/sci/ - Science & Math

I'm sorry to crush your first-world white nerd escapist fantasies, but no, the future of humanity is to stay on this rock forever until the inevitable extinction. We're not going to find prothean artifacts on Mars. We're not going to enter a glorious age of technological progress following the Singularity or whatever nonsense. We are constrained by economics, scarcity, biology, psychology, and physics. Superficial technological progress is not going to hide for long the state of crisis humanity is in, even though it will blind the priviledged few for some time. Face the fact that tomorrow is going to suck big time - the sooner you've accepted it and moved on from your fantasies, the more prepared you're going to be (not that it will help much).

why aren't we mining asteroids yet?

Many of you wish NASA, and humanity in general, need to make greater progress for the sake of the continued existence of humanity. You wish it despite gaining nothing from it as you will already be dead, in fact increased funding to NASA will only make your life harder due to greater taxes. Thus these wishes are for all intents and purposes selfless. However, though humanity WILL persist in space long after we die, said colonization will be done for purely selfish reasons:

1) Even if we could recycle 100% of the substances we use today there will always be a growing demand for more, so we mine.

2) Earth has a finite supply of minerals, some of which will be all but depleted within a generation or two.

3) When supplies of a given substance run out, prices skyrocket, allowing for previously cost-ineffective sources of said mineral to become viable.

4) Even if humanity began tapping the mineral deposits within currently unprospected regions such as in Antarctica or the ocean floor, those deposits will one day run out too.

5) Humanity can theoretically delve deeper and deeper into the Earth's mantle to harvest minerals, but the deeper one goes the greater the cost.

6) One day the cost of mining some given mineral on Earth will be greater than mining a much richer deposit in space.

7) As space mining methods develop, mining will become cheaper, and human industry in space will spread.

8) Even if mining operations are carried out autonomously there will always be odd jobs for humans to carry out for truly massive mining operations; and because humans cannot function without other humans around they will exist in space as groups, ie small colonies.

9) When the space infrastructure exists to mine the substance required for, build, and fuel more machines human expansion in space will cease to be geometric and instead become exponential.

QED