Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Asteroid eater

While musing about Space Colonization, I perused this article on wikipedia about Bernal spheres.  It so happens that the idea would be to get up to 140,000 people on this sphere.  So, I thought, what would these people do to support themselves?  There may be industry, sure, but what kind of industry?

Then the thought struck, which turned out not to be original, to have them consume asteroids.  In effect, they would be asteroid eaters!  Actually, this link was about computer games, but this would be real live asteroid eaters!  The big space colony would dock with asteroids and process them for their ores, and then trade with other colonies for their wares.  Thereby, creating a space industry that would be completely independent from the Earth.

They may even get richer than Earthlings, therefore causing great envy and resentment from the ground based Earthlings down below. Aw, shucks!

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