Space Colonization Part 09: Asteroid Mining Reality by 2025 The Future of the human Economy

Reasoning

Nobody can disagree that the earth population is increasing while the resources grow thin. Well it's actually ok people. We can start mining the the whole solar system and we are going to begin as early as 2025.

First lets take a look at the big expensive picture
Lets assume that we are going to start importing goods like minerals and even maybe water from the Asteroid belt, how much is there? By NASA's estimations the equivalent of the resources in the belt is 100 billion with B dollars, for every single person alive on the planet today, that's some wealth right... More importantly that's a lot of resources. And that's what space mining is about and not monetary gain.

Space economy

Well we do understand that getting something into space is too expensive at the moment, Skylon might change that, you can learn more about it here, but building by space space material is not expensive at all, moreover it is efficient and it adds up to the human economy jobs and many many trillions of "dollars" in circulation which will actually support any kind of effort of the civilization to thrive. Luxembourg recently established a 220 million EURO fund for space mining and there are private companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries that already produce the technological machinery that will help humanity to mine the cosmos.

The "timeline"

People might think that we are maybe a century away from space mining and that their grandchildren might live to see it but that's not true at all, we are about a decade away. Humanity already possesses 2 spacecrafts in orbit around asteroids, and in the first half of 2020's we anticipate that we are going to touch on the surface of our nearest asteroid and extract the first amount of material ever been extracted.

So how viable is it?

Well the asteroid belt is a bit too far away for now, 330 million km while the Moon is only 384,000 km. Of course we do not have to go that far to find an asteroid full of useful minerals to mine. Asteroids are actually the most accessible destination once we are out of low-Earth orbit. There are about 14,000 asteroids close to Earth that already been discovered and a few thousand of those are really easy to access.

In conclusion

A new market is emerging. It's capabilities are to become the biggest most flourishing market ever existed in human history. It will bring exotic amounts of so much needed minerals and materials, it will create a huge number of jobs and it will finally bring us one step closer to the colonization of the Solar System.

Source links:

https://futurism.com/humanitys-future-in-space-depends-on-asteroid-mining/

https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/about/nea_resource.html

Thanks for reading feel free to follow, vote and Re-esteem if you find it useful.

You can find more articles of mine here: https://steemit.com/@diasdr 

Space Colonization Part 06: https://steemit.com/science/@diasdr/space-colonization-part-06-the-skylon-the-motherships-my-plan 

Space Colonization Part 07: https://steemit.com/science/@diasdr/space-colonization-part-07-the-nine-very-real-ways-humans-can-travel-the-cosmos 

Space Colonization Part 08: https://steemit.com/science/@diasdr/space-colonization-part-08-the-skies-of-venus