Working on a near future hard sci fi story. What are plausible economic reasons to have a fair number of space stations? (generally earth orbit but can be further out)
Arthur Clarke’s idea of reduced gravity prolonging significantly human life. Sadly, the available evidence does not quite point in this direction. But for a sci-fi story it might be quite OK (e.g. it is discovered that microgravity prevents Alzheimers’).
You’re writing fiction, make it up :-) Off the top of my head, metals and alloys crystallize differently in microgravity. It’s also easy to make perfect spheres. I’m sure that googling microgravity technology will give you further leads.
From what I’ve seen the ISS is doing very interesting work on plasma physics in space due to having free high-vacuum available and the ability to inject highly-visible tracer particles into a plasma chamber which don’t settle out, this also allowing interesting mixed particulate/plasma states.
As far as application for crystallization goes, protein scanning needs the proteins in crystallized form. If someone would have a way to crystalize arbitrary proteins in zero-g that would be very valuable.
It would be fun to have corporations build space stations, ostensibly for technological benefits, but not disclosing details, so that your question would remain unanswered inside the story.
Space factories for spaceship. It’s much cheaper to build something heavy in space and have them launch from there. Of course you would have to mine asteroids instead of sending construction materials from the Earth.
Security concerns. If you want to test some form of nanotechnology, you better do that in space and nuclearize the whole thing (provided that nanotech is still extremely dangerous).
MIS (millionaires in space): once you live in outer space as a status signal, it’s easier to befriend other rich weirdos in space.
You still need a strong economic reason for the spaceships if we’re looking at a scarcity society with plausible tech. (Unless there’s enough public and political will for exploration for its own sake which would rquire its own explanation)
Not an expert, but my understanding (from reading Heinlein, and I think other sources) is that it’s hard to dissipate heat in space, because there’s nothing to conduct it away.
In space you can only dissipate heat by radiation. In an atmosphere you can also transfer excess heat into matter that you can carry away and dump elsewhere, using conduction, convection, and forced circulation.
For a concrete example, consider Google’s average 2011 power consumption of 258MW. What happens if they do all that in a huge server farm in space? Assume the exterior is a perfect black body and the interior is a perfect thermal conductor.
From the Stefan-Boltzmann law, for the equilibrium surface temperature to be at the boiling point of water, the surface area must be 235000 sq.m., or the area of a sphere of diameter 387m. Alternatively, if it was a large flat shape, edge-on to the Sun, it could be a 350m square.
Increasing the surface area with lots of large parallel fins, like on a heatsink, only works when immersed in a thermally conductive circulating medium. In space, the fins just block each others’ view, and the effective radiative area is that of the convex hull.
But we could change that slightly (?): what about process that produces an enormous amount of radiation? In space you can just dump those pesky photons in the backyard, while on Earth there’s always someone that owns this or that piece of land.
The point we are missing is means of dissipation. In space it’s impossible to dissipate through convection, while it’s very easy to dissipate through radiation.
A space station would roast star-side and freeze in the opposite direction.
At the moment asteroid mining is one of the best. Quantifies of various rare metals are limited on earth and we have companies working on making asteroid mining a reality.
Earth has laws that prevent certain economic transactions from happening. Various biotech and genetic engineering projects might get outlawed on earth. Human cloning that happens in space stations might make for an interesting story.
There might be nanotech that needs very high precision. Today an electron microscope is effected by a train braking a few kilometers away.
Nanotech could allow you to build cheap very big mirrors that redirect solar energy from one point to another. If you bundle it enough you could have a laser weapon that takes very little time to hit targets.
The energy from the mirrors could also be used for electricity generation. On earth but also maybe on Mars.
If you want a cargo to pass through customs it might be enough to bribe a single official.
On the other hand if you are doing something where a lot of people have knowledge of your illegal activity, preventing action can be more complicated.
With todays Russia you are right.
As far as China goes, I think there are cases where you aren’t.
China might outlaw companies that sell gender selection for babies in a way that isn’t easily fought by monetary bribes. China in contrast to the US throws corrupt politicians into prison when it’s in the interest of the party.
On the other hand scify isn’t out todays world. It’s about a future in which most of the powerful states could have functioning political systems that aren’t easily bribed. Third world countries where you can bribe officials might have little power and be subject to the dictates of the powerful countries.
(If not clear from the choice of ‘status competition’ as the most plausible economic reason, I think that all reasonable economic activity in space will not involve humans in space.)
