Spice Mining on the Moon
Today’s planet-saving daydream
How about the opposite?
How about we stop trying to persuade oil-rich, oil-glutted, big-company fossil-fuel addicts to build windmills instead? How about we encourage them towards other sources of the spice melange — sorry, towards other sources of fuel?
There’s the moon; there are asteroids — maybe no fossils up there, but certainly fuel sources. Rare-earth minerals, probably, whatever they are. Precious metals. Stuff to burn. They could build refineries out in space, probably use our own satellite-rubbish for a while.
If you’ve read Dune (this is a spoiler for the book; not so much for the recent film), you’ll know that the spice melange underpins all commerce in the book’s universe — and it is produced exclusively on Arrakis, which gives weight to Paul’s threat to destroy it at source.
But if you read that spice-link in the first (second) paragraph, you’ll know that eventually, many years after the action in Dune, the spice melange is replicated off-planet.
Billionaires like going into space; why not oil-company bosses?
After all, the money’s there.
We’ve spent billions developing artificial intelligences that can’t be trusted to talk sense (as if intelligence is a matter of being fed lots of words), and we spend — well, probably billions — on transport projects that only make sense if you factor in long-term dependence on oil.
I’ve said before — why else keep mending all these roads?
Oh yes, to keep people employed. Well, just think of the number of employees an oil company would need — even just to build roadways on which to trundle rockets to their launch-pads.
I say we pack all the world’s oil-company bosses into rockets and tell them to keep going.
