Another Good Reason for Going Into Space

Gold, platinum, iron, uranium, and other metals so valuable to modern life may not be native to this planet. In fact, the highly valued goodies so painstakingly mined from Earth's crust may only be a small sample packet of what celestial bodies hold in store for whoever wants to go out and get it.

"The extreme temperature at which the Earth's core formed more than four billion years ago would have completely stripped any precious metals from the rocky crust and deposited them in the core," says James Brenan of the Department of Geology at the University of Toronto and co-author of the study published in Nature Geoscience on October 18.

"So, the next question is why are there detectable, even mineable, concentrations of precious metals such as platinum and rhodium in the rock portion of the Earth today? Our results indicate that they could not have ended up there by any known internal process, and instead must have been added back, likely by a 'rain' of extraterrestrial debris, such as comets and meteorites." _SD

We know that there are single asteroids likely to be valued well over $1 trillion for their mineral content. _ Even a relatively small asteroid with a diameter of 1 km can contain more than $20 trillion US dollars worth of industrial metals (e.g., iron and nickel), precious metals (e.g., cobalt, gold and platinum) and rare earth elements. Wikipedia

As off-Earth infrastructures build, the value of concentrated mineral resources in space is apt to increase in a boot-strap fashion, in an unprecedented economic boom and expansion of human activity.

We have been trained by our politicians, our media, our professors, to expect increasing limits on economic growth and activity. But what if such arbitrary limits are unnecessary -- are in fact lethally dangerous to the future of humans?

It is time to transcend arbitrary authority and arbitrary limits at the same time. Petty dictators need to be put in their proper place -- in museums and zoos.