The high cost of access could well be the point : if you can easily hire a boat to get to your private island, it’s pretty simple for governments or peoples to do the same, club you, and take your stuff. A hundred thousand bucks would cover invading you, and make good return on investment.
By contrast, you’d have to have something of very high value to cover a rocket launch, and that something must be mobile enough to send down easily. (Or in extreme cases, you might be the only people who retain full knowledge of the manufacturing necessary to make the rockets, in some way that isn’t easy to reverse engineer—see the difficulty we have reproducing several engine designs as a guide here.)
True, albeit in a way that is still costly, unlikely to leave an identifiable corpse, and prone to retributory violence. Depends on what sort of heroes and villains you’re looking to write.
Space stations?As in, stations with humans in them? Pretty much none. Your best bet is to postulate some sort of alternate history in which electronics and computers never took off. Or you can go in the other direction, and postulate tiny space stations which house computing hardware running uploaded humans.
As others mentioned: mining, special manufacturing exploiting microgravity.
A lot of competition and innovation in the area of data transfer protocols and encryption and localization and espionage increasing the need for engineers that can build, test and maintain new communications directly from orbit, which is cheaper than launching prototype after prototype.
A fad for having a marriage and honeymoon in space, making luxury space hotels commercially viable.
Companies having headquarters in space as the ultimate signal. Especially if it gives them an advantageous legal environment.
China wanting to outshine the US, so heavily subsidizing the stuff above for it’s citizens / companies.
Space junk becoming enough of a problem that specialized repair and disposal jobs become viable, mostly financed by the satellite insurance companies.
Some of the things above increasing the number of space flights, and so decreasing prices and making a few more uses become viable.
I don’t think that’s meant to refer to a world without electricity, just keeping computers at 1950s-60s sizes and efficiencies. The linked page describes “rocketpunk” further up, and it’s quite different from steampunk.
Can confirm. I meant a rocketpunk setting in which combustion engines and simple vacuum tube electronics work, but human operators are still required to run space stations capable of monitoring the weather, handling international communications, or spying on enemy countries.
As others mentioned: mining, special manufacturing exploiting microgravity.
A lot of competition and innovation in the area of data transfer protocols and encryption and localization and espionage increasing the need for engineers that can build, test and maintain new communications directly from orbit, which is cheaper than launching prototype after prototype.
A fad for having a marriage and honeymoon in space, making luxury space hotels commercially viable.
Companies having headquarters in space as the ultimate signal. Especially if it gives them an advantageous legal environment.
China wanting to outshine the US, so heavily subsidizing the stuff above for it’s citizens / companies.
Space junk becoming enough of a problem that specialized repair and disposal jobs become viable, mostly financed by the satellite insurance companies.
Some of the things above increasing the number of space flights, and so decreasing prices and making a few more uses become viable.
Manned ones? . I can think of reasons to have lots and lots of industry and science in space, but reasons to have lots of bodies up there is harder....
Uhm. Someone develops a launch mechanism that is very, very cheap for small and durable components. - Railgun-to-orbit kind of deal. This necessitates assembly in-orbit of anything that doesn’t fit inside a launch-shell, but also drives down the cost of keeping labor up there alive way down because water, air and food fit just fine. Result: Big boom in space activity, lots of engineers and master craftsmen in low earth orbit building probes, space radio telescopes and so on.
Not really a reason, but if you postulate that the cost goes down dramatically (to the cost of an average car or something, relatively speaking), then you may have more reasons to work with.
At least a tiny bit plausible? The same sort of legislation that made renewable energy profitable in some countries. That is, huge taxes on earthbound industry and big subsidies for spacebound.
Alternately, artist colony for the next generation of super-wealthy artists like Damien Hearst (spelling?) need to go for “artistic inspiration” (scare quotes due to Hansonian signling).
I know whenever I don’t need the second monitor at my desk at work or are at the lab bench next to said desk, I always put the perpetual ISS livestream on...
The fact that bombarding lithium with neutrons produces tritium that decays into helium 3 (this reaction is actually responsible for a good fraction of the yield of many fusion warheads, see Castle Bravo). And the helium 3 on the moon is A—on the moon, B—of such a low concentration that the total thermal energy possible to get from fusion of absolutely all the He3 present per cubic meter of the top foot or so of lunar soil is about a quarter that of the worst lignite coal on Earth. And lignite requires a hell of a lot less energy and infrastructure per unit mass to process. By my calculations, given the heat capacity of the minerals it has been blasted into by the solar wind, you need to use at least half that energy on site just to heat the rocks to the point it gets driven off as a vapor. Then there’s all the movement of mass, purifying it down non-terrestrially from all kinds of other vapor, ridiculous launch costs… its not happening.
