Great swathes of the solar system should be preserved as official “space wilderness” to protect planets, moons and other heavenly bodies from rampant mining and other forms of industrial exploitation, scientists say.
The proposal calls for more than 85% of the solar system to be placed off-limits to human development, leaving little more than an eighth for space firms to mine for precious metals, minerals and other valuable materials.
While the limit would protect pristine worlds from the worst excesses of human activity, its primary goal is to ensure that humanity avoids a catastrophic future in which all of the resources within its reach are permanently used up.
“If we don’t think about this now, we will go ahead as we always have, and in a few hundred years we will face an extreme crisis, much worse than we have on Earth now,” said Martin Elvis, a senior astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Once you’ve exploited the solar system, there’s nowhere left to go.”
I say mine the shit out of it. Better we mine way out there than here on mother Earth. What the hell are they protecting it for? Indigenous extraterrestrial life forms? Future billionaire space tourists? What kind of stupid drugs are these people on? What they're really saying is that unless the human population and its resource consuming growth is drastically curtailed, then we have roughly 500 years left, unless we go interstellar. To read more, click here.