses, with true believers and heretics. Science and technology have become an apt replacement to magic for them: ‘a power that allows people (such as witches and wizards) to do impossible things by saying special words or performing special actions.’ Think: splitting the atom, creating abundant energy from water, or sending people into outer space.

‘Abracadabra…! Err, I mean: Three. Two. One. Liftoff!’

So far nothing seemed to be impossible, given enough time and resources any technology could’ve been developed (even the seemingly impossible ones). The magic worked. New gadgets kept popping up at doorsteps, blessing their new owners with luxuries beyond the wildest imagination of kings and queens of the past. All the problems looked solvable, even climate change: ‘hey, we just need enough solar panels and we will capture all the excess carbon from the atmosphere’. The problem is that we neither have time nor resources left to keep our leisurely lives going, let alone doing the next big thing: harnessing the power of hydrogen fusion, or mining and colonizing space. 

Let me start with time: have you noticed how remarkably little has changed in the past 60 to 70 years? Take commercial jets for example which basically all look, feel, fly the same as the ones in the 1960's. Apart from some flickering screens added to some long haul flights, my grandpa would have roughly the same experience today as in 1959, the first year when more people crossed the Atlantic in the air than on the sea. That is, 64 years ago. Based on science fiction literature of that age, we should be flying in capsules powered by anti-gravitation engines by now.

The cover of science fiction plus from 1953 (source)

An even more embarrassing memento of our lack of actual progress is fusion itself: the theory of which has been laid down already in the 1940’s, with a working experimental reactor still “just twenty years away”… Or think about all the “progress” we’ve made in space travel in the last six decades. Basically, we have been sending people out there since 1961, and the furthest any of us got was the Moon in 1969. Food for thought.

Then solar photovoltaic panels are surely something new! Nah, Hoffman Electronics created a 10% efficient commercial solar cell already back in 1959, and raised its efficiency to 14% the year after. Since then we are just polishing the technology and as a result hit a whopping 22% efficiency on average and a rock bottom price thanks to industries of scale — aka globalization — all powered by coal in China.

There is of course a bunch of very good reasons behind all this, and no, none of them has anything to do with evil cabals preventing us from using alien technology. In one word it’s called — true believers cover your ears now, because here comes the biggest heresy to your faith — limits. Science has not only showed us how to perform some great looking magic tricks, but also that these tricks have inherent limitations as well. And not only that: all of our technologies, without exception, are prone to diminishing returns as they approach these limits. Yes, including science itself. It takes more and more people, more and more funding and more and more resources every year to produce the next advancement in high tech, a trend which clearly points towards approaching zero return within a couple of decades. (Seeing our struggles with fusion, or the lack of success in figuring out a more efficient / faster way of traveling through space, I would argue, we are almost there.)

The other factor pointing towards the fact that we won’t be able to mine asteroids, let alone colonizing space (even if we had the technology) is the sheer scale of things. Let’s take the size of our solar system for example: if the Sun was the size of a golf ball, Earth would be as small as a grain of sand some 4.6 meters (or 15 feet) away from the center. The size of this miniature solar system, though, including the Oort-cloud, would be a whopping 8,878 m, or roughly the size of Mount Everest, with the closest star being “just” 1,248 km (775 miles) away. In comparison the furthest any human got away from this tiny speck we call Earth, however, was a mere 12 mm (less than 1/2 inch). Compare that to the highest mountain on Earth, or the flight distance between New York and Atlanta. I mean great for a primate species, but not nearly enough to colonize space.

The reason I’m bringing this up is that it takes a tremendous amount of energy and time to travel such distances. Especially against the force of gravity. At this point I have to remind my readers that after almost 60 years of daydreaming about antimatter engines, we are still using rockets to launch objects into space, 90% of the weight of which is fuel. Preparing to launching yourself into low Earth orbit is like filling up your car with 6,000 gallons of fuel (nine times its weight), only to drive a few hundred kilometers (or miles) upwards. Now compare that with your mileage and try not to laugh… And that is low Earth orbit only, you would need even more energy to leave Earth’s gravity and start populating the solar system, or sending out drones to mine the nearest asteroid. 

Space is neither close, nor cheap to get into. It is definitely not a corner store to visit for some snacks.

Knowing all this we can safely assert that it is rather unlikely that we will ever start mining in space at scale. I mean we will try for fun, and will keep funding projects like the OSIRIS-REx: costing some $1.16 billion to retrieve 60 grams of space rock from an asteroid, including a 7 year journey. Even if you neglect development costs, the launch of the 2-ton vehicle still costed $183.5 million. (Translated to a single gram of material returned to Earth, that would still set prospecting asteroid diggers back with some $3 million per gram.) In order to avoid such an exorbitant transportation cost, mining companies would rather blow up the entire Andes from top to bottom and ship the complete mountain range to China for processing. (Even if you assume that the vehicle will bring back its own weight in minerals (which is physically impossible since it has to launch that weight back to Earth, slow it down then descend it) you would still get a whopping $91,750 shipping cost for bringing back 1kg of material, or $41,700/lb.)

Folks, mining space is a lunacy. Energy is the economy, and if something costs this much energy, compared to strip-mining planet Earth, I’m sure we would rather do the latter. Luckily or not, like it or not, though, we won’t do neither of these options. We are in the process of running out of cheap energy and mineral resources, and since the two are joined at the hip, our civilization will go down together with them. Facing ever fiercer material and energy shortages we will simply stop doing as many things as we do today, and not waste our precious energy on projects with such a dismal return on investment as mining low grade ores here on Earth, or launching robots into space to do the same a million miles away. Instead we will keep building coal mines alongside solar panels and windmills as long as we can feed these activities with oil. Then, as we slowly start to run low on affordable petroleum, our activities will stop one by one. Projects will be cancelled and abandoned. Infrastructure will keep crumbling away. Mines will be closed for the lack of profitability, just like manufacturing companies — including the ones making space vehicles. One by one, year after year. Just watch.

Needless to say, neither quantum computers nor AI can do a thing about this. Neither of these technologies can create energy or cheap raw materials. Quite to the contrary: these technologies will continue to consume enormous resources, leaving nothing but tons of e-waste and gigawatts of waste heat behind. Even if we managed to crack the code on fusion with them, we would then have to realize that there are simply not enough tritium to start up the reactors, let alone a large enough mining and manufacturing capacity to supply them with superconducting Niobium-Titan wires. If AI were indeed that intelligent, it would immediately realize that it had arrived way too late into the game.

Colonizing the Universe, together with mining in space will be preserved in legends and fairy tales nevertheless. Ones, our descendants will surely enjoy sharing around the campfire while sharpening their stone tools for next day’s hunting. Our civilization will be long gone by then, with even the names (let alone locations) of our cities already long forgotten. Then, one day, some lucky guy will eventually find a strange metal shard fallen from the sky, and while wondering what the strange symbols and letters NASA mean, he will surely ask himself: maybe the ancient tales were indeed true…?

Until next time,

B