In a recent TV interview, cosmologist Neil deGrasse Tyson gushed about the prospects of mining in space and the benefits that it might afford humanity:
How about mining an asteroid for natural resources? [. . . ] There are more natural resources on asteroids than have ever been mined in the history of the Earth. So in 100 years [. . .] all wars over limited resources are over because we have access to the unlimited resources of our backyard and that new backyard is our Solar System.
Is this really plausible? What can we mine in space? And will it really deliver world peace, or just another realm for competition and conflict? Perhaps a look at the immediate past and near future may help us answer some of these questions.
In the two years since I first wrote about off-Earth mining, a number of things have changed, and at least one relates to “world peace.”
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