Buzz Out Loud Lounge forum: Those wondering "Why the moon"...here's why...

Will it ever be profittable to do mining etc in space, with how expensive space operations are.
What use are resources if you gotta burn more fuel than they're worth to bring them back to earth.
Economic activity is basically is a matter of energy flows and conversions. We are talking about extremely energy intensive activities that are supposed to compet with simpler lower energy operations on earth.
I remain dubious of the economics of anything in space...

Here's an article I was reading just the other day related to this issue.
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/49332

"As long as there is enough primary energy at tolerable prices there is no reason to believe that bottlenecks in any other primary materials cannot be either broken or circumvented. On the other hand, a shortage of primary energy would mean that the demand for most other primary products would be so curtailed that a question of shortage with regard to them would be unlikely to arise

"the only reason the iron industry can use progressively lower grades of ore is by using increasingly large amounts of energy per ton of iron produced, and the same rule applies across the board; the lower the concentration of the resource in its natural form, the more energy has to be used to extract it and turn it into useful forms. Second, when you try to apply this principle to energy, you very quickly reach the point at which the energy needed to extract and process the resource is greater than the energy you get out the other end. Once this point arrives, the resource is no longer useful in energy terms; you might as well try to support yourself by buying $1 bills for $2 each."

And here is the problem in space, there might be a lot of resources but the energy cost to obtain them is unrealistic. Especially during a time in history when we will be challenged just to get enough energy to keep society functioning as is.

No increased costs of extraction, you use it as it comes or that bit is gone forever. Increasing investments should mean greater efficiencies and more bang for the buck, but either way the energy will just keep on going by whether or not we capture/convert it for our uses.

An exceptions is the materials for the solar collectors--I assume extracting and manufacturing them will go to these issues. But the "raw materials" will not get more expensive or difficult to get to from any given location, tho obviously some locatoins (space, deserts) are more productive than others.

To a lesser extent, this is all also true of wind and geothermal. They just exist whether or not we use them. Not as pure, as they do have local environmental impact such as bird strikes etc, but seriously, that pales next to strip mining's impact on the local wildlife!