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James Cameron to Mine Asteroids?

Well this has plenty of people excited: the impending announcement (April 24) of “a new space venture with a mission to help ensure humanity’s prosperity”.

Supported by an impressive investor and advisor group, including Google’s Larry Page & Eric Schmidt, Ph.D.; film maker & explorer James Cameron; Chairman of Intentional Software Corporation and Microsoft’s former Chief Software Architect Charles Simonyi, Ph.D.; Founder of Sherpalo and Google Board of Directors founding member K. Ram Shriram; and Chairman of Hillwood and The Perot Group Ross Perot, Jr., the company will overlay two critical sectors – space exploration and natural resources – to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP. This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of ‘natural resources’.

Given the “new definition of ‘natural resources'” line, and the involvement of Peter Diamiandis, many have speculated that the venture will be the beginnings of an asteroid mining project. Diamandis mentioned the economic viability of mining asteroids as being a chief motivator for future space exploration:

You think about these other asteroids, there’s a class of Nickel-Iron, which in Platinum Group metal markets alone, are worth something like $20 trillion, if you can go out and grab one of these rocks. My plan is to buy puts on the precious metal market,
and then to claim that I’m going to go out and get one, and that will fund the actual mission to go and get one.

Looking forward to the big reveal on April 24.

Editor
  1. Pandora’s Box opened in 3… 2… 1…
    [quote=Alan Boyle]If private ventures start building settlements and factories on the moon, on Mars or on asteroids, someone may also have to build a new legal framework for the exploitation of those extraterrestrial resources. Experts on both sides of the debate over property rights on other worlds agree that the current rules may not cover the challenges that could crop up on other worlds.[/quote]

    Read the rest @ Cosmic Log.

    Personally, I think this is the sort of complex legal scenarios that will finally prompt private companies to declare themselves as independent bodies unbound by any national affiliation whatsoever –you just put your HQ in one of those asteroids 😉

    1. Junkie Ain’t Talkin’ Junk!
      Junkie – you ain’t talkin’ junk!

      They’re already selling real estate on artificial islands capable of moving into international water with the USP the law won’t apply to their inhabitants.

      Ditto corporations’re already developing their own private armies/security and intel services.

      Even all the global warming type disasters lying ahead’re viewed as potential culling mechanisms to remove none-useful eaters and free up the world for the meritocrats.

  2. Max Keiser From Mars Vs the Insurers from Uranus
    Oh boy I can see rip off scams galore ahead here.

    People being sold cdos which’ll make it sound like they’re buying into trillion dollar slices of every asteroid out there only to find out they’ve somehow incurred the cost – the debt – involved in identifying and tagging these things but somehow all the riches’ll end up in the vendors pockets because by some extraordinary coicidence they were so lucky as to be the only ones with the only shares in the only asteroids with ‘suitably’ exploitable mineral wealth.

    Then there’ll be the costcutting cowboy operations which’ll try to corral these things on the cheap and accidentally smack them into the Moon – incurring more insurance pay out consequences for the cdo holders – or even touch downs in the desert lands of Nevada which’ll turn into Apocalypse Las Vegas.

    A few people in the know’ll get extraordinarily rich enough to build palaces in space – the rest of us’ll get to play Asteroids with real asteroids and real population extinctions.

    And all the time the insurance companies’ll be making out like bandits.

  3. Economics
    Wouldn’t introducing 20 trillion dollars of metal into the economy kinda devastate it? There’s no way a money influx that great could be good. And this is ignoring how this whole thing sounds like a tremendous scam.

  4. from the Wratched-Watchers-Dept.
    i look forward to tasting water from a comet and ice cream (take snow, add some vanilla for flavouring and some cocoa and MMMMM)

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