Comment by gehsty
4 days ago
For it feels like we should work harder to mine critical resources in as low impact way possible. We don’t know what this will do. We don’t really need it. No one would get this consented / permitted within their own seabed, so why do we do it in international waters.
I work in subsea cables and the companies that develop this type of tooling also work in this field, on a purely technical level it’s super cool technology and operationally very very interesting - the riser for nodule collection and how you pump / suck something from 4km down to the surface is wildly cool.
> For it feels like we should work harder to mine critical resources in as low impact way possible.
I honestly think this is the reason that asteroid mining should be the future for resource acquisition - not because it's cheaper or easier or anything like that, but because there's so much of it floating around out there and nobody will complain.
It just feels untenable at the moment. How many decades away would it be?
> we should work harder to mine critical resources in as low impact way possible
This is easy to say in theory. It's harder if you have a population that wants rising material living standards. (Increasing living standards in middle-income economies is vastly more energy and material intensive than at the upper or lower ends of the scale.)
If you have a population that want rising material living standards, that's easy too. Any increase in living standards should be balanced against a concomitant decrease in population. Resource usage (meaning pollution, waste, energy production) stays steady or even goes down.
Apparently population control is anathema to most people though, so the unrelenting environmental rape continues unabated.
> Apparently population control is anathema to most people
Well yeah that too, but first and foremost when a population shrinks it leads to a demographic crisis. The government actively attempts to prevent that.
But also the issues you point to aren't inherently due to population. Most of our activities don't need to impact the environment to the extent that they currently do. We just cut corners to save money on a massive scale.
That seems to happen naturally, just with a lot of lag in the system. Declining birth rates can be seen in almost all modernised societies that have had a strong middle class.
I mean mining currently available resources more responsibly. I do not think we need modules to meet demand?
> No one would get this consented / permitted within their own seabed, so why do we do it in international waters.
They do it in international waters because no one would consent in their own seabed.
It’s really the perfect example of libertarianism. When no one is considering the externalities, nothing matters except profit.