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-Ch4s3- t1_j27mrj5 wrote

> hoard resources up there

What? Do you imagine them hoisting ton of gold bars into LEO? It's an awfully precarious place to try and sit out some instability, especially after recent demonstrations of satellite killing missiles.

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Brittainicus t1_j28b0uf wrote

You wouldn't even need missiles you just need to pick a hole suck all the air out. You could do this with a laser array from industrial laser cutters and a lot of optical lens to focus lasers. Additionally as the rich are just sitting ducks you would have many attempts to get it right.

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Robot_Basilisk t1_j2ahpr9 wrote

There's an asteroid in the belt between Mars and Jupiter with more gold than all that has ever been mined on Earth.

That will be mined and refined, possibly in orbit, and over time manufacturing will migrate into space to join them. The window in which we have to land resources on Earth to process it and relaunch it will be maybe 100 years after it starts.

Every raw resource on Earth you can think of exists in far greater quantities in space, between Earth and the belt. Water, iron, copper, silica, you name it. Only plants, animals, and petroleum are more abundant planetside than in space.

And, of course, they will heavily defend it, and they will crush any effort to threaten them from the surface of the planet.

And if you don't think every oligarch on Earth will be onboard, you haven't been paying attention to recent geopolitics and how the mega-rich in Russia, America, Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, even North Korea all play nice together.

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-Ch4s3- t1_j2ai0lx wrote

Who the fuck cares about the geopolitics of space mining in 200 years?

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