I’ve seen claims in several internet sources, a video documentary and the Wikipedia article that some countries have had plans to mine helium-3 on the moon. I wonder if the reporting is incompetent or if the plans are made by incompetent optimists if what you’re saying is true. How did this meme originate?
For what it’s worth, I just redid my calculations with the best figures I could find.
The comparison of energy density to lignite was just about the same as the calculations I remembered doing a year or two ago—average thermal energy density assuming complete fusion of the He3 present in lunar soil of about 6 megajoules per kilogram, as compared to 15 or so for average lignite. I found references to speculation that at the edges of cold traps where sunlight never falls near where the sunlight makes it you might have levels six or seven times that.
Something was apparently wrong with my old heat capacity calculations, though. The heating of crustal minerals by 300 kelvin or so would only take about a quarter of a megajoule per kilogram. Though that’s still a twelfth the thermal energy used in ONE step at point-of-intake assuming perfect capture and efficiency, and at least a quarter of the extractable energy you could get out of a heat engine driven by such a reaction. Regardless of the particular numbers, the mere fact that it’s going after an energy source several times less dense than the worst of the fossil fuels on another planet, requiring infrastructure that has not been invented for both extraction and energy-production, has often made me wonder why the meme persists.
Nobody has plans (in business meaning of term) to mine helium-3 on Moon. This idea was first proposed by Gerald Kulcinski in 1989. He gave very optimistic predictions regarging D-He3 fusion, underestimated cost of lunar mining and ignored possibility of specialized reactors for producing He3. Since then idea is pushed by space advocates.
I’m not sure if he meant the Earth’s orbit around the Sun or a geocentric orbit. I assumed the latter, the moon is there and supposedly has a lot of helium-3.
You could have human-crewed vehicles in orbit around various planets, tele-operating and managing things on their surfaces with much faster turnaround time than lightspeed delay to Earth. Depending on what’s been found and what’s being teleoperated, that could be worthwhile—consider the fact that our big $2 billion Mars rover moves something like 30 meters per day because with a 10+ minute turnaround time for signals, it’s doing nothing most of the time since they want to make sure that everything it does is something they can recover from if something goes wrong and they don’t know about it for fifteen minutes.
A valid reason would be the scarcity of resources. Further technological progress will be severely constrained by which chemical elements are available cheaply and which are not. Lots of interesting and useful chemical elements are not available in sufficiently concentrated ores, or they are rare in all of earth’s crust, having sunken down inside earth’s core during its formation.
These elements thusly are produced only as by-products of other elements which are more concentrated in their ores. This is valid not only for most of the lanthanides, but also for elements like indium, tellurium, gallium, germanium and the platinum group metals.
Asteroids might hold rich deposits of these elements because the elements could not sink down into their cores, and even if they did, most asteroids are small enough.
So if we don’t want to substitute that indium tin oxide in our smartphone touchscreens with cheaper elements, we’ll have to mine asteroids.
Edit²: Here’s a relevant review article (Vesborg, Jaramillo 2012)
Working on a near future hard sci fi story. What are plausible economic reasons to have a fair number of space stations? (generally earth orbit but can be further out)
Arthur Clarke’s idea of reduced gravity prolonging significantly human life. Sadly, the available evidence does not quite point in this direction. But for a sci-fi story it might be quite OK (e.g. it is discovered that microgravity prevents Alzheimers’).
Even though it could make for an interesting story, I would be very wary of making up scientific facts that future research may render obsolete.
Highly valuable technological processes that only work in zero g.
Such as?
You’re writing fiction, make it up :-) Off the top of my head, metals and alloys crystallize differently in microgravity. It’s also easy to make perfect spheres. I’m sure that googling microgravity technology will give you further leads.
From what I’ve seen the ISS is doing very interesting work on plasma physics in space due to having free high-vacuum available and the ability to inject highly-visible tracer particles into a plasma chamber which don’t settle out, this also allowing interesting mixed particulate/plasma states.
http://www.nasa.gov/content/space-station-illuminates-dusty-plasmas-for-a-wide-range-of-research/stationresearch/#.VFo2yoWxt2M
As far as application for crystallization goes, protein scanning needs the proteins in crystallized form. If someone would have a way to crystalize arbitrary proteins in zero-g that would be very valuable.
