Wednesday 25 April 2012

Grist for the Hard SF Mill

The BBC has a fascinating article about real-life asteroid mining today.

Apart from being, to me, an amazing story about human ingenuity, and proof that future resource constraints will just make humanity cleverer and more ambitious in all manner of ways - there are two things about the story that strike a chord with me.

First, this:
If you look back historically at what has caused humanity to make its largest investments in exploration and in transportation, it has been going after resources, whether it's the Europeans going after the spice routes or the American settlers looking toward the west for gold, oil, timber or land.
That's an elementary lesson in setting design (people don't settle new lands for the hell of it), but also for game design. What do characters do in a Traveller game? Go after resources, or do something related to that. How will society develop? It will be focused on resources. So the message to GMs is: think about where the resources are in your subsector and how they are connected. Everything should come after that.

Second, this:
Water from asteroids could be broken down in space to liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen for rocket fuel. Water is very expensive to get off the ground so the plan is to take it from an asteroid to a spot in space where it can be converted into fuel.
This ties oddly into conversations I've been having by email with Patrick recently, but the future is water. I don't think we'd end up using ice as currency, because it would be too useful as fuel (it's a bit like using steel for currency a la Dragonlance), but you can easily imagine wars over otherwise completely insignificant icy rocks orbiting Uranus some time in our semi-distant future, can't you?

9 comments:

  1. "... an amazing story about human ingenuity, and proof that future resource constraints will just make humanity cleverer and more ambitious in all manner of ways ..."

    Beware of swallowing it whole. Technically, this is playing catch-up on a process set on a long decline in the '70s. A decline could come again, and perhaps even for the same reasons. A key question in the swallowing is surely how this particular venture became possible now, and who stands to gain. Who is 'humanity' in this case? Many of us may have funded it, but did we choose too, and what stake do we have?

    Those are great questions for setting design too.

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    1. Sure, they are great questions for setting design.

      But for the world itself, I'm an optimist. I don't swallow it whole - these are businessmen, who are also hoping presumably to raise capital at some point if not now. But as our resources get constrained we get better and more efficient at using them, and we get better at finding them too. This just seems like an extension of that, and I think even if this project fails, sooner or later somebody will be doing something similar.

      As for who stands to gain...assuming it is successful, the entrepreneurs doing it will stand to gain, but so will "we" as humanity, broadly understood. That's how capitalism works.

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    2. "... I'm an optimist."

      "... as our resources get constrained ..."

      "... even if this project fails, sooner or later somebody will be doing something similar."

      It doesn't sound much like optimism, more acceptance of the inevitable. Is it possible we've become 'optimistic' about too narrow a future path? That could presumably be achieved quite easily with media ownership what it is, and with many of us too busy with this or that to have time to consider fully the things we're told, or to remember or compare.

      "... but so will "we" as humanity, broadly understood."

      If so, by what mechanism or mechanisms? And how broadly understood?

      "That's how capitalism works."

      If this is the mechanism, time to take a step back. In this case it may also be 'too soon to say'.

      Have you ever read this?

      http://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit

      I'd recommend it to anyone who writes, especially for other people. It doesn't seem to get old. Here's the essence:

      "... modern writing at its worst ... consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. ... People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning — they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another — but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying."

      Read the news with even those ideas at the back of the mind and things start to look less clear-cut.

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    3. I'm very interested in the detail of what I'm saying - I'm just not particularly interested into going into detail on it for the nature of this blog!

      It is a fact that resources here on Earth are finite. This means they will start to grow scarce eventually. As a resource become scarcer it becomes more expensive. This provides three incentives: people will use the resource less; they will use it more efficiently; and they will get better at finding and extracting it. The latter will occur because there will be big financial incentives for doing so.

