Exploitation beyond our planet: the risks of forced labor in space mining

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4558/1

#SpaceMining #Slavery

@nyrath we don’t even know what “space mining” is going to look like yet in any detail, but I’m educatedly guessing it will resemble earthly strip- and pit-mining in broad strokes. There are ZERO unskilled laborers in a modern industrial strip mine, every human on site does something complex and important - and you don’t have to expend energy for the air they’re breathing down here. In space it will likely be semi-autonomous and remote-operated robotics doing all the “digging”.

@nyrath hell the very first “space mines” absolutely MUST be entirely concerned with supplying air, water & propellant just for the “mine colony” itself. The first Great Space Industry will be selling air, water & propellant to the next wave, probably for about 5-6 waves over several centuries.

@jeffzugale @nyrath Heinlein covered this pretty well in “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.”

And also, what happens to Earth if you piss the miners off.

@nazgul @nyrath just occurred to me: mining the moon will require explosives? Know what we’ll use? Black Powder! Petroleum based explosives will be insanely expensive to lift, but there’s (logically) plenty of sulfur, potassium nitrate and carbon soot on the moon.

Don’t underestimate the power of primitive tech. Remember, we went to the moon with vacuum-tube electronics and 1950s material science. Crude, but effective is ace in space!

@nazgul @nyrath I love talking about this nuts and bolts frontier survival stuff. 😊

@cstross @A_C_McGregor @jeffzugale @nazgul

Yes, I call such a magical space resource "MacGuffinite". It would create an extensive manned presence in space.

Sadly for me, it apparently does not exist.

@nyrath @A_C_McGregor @jeffzugale @nazgul Yup. Every attempt to identify one turns up more convenient alternatives. Lunar 3He, for example—so monstrously expensive to mine that if you can crack the coulomb barrier for aneutronic fusion in the first place it'd probably be cheaper to push the tech a little further and run a P+B cycle, using water and borax as fuel inputs instead of something that costs up to $2000/litre in gaseous phase.

@nyrath @cstross @A_C_McGregor @jeffzugale @nazgul

Preserving the environment was mentioned a while back.

If you price in the eco-externalities and make the (IMO reasonable) assumption that we will continue to need inputs to get outputs, the numbers start looking better on getting those inputs from somewhere not buried in layers of expensive, precious, easy-to-damage ecosystem.

Dead space rocks are as close to eco-externality free as you can get. That's your MacGuffinite.

@cerebrate @nyrath @cstross @A_C_McGregor @nazgul That’s been a core of “space mining” advocacy since the 70s, and there’s validity to the idea of not digging up all of earth for raw materials. However, just scanning around Google Earth for an hour will show that we haven’t ripped up much ground to extract stuff. It’s WAY more important to stop filling the air with CO2 than rehab iron strip mines right now.

@jeffzugale @nyrath @cstross @A_C_McGregor @nazgul

From the perspective of the whole planet, maybe, but from the perspective of those locations that happen to have concentrations of the rare stuff under them, there are plenty of local ecosystems that we've fucked up to a fare-thee-well.

@cerebrate @nyrath @cstross @A_C_McGregor @nazgul No argument. Local impacts have been massive, regrettable, and preventable. But the most important danger we face right now is the now-accelerating Thermal Crisis. Nothing we do in space will mitigate that.

That’s also a very large blind spot in the original article - we’re gonna have our hands full down here, sadly.

@jeffzugale @nyrath @cstross @A_C_McGregor @nazgul

Not to diminish that particular crisis, but if there's one thing I've learned from mining accident reports for fictional purposes, it's that it's real easy to get so focused on solving one problem that you fly right into the ground.

@cerebrate @jeffzugale @nyrath @A_C_McGregor @nazgul Luckily there *should* be enough of us at the controls to handle multiple disasters in parallel. Like the crew of Quantas Flight 32 on November 4th, 2010 when an engine exploded, taking out the hydraulics and damaging 2 other engines. (Unusually, that flight had five pilots on the flight deck, including two check captains: they got it on the ground ... eventually.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32

@cstross @jeffzugale @nyrath @A_C_McGregor @nazgul

Certainly hope so, anyway.