It would be fun to have corporations build space stations, ostensibly for technological benefits, but not disclosing details, so that your question would remain unanswered inside the story.
I’ve heard you can make LEDs slightly brighter. I don’t think that would cause it, but it does give some idea that this is plausible.
Space factories for spaceship. It’s much cheaper to build something heavy in space and have them launch from there. Of course you would have to mine asteroids instead of sending construction materials from the Earth.
Security concerns. If you want to test some form of nanotechnology, you better do that in space and nuclearize the whole thing (provided that nanotech is still extremely dangerous).
MIS (millionaires in space): once you live in outer space as a status signal, it’s easier to befriend other rich weirdos in space.
You still need a strong economic reason for the spaceships if we’re looking at a scarcity society with plausible tech. (Unless there’s enough public and political will for exploration for its own sake which would rquire its own explanation)
Huge computing facility! It’s easier to dissipate heat in space.
Not an expert, but my understanding (from reading Heinlein, and I think other sources) is that it’s hard to dissipate heat in space, because there’s nothing to conduct it away.
But isn’t space like a heat bath at −273° C? I think there’s a finer point one or both of us is missing.
Cooling is much easier on the ground.
In space you can only dissipate heat by radiation. In an atmosphere you can also transfer excess heat into matter that you can carry away and dump elsewhere, using conduction, convection, and forced circulation.
For a concrete example, consider Google’s average 2011 power consumption of 258MW. What happens if they do all that in a huge server farm in space? Assume the exterior is a perfect black body and the interior is a perfect thermal conductor.
From the Stefan-Boltzmann law, for the equilibrium surface temperature to be at the boiling point of water, the surface area must be 235000 sq.m., or the area of a sphere of diameter 387m. Alternatively, if it was a large flat shape, edge-on to the Sun, it could be a 350m square.
Increasing the surface area with lots of large parallel fins, like on a heatsink, only works when immersed in a thermally conductive circulating medium. In space, the fins just block each others’ view, and the effective radiative area is that of the convex hull.
Bummer!
But we could change that slightly (?): what about process that produces an enormous amount of radiation? In space you can just dump those pesky photons in the backyard, while on Earth there’s always someone that owns this or that piece of land.
High-intensity computing generates waste heat, though. You can’t turn waste heat into directed energy within the laws of thermodynamics.
The point we are missing is means of dissipation. In space it’s impossible to dissipate through convection, while it’s very easy to dissipate through radiation.
A space station would roast star-side and freeze in the opposite direction.
At the moment asteroid mining is one of the best. Quantifies of various rare metals are limited on earth and we have companies working on making asteroid mining a reality.
Earth has laws that prevent certain economic transactions from happening. Various biotech and genetic engineering projects might get outlawed on earth. Human cloning that happens in space stations might make for an interesting story.
There might be nanotech that needs very high precision. Today an electron microscope is effected by a train braking a few kilometers away.
Nanotech could allow you to build cheap very big mirrors that redirect solar energy from one point to another. If you bundle it enough you could have a laser weapon that takes very little time to hit targets. The energy from the mirrors could also be used for electricity generation. On earth but also maybe on Mars.
Wouldn’t it be easier to bribe officials.
If you want a cargo to pass through customs it might be enough to bribe a single official. On the other hand if you are doing something where a lot of people have knowledge of your illegal activity, preventing action can be more complicated.
Depends on the country you are doing this in. Some place like China or Russia it shouldn’t be too hard.
With todays Russia you are right. As far as China goes, I think there are cases where you aren’t.
China might outlaw companies that sell gender selection for babies in a way that isn’t easily fought by monetary bribes. China in contrast to the US throws corrupt politicians into prison when it’s in the interest of the party.
On the other hand scify isn’t out todays world. It’s about a future in which most of the powerful states could have functioning political systems that aren’t easily bribed. Third world countries where you can bribe officials might have little power and be subject to the dictates of the powerful countries.
The other country’s is slightly bigger.
(If not clear from the choice of ‘status competition’ as the most plausible economic reason, I think that all reasonable economic activity in space will not involve humans in space.)
Extremely wealthy libertarian seperatists.
Assuming there is still land available on earth it would be orders of magnitude cheaper to stay groundside.
