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"It is change ... that is the dominant factor in society today... the world as it will be. This means that ... every man must take on a science fictional way of thinking.""
- Isaac Asimov
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| Asteroid Mine | ||
| The practice of seeking out and mining asteroids for their ore. |
This is a relatively early reference; I'm looking for earlier ones.
| Sofi Jokai had been operating her wildcat uranium mine on a shoestring before Robots Incorporated approached her with their proposition...
Beyond the laboratory, a somewhat larger igloo housed the mine shaft, reduction plant and tipple. A dilapidated tramp freighter sprawled beside the tipple like a foundered whale. |
| From Love Among The Robots,
by Emmett McDowell. Published by Planet Stories in 1946 Additional resources -
|
By the way, a "tipple" is the device used to tip over mining carts to get them to disgorge their contents in a particular place.
Here is another quote from The Mechanical Monarch, a 1958 novel by E.C. Tubb; the speakers on in a Martian colony.
Lars raised himself on one elbow. "As things are now we depend on Earth to buy our asteroid-metal and supply things we can't do without.
Is asteroid mining a useful idea? Think about it this way; in 2004, one billion metric tons of iron ore were mined. Just one M-type asteroid with a mean diameter of one kilometer contains about 2 billion tons of nickel-iron ore.
A significant number of asteroids are believed to be extinct comets. If that is true, mining these 'comet' asteroids would yield significant amounts of water.
The earliest reference I know about can be found in the 1898 novel Edison's Conquest of Mars - see asteroid mining.
"We can get our water from the pole, our food from the yeast vats, our building materials from the oxidized minerals in the sand... We can even fuel the space ships and mine the Asteroid Belt for rare metals..."
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'The prototype blue-bellied, gray-backed tracer-bird with the wide-angle eye...'
'See Vee Threepio - Vee for versatility - at your service...'
'Three and a half centimetres in diameter, permanently fixed in the centre of his forehead.'
"They were half way home when a single flyer, hopping free in a copter harness, approached the little parade."
'...moving with such drifting ease that it was like a single solid cloud of black-grey smoke blown at him in silence.' Almost.