      This project, and projects like it, are part of this. It is inevitable that they will happen, because it is inevitable that certain resources here on Earth will reach a point of scarcity that finding and extracting them from space will become profitable. I don't think for a second that this will be the only thing that happens in response to scarcity - people will find more ways to re-use resources, and to use them much more effectively as well (as has happened with oil, for instance, over the decades). But there will definitely be a point at which people will start to extract resources from places beyond Earth.

      That is an optimistic statement, based on the facts as we know them, don't you think?

      As for the mechanism of how "we" as humanity will benefit - it's simple. Entrepreneurs mining asteroids for stuff we need means that we will get the stuff that we need. I have far more faith in the profit motive here than I do in government, for instance, because entrepreneurs by definition provide resources for everybody (assuming a free market and free trade) whereas governments tend to use resources for their own nefarious ends, or to bolster their own country's power, and certainly not for the benefit of humanity as a whole.

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    4. "... it is inevitable that certain resources here on Earth will reach a point of scarcity that finding and extracting them from space will become profitable."

      I disagree that this point of scarcity is strictly inevitable, and the other responses you mention are actually very good reason to reject the idea that it is. There may well be other possible responses in fact, which is an optimistic view. However, the general assumption that one path is inevitable may make exploration of these other responses less likely, reinforcing the sense of inevitability.

      "But there will definitely be a point at which people will start to extract resources from places beyond Earth."

      'Definitely' suggests a determinism, that same narrow narrow future path mentioned above. What information do you have guaranteeing this? Who told you? Why is the one interpretation correct?

      "I have far more faith in the profit motive here than I do in government ..."

      Entreprenuers vs. government is a dichotomy quite possibly as false as many others. The complexity of human interaction surely doesn't allow us to be divided so easily as that.

      "... entrepreneurs by definition provide resources for everybody ..."

      By definition? If profit is the motive, how does provision of resources for everybody enter the equation? It may occur to a smaller or larger group of people, but you make clear by mention of profit that the interest of the entrepreneur is primarily the entrepreneur.

      Surely the structure of this passage:

      "... governments tend to use resources for their own nefarious ends, or to bolster their own country's power, and certainly not for the benefit of humanity as a whole."

      could also support this understanding:

      '... businesses tend to use resources for their own nefarious ends, or to bolster their own organisation's or owners' economic power, and certainly not for the benefit of humanity as a whole.'

      assuming the a similar handwaving of any specific data. Again, does that dichotomy really exist? If not, why do we so readily accept it?

      "assuming a free market and free trade"

      Big assumptions. Can we even prove the economic theories which suggest it is the case? Where, how and why are these theories published?

      Are you following the Leveson inquiry in the UK at the moment?

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    5. "Big assumptions. Can we even prove the economic theories which suggest it is the case? Where, how and why are these theories published?"

      Universe and the Free Market, by Miller & Chadwick, in Smart Creditchip, April 2450
      Economics of the Free Trade, by Astell & Harshman, in Spinward Entrepreneur, #04 1025

      Both provide a thorough analysis of these topics. A must read for every free trader.

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  2. As another weird coincidence, this turned up in my RSS this morning- Rosetta Approaches Asteroid Lutetia

    http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120424.html

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  3. Forbes, Discover magazin and Andrew Sullivan are now onto the asteroid mining kick

    http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/04/asteroid-miners.html

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  4. I can't help but feel like this is a Ponzi scheme. Investors pour in money and they build some aerospace facilities, put up a few sattelites, and their growth brings in even more investors. Takes a long time before people start asking how come the company isn't hauling in 500-ton platinum asteroids like they said in the elevator pitch.

    My bet is that in the long haul, a lot of private investors will lose their shirts, a single company will have a lot of resources for expansion into space, and maybe that expansion will actually happen.

    I'm just afraid people will notice Titan and go "whee doggie let's bring 'er in so we can gas up our Cadillacs and Fords!" That's not the point. This is finger-in-the-dike thinking. We need self-sustaining colonies of humans on other planets (and a self-sufficient Earth) and this is worthwhile only so far as it gets us closer to that.

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