Business Perspective

 Let’s look at this from a business perspective.

The moons and asteroids and planets are not being looked at as a means of population control or distribution. They are being looked at from a monetary perspective. We want to go there to mine them for what ever we can find. Return on Investment (ROI) is the driving force behind our interplanetary surveys and explorations. Nationalistic pride and territorial expansion is secondary to resource extraction. The science studies being done are simply the precursor of making that possible.

No one wants to spend billions of dollars going somewhere just for the fun of it. We want something in return for the money we have spent and going off world costs hundreds of billions of dollars. Business people will try to profit and nations will try to expand their influence, that’s our human nature on full display.

To reap any profit or expand their influence, companies and governments will have to pay for research, technological development and the associated engineering, transportation, science studies and eventually colonial development. Any hope of ROI is not in the near future. It is at least decades or perhaps a few centuries away. The costs are enormous with little to no immediate return on investment.

The costs of setting up a colony are huge, and with the limited resources being diverted to colonial development to reap that ROI would likely prohibit the bringing of toys and the construction of large resource wasting homes.

The concept of resource extraction has one major flaw in its concept. If you are intending to mine only precious metals such as platinum, palladium and gold, where will your workers live while doing that. Other metals will need to be mined to have the materials to fabricate the workers living and working spaces. Those precious metals will need to be refined before they are sent back to Earth as the cost of sending raw ore would be prohibitive.

Refineries will have to be built; accommodations and equipment and life resources will have to be supplied; transportation will have to be bought and paid for and a completely new society will have to be developed to support just the mining industry. ROI will again, have to be postponed if you intend to make money off-world, and living the high  life won’t happen for centuries to come.

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