The high cost of access could well be the point : if you can easily hire a boat to get to your private island, it’s pretty simple for governments or peoples to do the same, club you, and take your stuff. A hundred thousand bucks would cover invading you, and make good return on investment.
By contrast, you’d have to have something of very high value to cover a rocket launch, and that something must be mobile enough to send down easily. (Or in extreme cases, you might be the only people who retain full knowledge of the manufacturing necessary to make the rockets, in some way that isn’t easy to reverse engineer—see the difficulty we have reproducing several engine designs as a guide here.)
It may be hard to rob you, but easy to shoot you down.
True, albeit in a way that is still costly, unlikely to leave an identifiable corpse, and prone to retributory violence. Depends on what sort of heroes and villains you’re looking to write.
And it would be cheaper not to live on Sealand, I bet, but people still do it.
Space stations? As in, stations with humans in them? Pretty much none. Your best bet is to postulate some sort of alternate history in which electronics and computers never took off. Or you can go in the other direction, and postulate tiny space stations which house computing hardware running uploaded humans.
Interesting site.
Human mainteance is still required for satellites, especially if geostationary is becoming even more crowded,
As others mentioned: mining, special manufacturing exploiting microgravity.
A lot of competition and innovation in the area of data transfer protocols and encryption and localization and espionage increasing the need for engineers that can build, test and maintain new communications directly from orbit, which is cheaper than launching prototype after prototype.
A fad for having a marriage and honeymoon in space, making luxury space hotels commercially viable.
Companies having headquarters in space as the ultimate signal. Especially if it gives them an advantageous legal environment.
China wanting to outshine the US, so heavily subsidizing the stuff above for it’s citizens / companies.
Space junk becoming enough of a problem that specialized repair and disposal jobs become viable, mostly financed by the satellite insurance companies.
Some of the things above increasing the number of space flights, and so decreasing prices and making a few more uses become viable.
Please, no. The world already has a sickening amount of steampunk.
Does it now? Care to recommend some?
I don’t think that’s meant to refer to a world without electricity, just keeping computers at 1950s-60s sizes and efficiencies. The linked page describes “rocketpunk” further up, and it’s quite different from steampunk.
Can confirm. I meant a rocketpunk setting in which combustion engines and simple vacuum tube electronics work, but human operators are still required to run space stations capable of monitoring the weather, handling international communications, or spying on enemy countries.
As others mentioned: mining, special manufacturing exploiting microgravity.
A lot of competition and innovation in the area of data transfer protocols and encryption and localization and espionage increasing the need for engineers that can build, test and maintain new communications directly from orbit, which is cheaper than launching prototype after prototype.
A fad for having a marriage and honeymoon in space, making luxury space hotels commercially viable.
Companies having headquarters in space as the ultimate signal. Especially if it gives them an advantageous legal environment.
China wanting to outshine the US, so heavily subsidizing the stuff above for it’s citizens / companies.
Space junk becoming enough of a problem that specialized repair and disposal jobs become viable, mostly financed by the satellite insurance companies.
Some of the things above increasing the number of space flights, and so decreasing prices and making a few more uses become viable.
Manned ones? . I can think of reasons to have lots and lots of industry and science in space, but reasons to have lots of bodies up there is harder....
Uhm. Someone develops a launch mechanism that is very, very cheap for small and durable components. - Railgun-to-orbit kind of deal. This necessitates assembly in-orbit of anything that doesn’t fit inside a launch-shell, but also drives down the cost of keeping labor up there alive way down because water, air and food fit just fine. Result: Big boom in space activity, lots of engineers and master craftsmen in low earth orbit building probes, space radio telescopes and so on.
Not really a reason, but if you postulate that the cost goes down dramatically (to the cost of an average car or something, relatively speaking), then you may have more reasons to work with.
Strictly economic? There are none.
At least a tiny bit plausible? The same sort of legislation that made renewable energy profitable in some countries. That is, huge taxes on earthbound industry and big subsidies for spacebound.
Rich people treat the space stations as cabins.
Alternately, artist colony for the next generation of super-wealthy artists like Damien Hearst (spelling?) need to go for “artistic inspiration” (scare quotes due to Hansonian signling).
