Isn't rare earth metals mining insanely pollutive? I've heard they can be found all over the world but only China mines them massively because nobody else is willing to destroy their ecology.
Surely most electronic devices are recyclable as far as the metallic parts are concerned.
> The Norwegian company has developed an innovative and sustainable technology to separate rare earth metals that can compete with China's dominating production of these materials, the LKAB press release reads.
https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/norwegian-swedish-cooperati...
The Earth is unique and precious, but the vast out there - we cannot do our worst even if we tried.
So does every other living thing, in fact. It's not like every animal and plant is a nature conservationist and humans are the mindless exploiters - it's actually the other way around. We talk about restraining ourselves because, unlike the rest of the nature, we can choose to be selfless, or at least thing longer-term and at ecosystem scale.
Also, you're absolutely correct. Earth is a gem. Everything else in space we know of is just rocks and deserts and clumps of gases. And there's so much of it that we aren't going to make a dent even if we rode the exponential growth for a while longer.
Meanwhile asteroids are completely uninhabited and dead, and there's millions of them. They have all the same minerals the Earth has, and often much closer to the surface. We could even just mine a few and easily replace all the destructive mining on Earth.
1. How do you get astrominers there and back safely and on a regular basis whilst still keeping costs down?
2. What would it cost to keep your astrominers well fed and rested in a comfortable environment (warm, enough water, entertainment, etc)
3. How much more in bonuses (danger of hazard, long way from home, etc) do you even have to pay an astrominer vs a terraminer?
4. Most mines have some form of processing on site, e.g. break down rocks and sift through shit. How do you get those massive machines up there on the cheap and service them frequently on the cheap? Do we even have the machines that can work in those conditions?
5. Gravity is weak on the moon, I can imagine rocks of considerable mass flying or tumbling about being an issue. Sifting doesn't work as it does on earth without normal gravity and abundant water.
6. etc. etc. etc.?
I mean I think it'd be cool if we could pull it off as a civilisation but I just can't imagine how out there in scope and complexity moon mining would be.
But I think mining asteroids will be easier than mining the moon. Because on asteroids, everything is right at the surface. There's an asteroid that seems to be just the nickel-iron core of a former planet. That's more nickel and iron than you could ever hope to mine on Earth, and there's no planet around it.
Mining the earth is of course the easiest, because we're already there and there's no space travel or vacuum involved. But it's also very destructive, and once you tackle the space travel and zero-g mining issues, I think asteroid mining is going to be way more profitable. As well as saving our planet.
But the advantage of asteroids is that everything is at the surface.
Also not all minerals are so evenly spread. For example, it's estimated that half of all cobalt reserves is in little old Democratic Republic of the Congo
Of course. Everyone knows that rare-earth metal extraction involves ugly, environmentally destructive strip mining, and the metals themselves are primarily used to build components for first-world toys and gadgets, such as electronics and batteries in mobile phones, computers, or electric cars.
In contrast, gold, silver, platinum and diamonds are extracted through perfectly ordinary environmentally destructive strip mining, and they have important applications such as jewelry, tax evasion and more jewelry, much of it critical to important industries such as the wedding industry.
So why would anyone want a "real" diamond these days? Engagement/wedding ring is just not the same if it's made without spilling some poor African's blood or something?
In what world? NGOs, academics, journalists, and non-profits have been speaking out about these and the blood diamond industries around them for decades at least
> Gold mining is one of the most destructive industries in the world. It can displace communities, contaminate drinking water, hurt workers, and destroy pristine environments
https://earthworks.org/issues/environmental-impacts-of-gold-...
> Most silver production results in large emissions of mercury to air, soil, and water. Where silver is extracted by small-scale miners, large quantities of mercury are used, resulting in large health and environmental damages.
http://www.env-health.org/IMG/pdf/silver_fact_sheet.pdf
> The mining, metal extraction and beneficiation phases are accompanied by air and water pollution, the generation of solid waste deposited on tailings dams and waste rock stockpiles, the abstraction of vast quantities of water and the use of huge quantities of energy
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223232620_The_envir...
> Mineral resource exploitation also causes irreversible damage to the natural environment including deforestation, soil disturbance, air emissions, surface water pollution, groundwater contamination, dust, noise, workplace health and safety, and others.
http://www.imperial-consultants.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/202...
I really doubt more people are aware/making noise about rare earth minerals as they have been about the impacts of the sort of mining used to get gold, silver, etc
Criticizing gold and diamond mining isn't uncommon. A popular example coming to mind is the "Dirty Money" Netflix documentary series (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11947154/). The existence of "Blood diamonds" is also a pretty commonly known fact.
> But somehow these days everyone likes to think that they know that rare earth metals are "the devil".
Many years ago people also thought smoking is healthy and asbestos are a great material to use in construction.
That there's an ongoing movement with common people and the media, almost a fashion, of yapping about the perils of lithium extraction from ore, despite most of it coming from brine evaporation.
"Criticizing gold and diamond mining isn't uncommon."
Yeah it is.
Source: 7,596,400,000 pennies made @ 2.5g each divided by 12.1Mt worldwide zinc production.