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"I have a standard axiom: all governments lie. Don't believe anything they say. And corporations are only kinds of government."
- Frank Herbert
 |
| 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. |
| Technovelgy 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 (or sometimes the place) 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.
Compare to asteroid mining from Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898) by Garrett P. Serviss,
asteroid mining (blasting) from Asteroid of Gold (1932) by Clifford Simak, the
meteor miner from Salvage in Space (1933) by Jack Williamson,
asteroid claim law from Jurisdiction (1941) by Nat Schachner,
space placers from The Day We Celebrate (1941) by Nelson S. Bond, the
asteroid mining robot from Catch That Rabbit (1944) by Isaac Asimov, the coal mole from The Web Between the Worlds (1979) by Charles Sheffield, and
asteroid metal from The Mechanical Monarch (1958) by E.C. Tubb.
"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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Additional
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More Ideas
and Technology from Love Among The Robots
More Ideas
and Technology by Emmett McDowell
Tech news articles related to Love Among The Robots
Tech news articles related to works by Emmett McDowell
| The New Habitable Zones Include Asimov's Ribbon Worlds |
| Will Space Stations Have Large Interior Spaces Again? |
| Reflect Orbital Offers 'Sunlight on Demand' And Light Pollution |
| Chrysalis Generation Ship to Alpha Centauri |
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'...each of them is a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk who actually lived.'
'...there's a narrow belt where the climate is moderate.'
'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain, through the mediation of the electronic brain in the leg.'
'... every veephone on the continent would display, over and over, two propositions.'
'Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty meters. No recoil...'
'He wore spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.'
