(May 3, 2016 at 2:19 am)Bella Morte Wrote: Coal miners are a lot more useful than rocket scientists anyway, let's just stop space travel and put them out of business as well. Coal isn't going anywhere and you need to accept that.
Asteroid mining might be what saves human civilisation. Fusion power is just as far off as it has ever been. We're facing the long emergency. Resources and the capacity to pollute are depleting at an exponential rate while demand is growing at an exponential rate. Add to that an economy that needs to expand at an exponential rate in order to function properly. Anything less than 2% runs the risk of deflation. People don't actually realise quite what a bad situation we're in. For example, there are only about 100 harvests left due to top soil depletion. The amount of earth that must be dug up and refined for a smidgeon of rare earth materials is tremendous. Yet we need these materials for renewable energies, for computers etc.
Yet there is an awful lot of stuff out there in our solar system. What's expensive is getting out of Earth's gravity well. But that only needs to be done once if you can build a permanent presence in space.
