“The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it’s going to become multiplanetary, or it’s going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there’s going to be an extinction event”
This statement by Elon Musk illustrates the seriousness of the problem for human civilization of forever being confined to Earth. And while one of Musk’s long-term plans is to develop a colony on Mars and enable our civilization to become a multiplanetary species, it begs the question with what resources we will be able to build and sustain such colonies.
Due to the strong growth forecasts of emerging and developed markets and a resulting increasing demand, experts from the World Bureau of Metal Statistics expect that most of Earth’s natural non-renewable resources will be depleted within 50 years. More specifically, they published a report in 2012 displaying the following numbers based on current and estimated growth and extraction rates:
These numbers state that Earth’s resources will be gone very soon. Yet, in recent years technology has advanced so much that we are beginning to understand how to mine resources that are not on Earth, but on asteroids, which conveniently happen to have an abundance of precious resources. This idea of mining resources from near-Earth asteroids is known as asteroid mining.
There are around 16,000 near-Earth (between Earth and Mars) asteroids that have similar orbits like the Earth and have a relatively low velocity which makes operations on them much easier. NASA estimated that the value of the asteroids within the entire asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, could exceed $700 quintillion. That’s 700 times a million times a million times a million – it’s simply mindboggling. Definitely something to keep an eye on.
According to the company Planetary Resources, a pioneer in the field of asteroid mining, there is an estimated amount of around two trillion tonnes of water available on near-Earth asteroids. This water, which will initially be in the form of ice, could be used as propellant for spacecrafts to travel further into space or to sustain human life on or off Earth. Other resources found on Asteroids include gold, silver, platinum, copper, lead, palladium and other valuable metals.
These new resources could serve several purposes: 1) fuel the growth of humanity into new ventures 2) construct service space platforms or 3) support growing demand on Earth. Worth noting here, however, is that it’s likely not going to be very economical in the near future to mine the resources in space and bring them back to Earth. The transportation costs would outweigh the value of the resources. Rather, the resources would need to be mined and processed on the celestial body and utilized in space.
The first step in the process of asteroid mining involves the selection of an appropriate target. Mining firms will be scanning the skies with powerful telescopes to find near-Earth asteroids with a velocity of around 5.5 to 8.0 km/s (i.e. 19,800 to 28,800 km/h). Asteroids will then usually be classed into one of three categories: C-Type, S-Type or M-Type.
C-Type: These types of asteroids are the most common ones, accounting for around 75% of known asteroids. They contain a vast amount of water, carbon and phosphorus which can be used to support the establishing of colonies or other mining operations in space.
S-Type: These stony asteroids are the second most common asteroids, forming around 17% of all known asteroids. They are most often found in the inner part of the asteroid belt and contain a large part of magnesium, nickel and iron.
M-Type: These metallic Asteroids are made up of mostly nickel-iron and are found in the middle region of the asteroid belt. They distinguish themselves from the S-Type by having around 10 times more soil, gravel and minable ore.
The S and M-Type asteroids would certainly be the most profitable for mining companies as they contain the largest amount of valuable metals. And while the C-Type asteroids will not be the main targets of “for-profit” organizations, they will be immensely important for long term space endeavours.
Asterank.com, an asteroid data base, used various data such as asteroid composition and mass to estimate the economics of the most significant asteroids. The following table provided by them gives an indication of the potential of this new market.
Looking at these numbers, it is understandable why experts state that the first trillionaire will emerge from asteroid mining. And while this might not happen within our lifetime, once the space mining industry is sufficiently developed, the chances are not that bad that this industry will form new trillionaires, they might not be the first trillionaires, but I guess that is something they would be able to live with. Eventually, being listed on Forbes Billionaire list will not attract as much attention as it does right now.
The next steps in the asteroid mining process involve the selection of targets, the approach with the necessary technology, the actual mining operation and finally the transport of the mined resources to its final destination. Developing the technology and machinery for this entire process will need significant influence from the fields of Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and 3D Printing. Having humans on the asteroids itself to oversee the mining process will be complicated due to the low surface gravity of these bodies. The low surface gravity also affects the structure and design of the mining machineries as they will have to withstand different forces than on Earth and the Moon.
