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Comment by opwieurposiu | Hacker News Reader

It is crazy that there are trillions of dollars worth of these nodules laying around just waiting for someone to pick them up.

Congrats to the team that made this work.

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Fantastic work by the team in taking the wonderful things mining has done for the planet and expanding it to the oceans! I'm sure once we've had our way with the ocean and left almost nothing to live that we can find a way to live harmoniously with what remains.

There truly is nowhere left for nature to hide.

How do you feel about asteroid mining?

A matter of time until someone (whether negligently or maliciously) screws up the orbital insertion of a packet of minerals or a whole-ass asteroid. "Oops"

And it will undoubtedly happen because an american company, after lobbying for fewer regulations, will fail to do the right or necessary thing like "testing their systems" or "being fail safe"

Ideally, not that much material would be returned to Earth from asteroids, and certainly not "whole-ass" asteroids themselves. They would be kept far from an Earth-crossing orbit and mined in some safe orbit for their valuable minerals, and then a lot of those would probably be used in space, such as on the Moon, for constructing manufacturing facilities there.

Ultimately, we should be trying to move a lot of our "dirty" industries offworld, to places where no one cares much about keeping pristine and where nothing lives.

But yeah, The Expanse showed what happens when 1 jerk plays around with asteroid orbits...

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