Asteroid 2004 BL86

[Plane]

http://www.space.com/28371-asteroid-2004-bl86-earth-flyby.html?

By the time this rock makes another close approach , it will be real estate.

[Xavier_Onassis]

I am not sure what you mean by that.

[Plane]

   There is a lot of room to expand the space humanity occupies , if we learn to inhabit space.

     Asteroids are loaded with useful minerals , and could be the raw materiel for cities that have orbits near resources , or orbits that pass near planets .

       We basically know how to survive in space , but what we haven't done yet is exploit any raw materiel from space , nor use it on site.

      This little mountain has a moon of its own, and might have everything on it that a generation of pioneers might need to start a settlement . That its orbit regularly brings it close to Earth seems handy, this makes it a prize location.

    You know what they say about Real estate , location, location, location,...

[Xavier_Onassis]

I think that an asteroid that take 200 years to make an orbit and has no atmosphere would not be much of a place to live. The farthest location is way the Hell out there. Perhaps a few brave scientists might have a go at it, and more likely they would put a variety of equipment on it to relay info back the Earth.  Robots do not require air to breathe, and in 200 years, mining could be done entirely by robots.

[Plane]

   There is plenty of Iron on Earth for earth use.

     There is little reason to mine minerals on asteroids to send it here.

      But for building spacecraft , metals mined in space have the advantage of already being there, and not requiring the very expensive lift from Earths gravity well.

    Cities in space would need enclosures , but this just means living indoors which a lot of us do anyway.

       If we start building cities in space there will be a whole lot of room for us.

    More than discovering a continent.

[Xavier_Onassis]

If we start building cities in space there will be a whole lot of room for us.

    More than discovering a continent.
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If most of the resources of putting people in space come from Earth, it will diminish the amount of resources here on Earth.

Colonizing other worlds raises way too many problems for which we have no solutions to accurately predict the outcome.

[Plane]

   You do not need to predict the outcome.

    If you had asked Columbus what he expected the result of five hundred years progress to be  , I doubt he could have come close. You just do need to have faith in future generations to cope with the problems they find and build good things as they can.

    You do need to find and use the resources that are already there, more than the resources that are from here. That is sorta the point of the whole exercise.

[Xavier_Onassis]

As you say, I will leave the future up to those who will inhabit it.
I don't think there is any other choice, really.

Columbus had two goals: to win God's favor by converting Indians to the One True Faith and to win the Queen's favor and perhaps receive some goodies. He was a clever servant, but a servant, nonetheless.

[Plane]

   Our present goals may be a poor match for the goals of those centuries in the future, this doesn't excuse us to do nothing positive for the long term.

     I understand that some olive orchards have been productive for centuries , because olive trees can have very long productive lives. Peach orchards on the other hand bear for fifteen years or so and might as well be uprooted at that point.

     There has to be room in our thinking for both strategy's , because we want both peaches and olives  .

     We should not want shortsightedness that uses up resources , poisons wells or paints us into corners on long time scales even multigenerational.

     We also should not lock all reserves into long term storage such that we are hungry right now, and never expand into discovery of new resources.

      I consider exploitation of Asteroids to be a goal of the middle distance because it may begin while I am still alive , but probably too late to participate .

      Compare with making the Anwar a national park that no one will ever visit or exploiting it , fully and immediately while oil prices are as low as they have been for forty years.

      Not being able to see past the short time horizon is just the human condition, but not trying to is inexcusable.

[Xavier_Onassis]

It was a wise move to make it harder to drill for oil in the various parts of Alaska that were recently made off limits. In the even of a real emergency, they would be able to drill, and by then it would be safer and cheaper to do so.