Silicon Valley Billionaire To Alleviate Dire Rare Earth Metal Shortage By Unleashing Swarms of Autonomous Asteroid Mining Drones (Fiction)
September 2nd, 2030 Global News Network Inc
Gillian DeMarco Editor: Paul Cesaro
Today at the Vision 2030 International Astronautical Conference, Enon Truss, famous Silicon Valley billionaire who founded the aerospace giant, Solar Explorations (Sol-X) Inc, has announced his plans to mine the heavens using a swarm of autonomous space drones.
His announcement comes on the heels of a UN commission report warning that if the severe shortage of rare earth metals isn’t alleviated, our high tech AI-driven world economy, which depends heavily on those metals, would grind to a sudden and disastrous halt. Last week, UN Secretary General Yuen Luwai stated:
“Today, the industrialized nations of the world are engaged in an AI arms race in order to maintain a competitive edge in the economic, cultural and military spheres. To fall behind is to risk ceding the future to one’s rivals. Given the severe shortage of rare earth metals which are required to build and maintain our advanced AI-driven societies, and given that Africa contains the world’s only major deposits of such metals, we are likely to see another mad scramble to colonize this continent. For industrialized nations such as the United States and China, this is a matter of life or death.”
In response to this dire warning, Enon Truss said in his announcement:
“There’s a reason why we call these metals ‘rare earth’ metals. They’re rare. On Earth. In space, a single asteroid contains more of these metals than all of Earth’s deposits combined. So why do we need to fight over scraps when there’s literally a buffet of resources out there?”
Truss then unveiled his new company, Solar Resources, whose stated vision is to open up the heavens to human colonization.
“The cost of getting to space has dropped by a hundred fold over the past few decades, thanks in large part to the reusability of [Sol-X’s] rockets,” Truss said. “At the same time, the proliferation of AI tech has caused a massive spike in the price of rare Earth metals. It is now economically feasible to mine space.”
Truss then showed the audience a video of what he called ‘The Hive’ in action.
According to Truss, the Hive would operate just like a beehive. A ‘queen’ aboard the main hive ship would direct worker drones to survey the asteroid belt for valuable minerals, including water which could be electrolyzed to produce propellant fuel. Worker drones would then create a map of the asteroid belt, relay this information back to the Hive, and begin mining.
The Hive would be capable of replenishing the drones that it loses through attrition. The Hive would employ 3D printing to print out replacement parts for the drones. Complex nano-scale structures such as computer chips could be mass produced autonomously using organo-litho synthesis. Organo-litho synthesis, in layman’s terms, means creating inorganic structures using living organisms. While this may sound like something out of science fiction, the human body, or any other vertebrate for that matter, does this naturally. Skeletons are an example of organo-litho synthesis wherein living cells create an inorganic metal lattice structure that we call bones. Advances in genetic engineering have made it possible to program stem cells to create highly complex inorganic structures such as computer chips.
Truss ended his announcement on an optimistic note:
“Sol-X opened up the space frontier. Solar Resources will industrialize it. By the year 2050, we will see cities on the moon, on Mars, on Titan, on Europa, and on Enceladus. No corner of the Solar System will be beyond our reach. We will become a truly space-faring civilization.”
The above is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons, places or events are entirely coincidental.
This article is part of an ongoing 'Onion-style' news posts where I will provide the backstory to my novel, Red Eden: Homeworld Bound. If the backstory has you intrigued, please support me by clicking here and purchasing my novel on Amazon.com.
Cheers!
Michael E. Vigil