Space Colonization Part 04: Mining The Asteroid Belt
The General rules of our solar system adventure
You might all know by now that we are going to Mars at some point after 2030, or even earlier with the Mars One mission (which i am not so sure it is going to actually start its trip but who knows.). Mars as a goal is a very important one but it is not what you would call the most important, allow me to explain why.
The need for materials
In our adventure to expand into space we are going to have great needs for materials, materials that should not come from earths surface mainly because it is very costly to get them into orbit(in the future that might change but still earth has strong gravity that we will still need a lot of power to overcome). So space factories, 3D printing in spaceships, and mining facilities are going to flourish in the second half of the 21st century. But we are going to need a place to find all these materials, extreme mining of the Moon and Mars is not a very good idea, it should be just enough to keep us going. So the asteroid belt is the best place to find these materials.
The colonies of the Belt
The facilities at the Asteroid Belt are going to be vast, by far bigger than anything else we have constructed, we should actually have at least 2 main bases in the Belt that house maybe more than 300 million people each, why u might ask, the answer is simple, it is going to be the richest place for materials in the inner solar system. We can build 2 Elysium style main bases or even colonize Ceres the dwarf planet in the Belt. These colonies are going to have military bases close to them, plus scientist laboratories. As the first line or as our first boundaries for "Human Space" i believe the asteroid belt is our best case scenario.
The tech
We are not too far away by having the tech we need to be able to go and have our first habitats close to the Belt, especially after the creation of the Moon village it will be so much easier to start expanding exponentially. Again the first step is the Moon colony because it is so much easier to craft in low gravity so much easier to move the materials and so much easier to start Space journeys.
This plan has been envisioned by ESA and NASA a few decades ago, and today i give you my personal opinion why it is the most important part of colonizing the inner solar system. I hope it is not so far in the future since i would love to live in Ceres and work in its terraforming process.
You can find more information about all this in the video above by Isaac Arthur and in the Nasa and ESA sites.
Thanks for reading feel free to vote and Re-esteem if you find it useful.
You can find more articles of mine here: https://steemit.com/@diasdr
Space Colonization Part 01: https://steemit.com/science/@diasdr/space-colonization-part-01-general-idea-and-why
Space Colonization Part 02: https://steemit.com/science/@diasdr/space-colonization-part-02-the-moon-colony
Space Colonization Part 03: https://steemit.com/science/@diasdr/space-colonization-part-03-3d-printing-the-future-colonies
I love this post! Space exploration is so exciting! That would be cool if we could mine asteroids. I kinda feel bad doing damage to planets. but not asteroids. Flawed logic maybe!? I gotta admit I'm a bit jealous of the people way into the future who will be able to see more a lot more in person than our galaxy!
Well since earth is our first experiment we might not damage any other planet in the future, we do know how bad can things get nowadays, so i think it was the first and last bad idea.
I'm a shame actually to know that we have the capability to be in space, building stations right now, but are set back by money, debt, and banking issues. Perhaps in the not so distant crypto future we will have the foundations to escape the perpetual greedy economy and start exploring the stars (or in this case, the asteroids)!