
Protect solar system from mining 'gold rush', say scientists - blue1
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/may/12/protect-solar-system-space-mining-gold-rush-say-scientists
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mdorazio
While nice in theory, this is the exact opposite of how you get humanity into
space in a meaningful way quickly. How much slower would the American frontier
have been pushed westward if we said, “wait, 7/8 of everything is off limits”?
Expanding into space requires incentives and those incentives need to be
available enough for companies and people to chase them despite all the risks.

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thrower123
Largely, governments tried to wall off unauthorized expansion in North
America. It didn't work at all, and people went anyway.

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Robotbeat
Apply exponentials to anything without limit, and you'll get absurdity.

Mining anything in space is ridiculously difficult. The only asteroid mining
companies basically stalled out. There's no point to this right now. Earth has
much richer reserves of basically everything.

The only point to space mining is if people want to live out there for their
own reasons. Mining for export would only be a minor component of that.

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aurizon
Let us say that China raises the $$, explores space, claims resources and
defends them against all comers and then sell at monopoly prices and owns the
world. It eventually leads us to a global chinese oligarchy with the same
excess that Russian oligarchs have manifested. We already have man chinese
oligarchs buying houses etc all over the world with stolen state money

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anigbrowl
This is correct, clever, and wholly counter-productive. It's much easier to
get agreement to things in the afterglow of a widely shared success than prior
to one. Poorly-timed admonitions like this reduce rather than expand public
buy-in for the underlying proposition.

