Charlie #7865

Asteroid mining is not only going to make a lot more trillionaires, it's going to make us all rich. Just like the Industrial Revolution, the Space Revolution will greatly increase standards of living across humanity... yours, mine, everyone's. Electric light and indoor plumbing were once luxuries. Now they are so universal that we can have them and still think of ourselves as poor. But preindustrial folk would have thought us wealthy beyond measure. What's coming is another paradigm shift. You may think this is all theoretical. You may think asteroid mining is an unproven concept. You're wrong. Because you don't know one critical fact. We're already asteroid mining. And we've been doing it since the Bronze Age. All gold we mine on earth, all the copper for wires, the uranium for reactors, all the iron for nails, everything made of heavy metals that you own, or use, or have ever seen... it's all mined from ancient asteroid strikes. All the native Earth metals sunk to the core when the whole planet was molten. Past our reach. Do you think there are precious metals, like gold and silver and platinum? Do you think that even common metals, like iron and tin and copper, cost a lot to extract and refine? Artificial scarcity. Every piece of metal you have ever seen was sourced from the tiny percentage of asteroids that once hit Earth. Leave the gravity well, learn to sail the void, and we can loot all the asteroids that haven't. Imagine that we built all of civilization picking up our raw materials, grain by grain, with tweezers. Asteroid mining, true asteroid mining, is a shovel. And no, not a hand tool shovel, I mean the shovel attachment on the front of an industrial digger. That's why SpaceX has trillion dollar plus valuation. And unless we screw things up on Earth, and sabotage them somehow, that valuation is way too low. Below here, you'll see a different part of the plan. A little company, running out of a little industrial space in the San Fernando Valley, is building humanity the ultimate shopping bag. They think Mars is a sideshow, you see. They want to bag up asteroids, just scoop the little ones right up with a great big robot butterfly net, and bring back to high Earth orbit. Strip them down there, and build. If you thought data centers in space are wild, wait until you see factories in space. Wait until everything from toasters to CPUs to machine tools are made in high orbit, or on the moon, and the only bits that ever make it to Earth on the finished products. In space, minerals are cheap. And power is free. And it doesn't cost much of anything to move goods down a gravity well. You have no idea what's coming. Neither does SpaceX or Transastra, for that matter. They've got a hold of the tail of the elephant, and they think the Space Revolution is a rope. I'm a science fiction author. My job is to see the whole elephant. It's a big fucking elephant.