ot: 1 min of silence

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Mining asteroids for goldwould indeed be expensive I agree (or rather go with you, you're the mining student here) but what if you look for other metals? Perhaps the nickel-iron compounds ARE the stuff you're looking for.

And about mining the asteroid:

You don't need to get the asteroid anywhere, just pick a rather large, rather static one at the edge of the Belt and place robotic/remotecontrolled drills there to extract materials. Excess materials (like simple rock) could be vented into space or stored separately, the ores you want could be picked up periodically by (again) robotic/RCed transport shuttles that ferry the cargoes to a space station or colony where it is processes then shipped, or simply shipped out and processed elsewhere.

It could be a massively useful exploit once we exhaust Earth's raw material deposits.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Exhaust? Most of the metal is simply rusting in conveniently-placed piles. Admitadly, we will have a problem with fossil fuels, but, among other things, I saw a show on nova, I think it was, once, about some people who had gotten candlewax to burn at 85% the efficiency of rocket fuel.

[deccan]

Going to space for natural resources is pretty implausible unless some kind of major technological revolution, I'd agree.

In the near future, it'd all be about tourism and vanity.

[El_Phil]

We are talking a century plus, minimum, for all major metals. One Brazilian iron ore mine, on it's own, could supply the world for over a century at current rates. Some speciality ones less, but then no-ones been prospecting for them becuase well, they're speciality.

Take Tantalum. Barely until mobiles phones and other small electronics come along, then wallop massive demand. On Australian exploration firms finds a very nice deposit, gets it going and grabs 70-80% of the market. So on paper when that runs out we run out of Tantalum, however:

1. Once Greenbushes was open everyone stopped looking because you not only had to find a deposit you had to find a really cheap one. Given it was rare to start with no-one bothered.
2. Tantalum can be subsituted with Selinium and shed loads of other sutff from the weirder parts of the periodic table
3. Worst case there's always slave labour mined Tantalum from Sierra Leone, DRC and other west/central Aftican war zones. You didn't think it was just blood diamonds did you?

So frankly I can't see asteroid mining happening.

Fossil fuels: Coal for almost half a millenium, oil/gas there's been only 35/40 years left for almost 40 years now. Whilst that can't go on forever there's still most of Siberia, Antarctic, Alaska, Rockall and the deep South Pacific basin to explore. Not even counting oil shales/sands of which the US known reserves could meet their oil needs for around 350 years.