This House Believes that we should substantially increase governmental funding into asteroid mining.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Today, I hope to explain to you why the additional subsidies and funding towards the pipe dream of asteroid mining is unjust, and something we should be strongly opposed. My opponent affirms the aid by the government to prop up industry in this market sector with the aim of simply creating profit, rather than any interest in the equity of mining. I will be rebutting this claim of government-led investment over a free market judging our investments into space. I also note that this debate is not geography-specific, and therefore all mentions of the United States and United States law ought to be disregarded as irrelevant, for brevity’s sake, or I shall simply point out that the majority of nations don’t have ten billion dollars to spend, nor have any regulation in place along the lines that my opponent suggested exists. What would ten billion dollars give us? My opponent argues for the use of the money to follow the system proposed in his link[1]. However, his link does not state that this is the cost of mining the asteroid. Instead, it shows the cost of moving an asteroid from Near planetary orbit to high lunar orbit, or near-moon orbit. To use the funding is a waste of money, and while it may or may not be true that “Placing a 500-ton asteroid in high lunar orbit would provide a unique, meaningful and affordable destination for astronaut crews in the next decade”[2], it is in no way an economically intelligent idea. Moreover, how much of the 500-ton asteroid would we be able to mine per visit? Current best estimates favour David Gump’s Firefly mission, which states it can mine between 25-65 kg of an asteroid.[3] The asteroids we are even able to mine are mostly to be type-S asteroids which have roughly 10% metal, which the largest share of that is to be nickel and iron. So on our best day, we’d be getting a couple kilos of a pretty valueless amount of metal. In reality (as the Dragonfly mission is still hypothetical), the closest actual launch we have was the seven year Hayabusa mission, which gained us only 1500 grains of rock from asteroid mining.[4] This is less than the mass of a single skittle worth of rock. So in reality we expect an absolutely miniscule payoff from throwing billions and billions blindly at the utopian science-fiction ideal of asteroid mining. Additional considerations – Who owns an asteroid? We have a multitude of extra considerations to take into account. One of which is simply taxation. Corporations of course must pay tax in a modern society – this is how the world works, and the way of the world. To dodge tax gives one an unfair and unjust advantage. However, is it not true that space corporations would be able to do this? Setting aside the science fiction for a moment, it is illegal for any nation to claim ownership to land on the moon or any other celestial body[5]. However, to collect taxes one needs to be able to own the land you’re on. A government would not be able to tax an extraterrestrial company any more than the British government can tax a Vietnamese bike shop. “As far as law is concerned, there’s nothing inherently in the space treaties that prohibits this [mining] … But there are a heck of a lot of unanswered questions,” to quote Henry Hertzfeld professor of Space law (which is a thing)[6]. Corporations would be able to claim to be based on an asteroid or similar and avoid taxation. “Unless the U. S. manages to impose jurisdiction on an asteroid, there will be no way that the U. S. government can claim that the operation is domestic and subject to corporate tax. This may be another attraction for the company: asteroid mining is the ultimate offshore site. Nobody has given a lot of thought to how all this will be dealt with from a legal and governmental angle. And the current tight coupling between corporations and the U. S. government probably ensures that whatever regulations are imposed will generally be favorable to the corporations.”[7] Additional Considerations – The 1% Rich investors from rich companies living in rich countries will benefit first and foremost—asteroids may add “tens of billions” of dollars to the global GDP as Planetary Resources claims, but guess where most of that is going? The same place where profits from the sale of commodities have gone since the dawn of human civilization - the pockets of the 1%. However, this market will be inaccessible to those without the huge funding needed to benefit. This marketplace will give unheard of profits to those who are willing to lie and cheat and most importantly those who are born with the funding to pursue such frivolity, and therefore will create astronomical inequality and negative consequences (pun not intended). It will not benefit the people in any meaningful way, but instead the industry would be led by governments, funded by us taking all the risks, and then the richest of other nations learning from our mistakes will swoop in and take the gold out from under us. Instead of this breaking a strangehold of resource ownership, it will instead tighten it. REM metals are already being broken in their control by nations such as Japan and others[8], but the opening of more resources will allow other nations to instead get a stronger grip over these resources, not weaken them. Additional Considerations – The Hawking Hypothesis Remember what Stephen Hawking said about why we should probably be afraid of any aliens we might meet out there? only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach." Sound familiar? We are becoming Hawking’s aliens. Not content with the finite supply of materials on our planet, we’re searching out new celestial bodies to pillage. We are expanding the capitalist horizon into space, we are pushing the profit-motive beyond orbit.[9] Conclusion To conclude, we have many reasons to oppose the resolution – ignoring the inefficiency of the economic side of the debate, where we simply won’t earn money from such a foolhardy enterprise, the ethical considerations are so massively damning that asteroid mining will become devastating. As such, I urge a vote against the resolution not simply on the economic grounds, but for the ethical benefit of all. Thank you. [1] http://www.space.com... [2] http://www.space.com... [3] http://www.economist.com... [4] http://www.spaceflightnow.com... [5] http://www.fas.org... [6] http://www.popsci.com... [7] http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.co.uk... [8] http://www.theverge.com... [9] http://motherboard.vice.com...