Remedy Mine!

Summary: A consortium of billionaires, including Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, and filmmaker/explorer James Cameron, have announced a new venture to mine near Earth asteroids!

Why it's a Mind Blow: I'm so excited about this, I don't know where to begin! Sending robots to mine asteroids seems like serious science fiction. But the necessary technology exists, at least theoretically. And if anyone can get the job done, I'd put my money behind the Google boys.

This is not a pipe dream. The money has been invested, telescopes are being deployed next year, and actual surveys could begin within seven years! They're doing this!

Now you may be saying to yourself, "great, we've exploited the Earth and now we're going to let our greed run wild on the solar system." Well, allow me to turn that frown upside down. I am no fan of unchecked capitalism, and if the Chinese government were behind this project, I'd be worried. But the group of investors who are planning this undertaking are visionaries. Yes, there's a healthy profit to be made, but the benefits to mankind as a whole may be equally as rich.

The plan would be to focus on the extraction of platinum-group metals and water. The rare-earth metals are used in batteries, medical devices, and have several applications for renewable energy sources, like fuel-cell vehicles. An effective harvest in space could pour trillions of dollars into the global economy. This is a revenue stream that simply doesn't exist on Earth. It's new money, and it could be one of the key factors in eliminating deep poverty once and for all!

Now, about the water, and this is truly thrilling. Why water? Well, the water can be split into liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen and refined into, you guessed it, rocket fuel. This can all be done in space, and the rocket fuel can supply "orbital fuel stations". Manned missions to Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn in our lifetimes would be difficult for a number of reasons, but one of the chief hurdles is the amount of fuel it requires. Liquid fuel is heavy on Earth (thanks gravity) and lifting it into space is expensive and inefficient. Having fuel waiting in orbit opens up an whole new realm of possibility for the exploration of our solar system. And that, my friends, is mind-blowing!

Source: The first link is to the article from The Guardian newspaper, and the second is a nice interactive graphic that explains what the mining operation might actually look like.

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/24/tech-tycoons-asteroid-mining-venture?INTCMP=SRCH

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/interactive/2012/apr/24/asteroid-mining-how-work-interactive?INTCMP=SRCH