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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-Metal | ||
| Metal mined from asteroids. |
Sooner or later, humanity will need to go into space for more raw materials. The asteroid 16 Psyche is believed to contain enough iron-nickel ore to supply our annual needs for iron for about the next million years (it contains 1.7 times ten to the nineteenth kilograms).
| "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..."
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. |
| From The Mechanical Monarch,
by E.C. Tubb. Published by Ace Books in 1958 Additional resources -
|
I don't know who first suggested the idea of mining the asteroids. The idea appears in science fiction by 1946, if not earlier, in Love Among the Robots by Emmett McDowell.
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'The old woman laid her wire-knitting aside and fixed them with the bug-eyed, opaque gape...'
'The scope was adjusted to generate... an image of the lower section of the book.'
'They should be Welton Fine-Grains, or they would be too bulky to ship...'
'He imagined thousands on thousands of faces peering into yards, into alleys...'
Rather than nudge them up, nudge them down.
