Geology is the Mother of History
You may have heard the famous saying “geography is the mother of history”. It explains the idea that WHERE you live can have just as big (or even bigger) impact on your culture and society as HOW you live. Got a nice big river and temperate climate? You’ll probably be part of a rich and successful culture. Desert as far as the eye can see? Things are going to be tougher.
Today, geography is less of an excuse for failure. Today on Earth at least, HISTORY is the mother of history. All that ancient baggage still has an e ect on how happy people can expect to be.
When it comes to space though, it won’t be the WHERE that’s important, but the WHAT. Geology - though in space it’s probably more correctly just called mineralogy - will define who is rich and who is poor, who is happy and who lives in despair.
Until now, our reasons for exploring space have been fairly esoteric. Oh sure the science is important but do HD pictures of Jupiter’s north pole really help the starving masses? We launch satellites to spy on each other or beam TV programs around, and the US went to the Moon to stick it to the USSR. The communication stu is good, but the rest? All pretty abstract.
Space, for everyone, won’t become properly important until we start mining it for resources. This no-doubt long and di cult process has begun, as numerous companies prepare to launch their first rockets and probes.
There’s a very good chance that life will get a lot better for everyone if we can quickly establish an economical o world mining industry. The great advantage of mining asteroids is that nobody’s back yard needs to be destroyed as prospectors chase morsels of this or that resource. If this does happen, it will be interesting to see if the nation states we know and “love” today can survive. Right now, the only thing that keeps, for instance, the government of the USA operating is its ability to gather money via taxation, and compel compliance via, ultimately, its army.
If you start mining somewhere in US territory without permission, first they will send the bureaucrats, then the police, and finally the army. But what if it’s impractical or impossible to enforce ownership of, say, an asteroid full of stainless steel and cobalt? How do you prevent or control the company mining it from selling these high-demand resources back to Earth?
Governments maintain control via the gun, sure, but also by harnessing patriotic loyalty for an arbitrary chunk of the Earth’s surface. Yet true human loyalty is usually limited to a few hundred close acquaintances, the so-called monkeysphere. For a person living on an asteroid with 500 buddies, mining it and standing to make a trilliondollar profit, no dirt-sider government is going to be able to inspire any sort of loyalty.
Sanctions? Good luck with that. Space will trash the planetside mining industry. Why pay $300 for one tonne of Earth-steel when Eros Incorporated will sell you 3000 tonnes of ultra-pure-grade steel made super-strong via additives unavailable on Earth, for more or less the same price?
Nation-states that harumph and garumph and refuse to trade with o worlders will be left behind. They will become increasingly poor, as other polities grow rich with materials - geology - from the sky.
Of course, this is still all a pipe dream. Getting o the planet is a big challenge. Getting to a useful rock in space is bigger. And returning the resource in a form that makes it marketable? That could be the biggest challenge of all. But it’s one to which I think we’re inevitably going to rise.