That’s actually pretty plausible, given the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect http://www.fastcoexist.com/3036887/out-of-this-world-the-mysterious-mental-side-effects-of-traveling-into-space
I know whenever I don’t need the second monitor at my desk at work or are at the lab bench next to said desk, I always put the perpetual ISS livestream on...
mining helium-3 for fusion power plants. (ETA: it seems a popular movie used this idea already)
something bad happens, existential risk is suddenly taken seriously and demand for space survival skills increases
rich people building their own colony with their own rules to escape government involvement
Mining helium-3 on the Moon does not make slightest sense. It can be manufactured from lithium for a little fraction of that cost.
Source?
The fact that bombarding lithium with neutrons produces tritium that decays into helium 3 (this reaction is actually responsible for a good fraction of the yield of many fusion warheads, see Castle Bravo). And the helium 3 on the moon is A—on the moon, B—of such a low concentration that the total thermal energy possible to get from fusion of absolutely all the He3 present per cubic meter of the top foot or so of lunar soil is about a quarter that of the worst lignite coal on Earth. And lignite requires a hell of a lot less energy and infrastructure per unit mass to process. By my calculations, given the heat capacity of the minerals it has been blasted into by the solar wind, you need to use at least half that energy on site just to heat the rocks to the point it gets driven off as a vapor. Then there’s all the movement of mass, purifying it down non-terrestrially from all kinds of other vapor, ridiculous launch costs… its not happening.
I’ve seen claims in several internet sources, a video documentary and the Wikipedia article that some countries have had plans to mine helium-3 on the moon. I wonder if the reporting is incompetent or if the plans are made by incompetent optimists if what you’re saying is true. How did this meme originate?
For what it’s worth, I just redid my calculations with the best figures I could find.
The comparison of energy density to lignite was just about the same as the calculations I remembered doing a year or two ago—average thermal energy density assuming complete fusion of the He3 present in lunar soil of about 6 megajoules per kilogram, as compared to 15 or so for average lignite. I found references to speculation that at the edges of cold traps where sunlight never falls near where the sunlight makes it you might have levels six or seven times that.
Something was apparently wrong with my old heat capacity calculations, though. The heating of crustal minerals by 300 kelvin or so would only take about a quarter of a megajoule per kilogram. Though that’s still a twelfth the thermal energy used in ONE step at point-of-intake assuming perfect capture and efficiency, and at least a quarter of the extractable energy you could get out of a heat engine driven by such a reaction. Regardless of the particular numbers, the mere fact that it’s going after an energy source several times less dense than the worst of the fossil fuels on another planet, requiring infrastructure that has not been invented for both extraction and energy-production, has often made me wonder why the meme persists.
Lalartu has a good response below.
Nobody has plans (in business meaning of term) to mine helium-3 on Moon. This idea was first proposed by Gerald Kulcinski in 1989. He gave very optimistic predictions regarging D-He3 fusion, underestimated cost of lunar mining and ignored possibility of specialized reactors for producing He3. Since then idea is pushed by space advocates.
Rude tone without a source to back it up, tsk tsk :)
But you can’t mine that from Earth’s orbit, so why would there be space stations there?
I’m not sure if he meant the Earth’s orbit around the Sun or a geocentric orbit. I assumed the latter, the moon is there and supposedly has a lot of helium-3.
Is it wrong to call a moon base a space station?
How many stations are you considering a “fair number?”
At least a dozen, with a few hundred people working spaceside full time
You could have human-crewed vehicles in orbit around various planets, tele-operating and managing things on their surfaces with much faster turnaround time than lightspeed delay to Earth. Depending on what’s been found and what’s being teleoperated, that could be worthwhile—consider the fact that our big $2 billion Mars rover moves something like 30 meters per day because with a 10+ minute turnaround time for signals, it’s doing nothing most of the time since they want to make sure that everything it does is something they can recover from if something goes wrong and they don’t know about it for fifteen minutes.
A valid reason would be the scarcity of resources. Further technological progress will be severely constrained by which chemical elements are available cheaply and which are not. Lots of interesting and useful chemical elements are not available in sufficiently concentrated ores, or they are rare in all of earth’s crust, having sunken down inside earth’s core during its formation.
These elements thusly are produced only as by-products of other elements which are more concentrated in their ores. This is valid not only for most of the lanthanides, but also for elements like indium, tellurium, gallium, germanium and the platinum group metals.
Asteroids might hold rich deposits of these elements because the elements could not sink down into their cores, and even if they did, most asteroids are small enough.
So if we don’t want to substitute that indium tin oxide in our smartphone touchscreens with cheaper elements, we’ll have to mine asteroids.
Edit²: Here’s a relevant review article (Vesborg, Jaramillo 2012)