Having briefly touched upon the purpose and benefits of asteroid mining, I wanted to look at the legal side of asteroid mining. Is it even legal and which laws govern this entire process? This happens to be a large topic in the legal world.
The United Nations Outer Space Treaty from 1967, provides the basic framework on international space law. Its declarations include: “The exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind; outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation.”
In November 2015, Obama signed the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act which gave U.S citizen and commercial entities the explicit right to own, sell and use resources extracted from space. These rights are meant to encourage the advancement of the space resource industry as humanity expands its reach into the solar system.
Similarly, Luxembourg, in 2015, initiated a law that ensured that private operators can be confident about their rights on resources they extract in space.
But are these laws passed in the U.S and in Luxembourg even legal, considering the UN Outer Space Treaty? The U.S and Luxembourg state their laws are consistent with the treaty, as no sovereign nation is laying claim to an area of outer space. Rather it is just private entities that are laying claim on individual resources.
We will have to wait until the first company brings back their mined resources from space mining, to see if this argument holds up in the international courts.
This development of potentially evolving into a multiplanetary species, with large scale mining operations going on in space, is probably one of the most exciting and surreal developments ever. However, I don’t want to convey the picture that asteroid mining solves all problems and comes with no adverse side effects. Just think about it:
The legal conflict that could arise between space giants such as the U.S, China and Russia on who gets to own what, could potentially be one of the major conflicts coming up that could spill over to political and economical distress.
Furthermore, the economic viability of asteroid mining is still in question. It is still extremely expensive to launch space rockets and to develop the necessary technology. NASA’s Osiris-Rex expedition, which aims to bring only two kilos of asteroid material to Earth by 2023, is said to cost $1bn. Jeff Bezos, who founded the space company Blue Origin in 2000, said that if we can reduce the cost of launch by a factor of ten and then by a factor of hundred, we will be living in a completely new world. SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, has already pushed launch costs down by as much as 75% by using their ground-breaking reusable rocket technology. In December of 2017, SpaceX became the first company to launch a reused rocket on a NASA mission. “Rapid and complete reusability is really the key to opening up space” Musk explained.
The possibilities of asteroid mining are endless – however we are not there yet. Economic and technological limitations are still restricting companies in making further progress in this field. Nevertheless, it is one of the most exciting operations out there and could get us one step closer to the possibility of being born on Earth and dying peacefully on Mars.
Volcanoes erupt all the time, all over the world. However, the majority of these eruptions are from minor ones, hardly impacting the environment. The typical volcano sends sulphur dioxide into the troposphere, the atmospheric layer closest to the earth’s surface. The gas stays in the sky for a week before falling back to the ground as acid rain, just a few hundred miles from the volcano.
A large volcano however, shoots the sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere, which begins at seven miles above the earth’s surface. In that height, rather than falling back to the ground, the sulphur dioxide mingles with the stratospheric water vapour and forms a sulphur aerosol cloud. Aerosols are simply a combination of dispersed, fine and solid particles from different substances connected through water vapour. These sulphur aerosols can stay in the stratosphere for over a year and therefore have a significant impact on global climate.
This is exactly what happened after June 15th 1991, when Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines. It injected more than 20 million tons of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere, more than any eruption since Krakatoa in 1883. Following the eruption, the sulphur aerosol spread across the whole stratosphere through natural winds and covered the earth like a blanket. The result was a drop in the global temperature by 0.5°C in the years between 1991 and 1993 as this layer of sulphur dioxide increased what scientists call the planet’s albedo, or reflective power. The sulphur aerosol blanket reflected 1% of the sunlight coming towards the earth back into space and thus partially offset the warming effects caused by rising levels of greenhouse gases.