But I can’t help but think of just how much crew resource management had to develop as a discipline to mostly-reliably produce this sort of outcome.

@cerebrate @jeffzugale @nyrath @A_C_McGregor @nazgul Two factors drove CRM improvements: (a) airlines don't like crashing $500M jets, and (b) aircrew don't want to die on the job! If we can achieve a broad consensus that some given outcome is very bad, we can usually agree on steps to mitigate it.

@cstross @cerebrate @nyrath @A_C_McGregor @nazgul In addition, It’s worth remembering that we did, in fact, crash some $500M jets (or flight-tech-era cost-equivalents) in the process of learning this stuff. We *always* have expensive failures as we learn and grow.

Let’s remember our astronauts from Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia, and some Russian missions. 😔 RIP pioneers.

@cstross @cerebrate @jeffzugale @nyrath @A_C_McGregor Albeit not entirely in one piece. But one hell of brilliant adaptation and flying.

@cstross @A_C_McGregor @jeffzugale @nazgul @nyrath

Sooner or later that other space based mission is “survival of the species” but that’s hopefully much, much later.

Until then, and barring any war scenarios, I think it’s more likely wr discover something that can only be manufactured in space. Best guess there would be materials that are basically aerogel but without a viable substrate, and so requiring zero-g mfg.

@mgaruccio @A_C_McGregor @jeffzugale @nazgul @nyrath News flash: no species survives on the time scale you're talking about. Life on land is only about 500MY old. H. Sapiens is about 0.3MY old. Written culture is 0.005MY old. Solar brightening dessicating the Earth's hydrosphee? About 1000+ MY in the future. We'll be long gone WAY before then.

@mgaruccio @A_C_McGregor @jeffzugale @nazgul @nyrath That would be a good bet; but begs the question of why the factory can't be entirely automated.

@cstross @mgaruccio @A_C_McGregor @jeffzugale @nazgul @nyrath It’s quite improbable to even think of any civilization composed of individuals (not hive-minds a la Borg, directed hierarchies a la ants, &c. &c.—having free will) that would be capable of even reaching Kardachev Type-I before fragmenting or destroying themselves. Type-II would be even more of a hilarious stretch; a single planet is at least tractably conquerable and holdable; for a time.

@alice @mgaruccio @A_C_McGregor @jeffzugale @nazgul @nyrath I find the Kardashev scale quaintly Stalinist in its confident assertion that energy utilization is a useful metric of sophistication. By that yardstick a mindless paperclip-optimizer converting the entire Solar System into orbiting PV panels powering bitcoin mining engines would be an optimal Kardashev type II civilization!

@cstross @A_C_McGregor @jeffzugale @nazgul @nyrath

Change “species” to “things descended from us” and NOT being long gone before then is kind of my point. The list of things that can wipe everyone out gets a lot shorter for a species/society/whatever living on multiple planets. And goes to almost nothing if they don’t need planets at all.

@cstross @A_C_McGregor @jeffzugale @nazgul @nyrath

At least at first I think there would need to be some level of human presence. Creating a “lights out factory” has proven to be effectively impossible on earth, and I don’t see a reason it would be any easier in space.

@mgaruccio @A_C_McGregor @jeffzugale @nazgul @nyrath Then why aren't we flying Falcon 9 payloads full of hardy algae spores every week, to dump into interstellar space? Because that'd be our best long-term strategy for spreading life throughout the galaxy. (We could start RIGHT NOW on a budget of well under $1Bn/year! So why isn't it happening? Hint: the answer is socio-political, or maybe ideological, and not entirely rational.)

@cstross @A_C_McGregor @jeffzugale @nazgul @nyrath There are some materials that may be “easier” to obtain/source off-world than they are on-world often due to reactivity, which are at this point economically and technologically critical.

Lithium, for example. I think it used to be cobalt before the LiOn/LiPo revolution.

Air quotes because actually capturing a passing asteroid is still no 🤬 joke, same as getting the material safely down from orbit to be utilized. Gigaton rock? Needs planning.

@A_C_McGregor @alice @mgaruccio @jeffzugale @nazgul @nyrath

Close.

(I tend to think we should focus our efforts on quality, not quantity.)

