Abstract
Walt Whitman was right: Earth is not a closed system. The road to the riches of the Solar System lies open. Nature has provided humanity with a virtually unlimited supply of raw materials, and that supply is right above our heads. The asteroids, comets, planets, and moons of the Solar System contain enough of the soon-to-be-scarce raw materials required to feed our technological civilization for thousands of years.
“Allons! We must not stop here,
However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this
dwelling we cannot remain here,
However sheltered this port and however calm these waters
we must not anchor here,
However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are
permitted to receive it but a little while.”
—From the poem “Song of the Open Road” by Walt Whitman
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Further Reading
For more about the possibility of future wars over natural resources, we recommend Resource Wars: A New Landscape of Global Conflict, by Michael T. Klare (New York: Holt, 2002). A good source of data on Solar System objects is Katharina Lodders and Bruce Fegley, Jr., The Planetary Scientist’s Companion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). One of the best sources on Solar System resources is the very readable John S. Lewis’s Mining the Sky (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996). A somewhat more venerable treatment of the same topic, authored by an ex-astronaut, is Brian O’Leary’s The Fertile Stars (New York: Everitt House, 1981).
Technical treatments of NEO resources and NEO mining possibilities can be found in two scientific papers published in “Near-Earth Resources,” (Gertsch, Remo, and Sour Gertsch) and Mining Near-Earth Resources” (Gertsch, Sour Gertsch, and Remo), published in the proceedings of the U. N.-sponsored conference at which they were presented: John L. Remo, ed., Near Earth Objects, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1997, Vol. 822.
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Matloff, G., Bangs, C., Johnson, L. (2014). Raw Materials from Space. In: Harvesting Space for a Greener Earth. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9426-3_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9426-3_11
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