We are at the point where expanded space technologies are becoming viable, but not feasible. Its progress, but media science tech articles do a really shitty job of over-promising, or rather leaving out the unexciting details. And tech journals don't become popular if they aren't vague enough to allow people to imagine a few details for themselves. It wouldn't be nearly as interesting to read if it had a forewarning that the topic of the article has been proposed, it'll finally be built in 10 years, and may be able to be produced in 30 years.
I don't have specific numbers to back it up, but I'd be willing to bet that it isn't feasible to transport gold back to earth, even without any labor. Just the transportation costs alone would be a few times the cost of the precious metals. Robot space mining makes a really cool scifi story, but when we do get around to it, it'll probably be for the purpose of getting water, rather than metals.
If you click the link and read the paper, it's actually all the numbers to show it's feasible, and practical.
This isn't a link to a news site, but directly to a research paper.
I read a few pages up to the point where the plan was done being laid out, and resident expert on drone asteroid mining, Bill Gates was referenced. I figure at that point, its filler.
I'm disagreeing, and qualifying the paper as the type that leaves out the unexciting details. It may be theoretically possible, but it leaves out some inconvenient details like how far out the time frame would be to make it possible. In its credit, it does mention that they expect it'll take 2-4 decades to actually put into place once the international community comes together on it. But it doesn't provide a time frame for creating the technologies needed to do it in the first place. The concepts may exist, but if you don't have the machinery on earth to reliably manufacture the parts you need to get your project going, you need to wait for the manufacturing capacity to exist. If the leaders were convinced today, would it take 20-40 years to produce? Or 80 years, 40 to setup the manufacturing, and 40 to get it launched. People get a lot less interested in projects when they are more than 1 lifespan out. As someone who has written papers that are supposed to be technically factually accurate, but still pandering to people to gain support, its written like a template.
I'm not really blaming them, you have to do it. I just don't get excited by things like this, because I don't care about things more than one lifespan out.