@cstross @A_C_McGregor @jeffzugale @nazgul @nyrath

Fair enough, and at that point were back to religion. I still think there are some events between now and the lifecycle of the sun being an issue that may spur humanity or intelligent life descended from us to need to move beyond earth, but hard to say which would offer “space mission” as a viable alternative.

@cstross @mgaruccio @A_C_McGregor @jeffzugale @nazgul @nyrath Arguably a type-II entity, not civilization. And sure, it would be. It’d be quite a marvel of sophistication being able to accomplish such a feat, even if it appears useless.

I mean, all life is here to increase entropy and hasten the heat death of the universe, no? Why would paperclips be less worthy than, say, adorable kitten collectable painted porcelain plates? They’d all serve The Purpose™. 👹

It’s “a metric”. I welcome the definition of others that may be more practical or useful. 😜

Civilized conflict as a measurement? Japan’s winning, on Earth, on the interpersonal lawsuit front. (Apologies and responsible ownership of one’s failures are big, there, so there’s far less frequently the need or desire for litigation.) But that shows only one specific form of advancement, one less generally applicable than “energy”.

@cstross @mgaruccio @A_C_McGregor @jeffzugale @nazgul @nyrath

@cstross @alice @mgaruccio @A_C_McGregor @nazgul @nyrath Your matryoshka brain swimming with ancient predatory marketing programs! So fun 😁

@jeffzugale @yonder @cbehopkins @cstross @A_C_McGregor @nazgul @nyrath

It is my very, very, very sad conclusion that we need to put the dream of my youth, manned space travel, on pause - that the money, the physical energy and the emotional energy need to entirely redirected into avoiding the collapse.

We need to give up a lot of things to survive - it isn't just manned space travel, but this one is a low-hanging fruit.

-- more --

@jeffzugale @yonder @cbehopkins @cstross @A_C_McGregor @nazgul @nyrath

It consumes a large number of scientific and technical personnel. It is wildly consumptive of energy, measured in joules, but also of the focus of humanity's best and brightest, and of our richest.

We need another moonshot, and this mooonshot needs to be saving our biosphere. Nothing else matters. We need to laser focus our technical resources on this issue.

--- more, almost there --

@TomSwirly @jeffzugale @yonder @cbehopkins @A_C_McGregor @nazgul @nyrath I disagree on your estimate of how much energy space exploration soaks up: the entire global space science and industrial sector runs on a small fraction of the budget of the US Navy, never mind the Pentagon as a whole. Planetary GNP is roughly $70Tn/year; the Pentagon gets by on $0.7Tn/year: I think we can spare $0.07Tn/year for space?

@cstross @A_C_McGregor @jeffzugale @nazgul @nyrath

Lithium. :D

There isn't enough lithium on our planet to provide all that we want for the batteries that we need to give the storage requirements to balance the intermittency of wind/solar.

Yes, we could use NiFe batteries for static systems, but very few people are looking at that.

There are known asteroids containing more lithium than exists here on Earth.

@cstross @TomSwirly @yonder @cbehopkins @A_C_McGregor @nazgul @nyrath Don’t get me started on the astonishingly wasteful US DOD budget. It’s (quite possibly deliberately) designed as a “covert” pipeline to transfer money from the general citizenry to the aristocracy. 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

@jeffzugale @cstross @yonder @cbehopkins @A_C_McGregor @nazgul @nyrath

By my calculations, the US military is the most expensive project ever undertaken by humans (excluding "governments").

And yet this military has been used to wage wars of choice against Bronze Age societies, and has lost each and every one of them.

The $30 trillion or so spent on the US military would have saved us from climate collapse.

@TomSwirly @jeffzugale @yonder @cbehopkins @A_C_McGregor @nazgul @nyrath The western way of warfare—deliberate genocide excluded—is at a societal level a cultural event with various rules and rituals that other types of society don't share. The US military excels at that type of boxing match, but lost badly when the Taliban simply refused to follow someone else's rule book and did their own thing. (The Taliban in turn are now losing at running a westernized city-state.)

@cstross @jeffzugale @yonder @cbehopkins @A_C_McGregor @nazgul @nyrath

In order to "excel" the Yanks would have to actually win some of those boxing matches, and yet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Saigon#/media/File:Saigon-hubert-van-es.jpg