Resource Depletion
"Actually, natural resources do not exist at all. All resources are manmade. Something is not a resource until it can accomplish a human purpose. Before Benjamin Silliman, Jr., a Yale University chemist, discovered in 1855 that kerosene (a better illuminant than whale oil) could be distilled from crude oil, oil was not a resource. It was black gunk that ruined farmland and had to be removed at great expense. Silliman turned oil into a resource not by changing its chemical composition but by making a
discovery. Nature does not provide resources, only materials. A resource is a material that has been stamped with a human
purpose."
-Sheldon Richman, Congressional Testimony, 1995
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According to predictions published widely in the mid-1970s, we are out of oil. This desperate situation arose due to the expanded consumption of oil-derived products and the steadily decreasing production of oil from the world's proven reserves.
Or did it? It would seem that the predictions of $100 per barrel oil prices that were bandied about in the early 1980s were not realistic. Instead, the world seems to be swimming in oil, with new fields and new production being brought online every year. While we have had to go deeper into the Gulf of Mexico to discover oil in American territory, we have found it practical to do so. We have also seen vast new areas of the world open up to American oil interests through the collapse of the Soviet Union. Quite a few areas with potential reserves remain unavailable due to political chaos, but political chaos doesn't last forever.
Over the longer run, some resources will be depleted. As the price of these resources rises due to scarcity, technology will advance to find more economical resources to use, or adapt to using less of the scarce resource without lowering standards of living. For example, whale oil increased in price as whaling depleted the readily available herds of whales. Fortunately, kerosene was identified as a material that could be extracted from petroleum, and the market for whale oil is now very small. Another example, pertinent to the same energy industry, is the recent announcement of an effective gasoline-powered fuel cell system which runs an electric-motor automobile on the same stuff so readily available at gas stations everywhere, with significantly greater efficiencies than gasoline in an internal combustion engine.
If we aren't "about to run out" of precious metals, strategic metals, petroleum, natural gas, wood, or any of dozens of others of critically important resources, why go into space to find new resources? We know that there are tremendous caches of materials in the Solar System. We can apply human ingenuity to make these into resources.
Perhaps the return of such resources to the Earth in their raw form will never be a paying proposition. That equation certainly looks bleak given the tremendous cost of space transportation. While the cost of delivery from space to Earth's surface is small, launching enough materials to build a mining and distribution system seems burdensome.
The materials bonanza permeating the Solar System may become vital resources for two reasons:
- Industrial and tourist activities in Earth orbit as well as industrial, frontier, and tourist activities beyond Earth orbit will need many kinds of materials. Delivering these resources from extraterrestrial locations should represent a tremendous savings in cost. For example, about one-twentieth the energy is needed to deliver a kilogram of materials to low Earth orbit from the surface of the Moon as compared to delivering that same amount of material to low Earth orbit from the surface of the Earth. The savings from getting the material from an Earth Approaching Asteroid should be even greater.
- Certain industrial techniques now being researched may allow significant value to be added on orbit to materials of extraterrestrial origin. These may then be worth shipping down to Earth. For example, certain foaming techniques may be applied to molten steel in orbit where the distribution of bubbles isn't modified by buoyancy as on Earth. Foam steel might become a valuable commodity for building on Earth and in space, with much of the strength of steel but much less weight. More exotic materials for protein crystallography, superconductivity, semiconductivity, or other applications may be manufactured on orbit, either utilizing containerless processing available from zero gravity or using high vacuum available in the wake of a properly designed spacecraft, or both. Supplying feedstocks to these materials industries from Earth may be cost prohibitive; supplying the same material feedstocks from the Moon or nearby asteroids may be sufficiently economical to make such space-created materials competitive in markets on Earth.
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