This phenomenon led many scientists to believe, that through controlled injections of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere, global warming could be controlled and global temperatures could be reduced. A major advantage of this possibility is its cost effectiveness. According to calculations, 100 thousand tons of sulphur dioxide per year would effectively reverse warming in the arctic and reduce warming in the Northern Hemisphere. This number may seem a lot but is dwarfed when compared to the annual output of 250 million tons of sulphur dioxide ejected by volcanoes, motor vehicles and coal powered plants. So, the question researchers were asking themselves was essentially: How do we spray 128 litres of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere every minute in order to stop global warming?
A group of scientists from the US that loves cheap and simple solutions proposed a very long hose for the cure. At a base station, sulphur would be burned into sulphur dioxide and then liquefied. The hose, which would only be a couple of centimetres in diameter would be about 18 miles long, reaching from the base station into the stratosphere. In order to keep the hose vertical, helium balloons would be attached to the hose. Additionally, small pumps would be attached to the hose in an 80-metre interval to elevate the sulphur dioxide to the top of the hose. At the end of the hose, the sulphur dioxide would be sprayed into the stratosphere, where natural wind patterns would disperse the aerosols over the globe.
This layer of aerosols would reduce the effects of global warming caused by greenhouse gases drastically. However, researchers and scientists agree, that using geoengineering does not mean that we should stop worrying about reducing our carbon dioxide emissions. The warming caused by atmospheric carbon dioxide build-up is practically irreversible, as climate change is directly correlated to the total cumulative emissions. So even if we were to immediately stop any carbon dioxide emissions, the elevated concentrations of the gas in the atmosphere will persist for decades and increase global warming.
Until now the method of injecting sulphuric aerosols in to the stratosphere seems too good to be true. And it is. Firstly, the ethical and governance issues of the proposed method are huge. Solving a problem, that only exists because of humans emitting gas into the atmosphere, by injecting a different gas into the atmosphere, doesn’t seem like a very good idea. Also, injecting sulphur into the stratosphere could have dangerous consequences such as disrupting precipitation patterns, whitening the sky or destroying the ozone layer.
The impact on ozone is probably the most worrisome outcome, as the ozone layer absorbs most of the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation and hinders it from reaching Earth’s surface. Ultraviolet radiation is very harmful to all living organisms as it can lead to genetic damages, skin diseases and immune system suppression. David Keith, a Harvard professor and a pioneer in geoengineering said that “the uncertainties are substantial. You could get very bad [ozone] outcomes, but there are also ways where you could have no impact, or even a positive impact, on ozone.” In any case, he says, it is “just crazy” not to begin conducting experiments on solar geoengineering to find out more.
Another idea worth considering is the “space sunshade”- a climate engineering method for mitigating global warming through solar radiation management. It is based on the idea that we would just need to divert 2-4% of the Sun’s rays, to take Earth back to its preindustrial climate. This would be achieved by placing trillions of tiny disks at the Sun-Earth Lagrange L1 point. This is a position in between the Sun and the Earth, where the gravitational pulls of both the bodies are in such a way that they balance out perfectly. This means that a small object, placed at the L1 point, could remain in that position without using too much fuel. The disks are proposed to have a 60cm diameter and a thickness of five micrometres and will weigh about a gram each. These disks would contain transparent lenses in order to deflect the light coming from the sun so it does not hit earth.
The estimated cost of this method, which is commonly referred to the “Venetian Space Blind”, runs at around $5 trillion, which could be spent on developing alternative energy. Another downside is that the construction time of the whole operation would be very long and replacing faulty disks could prove to be a severe challenge. Another difficulty, scientists assume is convincing governments and people that the cloud of disks could not be used as a weapon to change sunlight on various parts of the earth.
Of course, geoengineering methods have their downsides, however so do most of the options currently available for reducing or reversing global warming. David Keith stated that ”there is a realistic chance that solar geoengineering technologies could actually reduce climate risk significantly, and we would be negligent if we didn’t look at that. I’m not saying it will work, and I’m not saying we should do it.” But “it would be reckless not to begin serious research on it,” he adds. “The sooner we find out whether it works or not, the better.”