Space Colonization Just a Generation Away

Mining Colonies in Space
Mining Colonies in Space

Mining Colonies in Space

SF News – While Australians do not have a space agency, they are mining experts and are willing to invest to find new ways of scavenging materials; even if that would mean finding their ways into space.  Owning some of the world’s major mining companies, Australians are now looking into Moon and other space bodies for resources.

Colonization of moon in order to mine and export material could only be a generation away, a recent gathering in Sydney concludes, says AFP.

“There’s nothing really science-fiction about any of this,” explained Andrew Dempster, from the Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research.  “It’s about joining the dots, and I think we’ve got to the point where people are saying ‘yeah, we can do this'”.

A NASA expert believes that a robotic mining colony on the moon is a possibility within 20 years and within another 30 years, the industrial capacity of space could grow to even one billion times that of the United States.

“It’s getting very exciting in this field, we are becoming very convinced that the technologies are here now so we can access the billion-fold resources of the solar system,” Phil Metzger of NASA said to AFP.   “We don’t have a resource problem in this vast system, we have an imagination problem.”

“Space commerce is now exploding as visionaries see that this is possible today,” he said. “The benefits are almost impossible to imagine.”