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Gold Rush
The battle for universal mining rights
Film still from Duncan Jones’ “Moon”, 2009. (Image courtesy Koch Media)
This trailer for the corporation Deep Space Industries proposes asteroid-mining as the solution for our future. It’s eerily reminiscent of a similar trailer for space mining in the movie “Moon”. (Video: Subtractive, Inc.)
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Claire L. Evans is a writer and artist working in Los Angeles, California. Her “day job” is as the singer and co-author of the conceptual disco-pop band YACHT. A science journalist and science-fiction critic, she is a regular contributor to Aeon Magazine, Vice, Motherboard, and Grantland, and is the editor-at-large of OMNI Reboot. A collected book of her essays, High Frontiers, is now available from Publication Studio.
Earth is a closed system. Although the sun will continue to spill free energy for five billion years, our more finite resources – minerals like zinc, tin, copper, and lead – won’t last us through the century. So where are we to find these elements once we start scraping the bottom of our planetary barrel? To many speculators, the answer is obvious: space.
Of course, science fiction writers — those other speculators — have known this for decades. After all, exploration is always driven by economic necessity; the science fiction canon abounds with prospectors searching for profit at the edge of the known world. The crew of Ridley Scott’s Alien were miners; mining is the central pursuit in Outland, Total Recall, and Moon. Robert A. Heinlein and Frank Herbert alike placed the jockeying for resources at the centre of their interstellar dramas.
But as our need for resources grows pressing enough to justify the cost of retrieval, space mining is an increasingly plausible option. NASA is tinkering with it – an upcoming mission, OSIRIS-Rex, will extract a 60-gramme sample from a carbonaceous asteroid named Bennu – as is private industry; two new companies, Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources, have already begun testing and long-term planning for mining missions as early as 2020.
New frontiers bring new adversities, but with any luck, we’ll find enough in the vastness of space to go around – and if astronauts can stop on an asteroid to mine hydrogen and oxygen, creating rocket fuel as they go, the universe is full of waypoints for an endless prospecting journey. I
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