Press conferences in Luxembourg were eagerly awaited by both people professionally involved in politics, economics and finance, and … fans of science fiction and space. But another thing is even stranger - it may be of interest to sociologists, those who follow the labor market, as well as - world economic cycles
Deputy Prime Minister of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg Etienne Schneider announced on February 3 at a press conference the start of the industrial asteroid exploration program. Translated into a more understandable language, this means that the Luxembourgers intend to extract valuable and rare minerals on asteroids and other cosmic bodies.
Luxembourg is no stranger to space exploration. The Duchy played a prominent role in the development of satellite communications in the nineties of the last century. One of the largest global satellite operators is the Luxembourg-based SES company.
It is SES that, together with partners from the United States and European countries, will explore asteroids and other space bodies in order to extract rare metals from them. The press conference in Luxembourg was attended by representatives of the American companies Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources, which will be partners of the Luxembourgers.
Jean-Jacques Dordein, who until June 2015 headed the European Space Agency (ESA) and now serves as an advisor to the Space Resources program, told the Financial Times (FT): “I am convinced that the Luxembourg initiative has great potential for both science and for the economy.
Cosmically high potential
It is for the economy, and for the macroeconomics, although the ex-head of the ESA most likely had in mind the more modest goals of replenishing the reserves of raw materials by Luxembourg, whose ability to extract it from its own subsoil is zero. In the acclaimed book "Does Capitalism Have a Future?" one of the co-authors, the outstanding sociologist Randall Collins, logically argues that in the foreseeable future there will be a real technological substitution of labor by machines. It was predicted by Marx, but was delayed by 150 years due to the fact that the state and corporations found jobs for those who were forced out of factories by high-performance machine tools. These people, that is, most of you and I, were employed in office work: the sprawling state gave us jobs in ministries such as "labor and social security," or "culture," which had never been heard of in the 19th century under Marx and Engels.
Giant corporations have overgrown with an employee apparatus that can rival the state, instead of those modest offices from which former industrialists did business almost alone with a cigar in their teeth and a gold chain on their belly. The innovation required many engineers to design individual machine parts. This entire army of white-collar workers, specialists and skilled workers in semi-automated factories constituted the middle class.
But now office work is being supplanted as well. The computer itself has not yet generated unemployment, but rather creating new jobs in the same offices. But in developed countries, these places are now becoming less and less, since modern methods of processing information still crowd out people. And factories from semi-become simply automatic. The question arises: what to do with the roughly one billion people of the world middle class when they are out of work?
Collins gives his own answer - socialism. Not categorical, but probabilistic. Yes, it is possible. Government semi-coercive labor management for employers and workers can temporarily muffle the problem. But this is hardly the way to solve it in principle.
But it was precisely the birthplace of socialism that provided another potential response to modern challenges, having paved the way for humanity in its time into space. And then the answer to these challenges is: space. Its space is capable of absorbing labor resources, estimated not by a billion, which by earthly standards seems incredibly large, but by infinite quantities. Mastering asteroids in scale does not seem too labor-intensive, but what is it like to master Mars? And asteroids, of which a great many are flying, are able to attract labor on the scale of the entire modern earth's mining industry. But we must also take into account the terrestrial infrastructure and the maintenance of space communications. So the popularity of "Star Wars" can be explained not only by the love of science fiction, but also by the fact that mankind is gradually trying on its cosmic destiny. Not to mention the popularity of Gagarin.
Is this not the answer to the direction of the way out of the current crisis, which is again acquiring the character of a global one? For Russia, such an answer would be as organic as possible. If Luxembourg got involved in space affairs …
Something Remains From the Creation of the Solar System
Despite the fact that the extraction of raw materials in space, writes FT, seems to be something descended from the pages of science fiction books, in general, its technology has long been developed. It is already known how to get to an asteroid, how to drill a well in it, and how to deliver rock samples back to Earth.
Etienne Schneider did not provide details of the project because the Luxembourg parliament has not yet allocated funds for it. According to preliminary calculations, the extraction of rare minerals on asteroids is a very expensive pleasure. We are talking about tens of billions of dollars. However, experts believe that the game is worth the candle, because the potential volume of a still non-existent market is estimated at trillions of dollars.
Asteroids are made of materials that have survived from the creation of the solar system. They are much richer in minerals of the earth's crust, because heavy metals, the most valuable and rare, sank to its core as our planet cooled.
Extraction of raw materials from asteroids can be of two types. The most valuable metals, for example, the platinum group, can be delivered to Earth after pretreatment in space. Other minerals, including iron, nickel and tungsten, can be processed in space for use in spaceships and weapons to further explore the solar system. The resulting water can be split into hydrogen and oxygen and used in rocket fuel.
The first phase of the extraction of materials in space, exploration, is already in full swing. Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources are now working on a spacecraft that can be used to search for the richest in valuable minerals asteroids.
In addition to technical and financial problems, companies looking to extract raw materials in space will have to deal with legal difficulties. According to the Outer Space Treaty, signed by the leading economic powers back in 1967, minerals in outer space are the property of all mankind. However, there is no specific mention of the extraction of raw materials on asteroids in the agreement.
Last year, the United States passed the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act. According to it, the rights to minerals extracted on asteroids belong to American companies. Many experts believe that this law violates the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. However, experts are confident that legal problems are completely surmountable and solvable.
