Science fiction has been imagining asteroid mining and habitation (carving out the interior volume of a chunk of rock to live in) for a very long time. We can go back to Isaac Asimov’s ice capture mission in “The Martian Way” (1952) and up to M. J. Locke (Laura Mixon)’s 2011 novel Up Against It, and those are just a small sample. Asteroid resource utilization is also important for a certain brand of post-human futures. In Greg Egan’s Diaspora, humans send very small spacecraft at very high sub-light speeds to interesting new planetary systems. The digital human consciousness spend their travel time in the VR simulation of their choice or unconscious, ready to be woken up if something interesting happens. When they reach their destination an army of nanomachines locates and reassembles whatever habitat/sensor package/solar power station/etc. that the post-human explorers need based on the resources available in the new system.
But even if we can’t send our digital consciousnesses to a distant star yet, why aren’t we already out there picking apart asteroids for fun and profit? There are a lot of answers to that question: a simple one is politics and the lack of political support for pretty much any single vision for space exploration. At a recent AIAA conference Beth Fischer was asked about her vision for the next 100 years of space exploration and she replied: “My vision is that we pick a vision and stick with it.” The applause was loud and sustained.
Another answer is that space launches, especially out to lunar orbit or beyond, are still difficult and expensive. Still, in 2029 the asteroid 99942 Apophis (a science fictional name if ever there was one) is predicted to pass within 18,000 miles of Earth, and researchers have estimated that it weighs around 30 million tons. Since it is so big and will be passing so close, why not just head on out and hitch a ride?
Let’s look at a few of the challenges facing a prospective asteroid mission. The first question we have to answer is: humans or robots? Humans are infinitely more versatile, but robots are much, much cheaper. So let’s look at what we can do with robots. We’ve had robots exploring the solar system for years: the Russians had a rover touring around the Moon’s surface, and NASA has had four incredibly successful Mars rovers. All of those have engaged in some form of geological research, scraping rocks for samples and analyzing them. Sounds like the perfect groundwork for prospecting an asteroid, right?
Unfortunately, no. It turns out that robots operating on a planet, even one with a very low gravity such as Mars (1/3 that of Earth) or the Moon (1/6 that of Earth) have many advantages that an asteroid robot wouldn’t. The gravity of even a large asteroid is so small that you could achieve escape velocity just by jumping. Without gravity to keep you on the surface, a rover driving around would leave the asteroid for good whenever it hit a bump. If it tried to swing a pick to break up a rock, it would simply push itself off the surface. There are plenty of means of tethering to a surface, but then you’re faced with a trade-off versus mobility and flexibility.
Then there’s the problem of actually extracting the minerals. Almost everything we know about mining was developed in the context of Earth, with its rich oxygen atmosphere, warm temperatures, and sturdy gravitational field. On an asteroid, none of that applies.
Consider platinum. Platinum is rare and valuable on Earth, and it occurs in somewhat higher concentrations on the Moon and in asteroids than it does here (some of the richer platinum sites on Earth are associated with meteor strikes). But like many metals, platinum must be separated from the ore in which it is found. In one typical mine in South Africa, they mined 16 million tons of ore in a year to yield 1.125 million ounces of platinum. That’s 2.2 parts per million, meaning that for every metric ton of ore they mined, they got 2.2 grams of platinum.
So even with a slightly better ratio on an asteroid, you still have to break up a lot of rocks to get what you’re looking for. That poses the first challenge. When you break a rock on Earth, the pieces fall down on the ground and you can pick them up. If you broke up an outcropping on an asteroid, most of the pieces would have enough velocity to go flying off into space, never to be seen again. Explosives, very common in terrestrial mining, would essentially launch everything that you were looking for off into the deep dark sky. So the first problem that has to be solved is breaking up and containing the ore that you’re working with.
Next, how do we separate the platinum from the ore? There are many ways, but almost all of them involve melting. That allows all the materials involved to flow and separate from each other, either by density (the platinum would sink compared to normal rock) or by magnetism (platinum is often found with iron, which can be separated out with a magnet). Again, we start to see the problems: melting things is much more difficult in space because out in the vacuum, everything wants to either freeze solid or boil away completely. And in a microgravity environment, a dense material won’t necessarily sink to the bottom of a processing container. This problem can be solved with centrifuges (spinning the materials instead of letting gravity do the work), but again you’re adding weight and complexity to your mission.
Similar problems would be found with those minerals that are usually extracted using some kind of dissolving solution, like the use of cyanide for gold mining. First ore is extracted, then crushed and mixed with water to form slurry. We’ve already seen some of the problems with liquids in space, but it gets worse. The chemical reaction that allows the gold to bind with the cyanide requires large amounts of dissolved oxygen, which would have to be introduced artificially, since there’s no oxygenated atmosphere available on the asteroid.
Nanotechnology would seem to be the answer to a lot of these problems, but the science fictional view of nanotech as a nigh-unto-magical grey goo is a long way in the future. While that’s worth another article all on its own, for now let’s just say that nanotechnology is far more limited in what it can achieve than the asteroid-stripping solar-panel-building bots of many post-human futures.
None of these problems are insurmountable, and as we travel along the curves that make minerals more expensive here on Earth and cheaper up in space, the economic incentives to solve these problems will increase rapidly. Miners have been enormously clever in devising ways to profit from resource extraction even in very hostile environments. But it is clear that the challenges ahead for asteroid mining are steep.
We won’t derive much benefit from all our experience with space robots or with terrestrial mining; instead a lot of processes will need to be devised from scratch. If we are to start laying the groundwork for this sort of mission, it seems like NASA’s asteroid capture mission would be a good place to start, with the added bonus of learning some lessons about changing an asteroid’s orbit—something we’ll want to be able to do the next time a killer asteroid is headed our way. As much of science fiction has imagined, it seems likely that in the future we will end up working with asteroids one way or another. But we’re just starting the journey of learning how to work with them.
There’s a long way to go yet.
About the Author
Karen Burnham is an electrical engineer working at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (all opinions expressed in this piece are her own, and no reflection of NASA’s official policy). She is also a book reviewer writing for Locus, Strange Horizons, SFSignal, and Cascadia Subduction Zone. She writes non-fiction about science when she can, and recently started writing for GeekMom.com.
Deep into the Dark:
A Conversation with Lavie Tidhar
Jeremy L. C. Jones
It was easy to write.
“I honestly wish I knew why,” said Lavie Tidhar. “Some books are like that. Most aren’t! It just felt right but, you know, I wish that could happen with every book, but the truth is it’s so rare, you just have to be thankful when it happens.”
He’s talking about Osama, the winner of the 2012 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel—a novel featuring a pulp writer, a detective, a vigilante named Osama Bin Laden, and a view of the world that seems at once brilliant and dark, dulled by a wise man’
s weariness and sharpened by a young man’s exposure to a very real, very immediate truth.
Tidhar, who was born in Israel, has spent most of his adult life travelling, each trip seeming to add a layering to his writing, while deepening his sense of rootedness in the past. Story after story and novel after novel—from The Bookman Histories to Martian Sands to The Violent Century (due out this month) there is always that forward thrust, that delving deeper into a darker space that is also, somehow, more revealing, more full of light.
I went into our interview expecting the globe-trotting man of letters to be simply bubbling with enthusiasm for his craft. He is not, mind you, a grump or premature curmudgeon, but his relationship sitting at the keyboard is a bit more conflicted than I expected.
“I don’t know if enjoy is the right word,” said Tidhar. “But if I don’t do it for a length of time I know get very irritable, restless, physically itching to write. So perhaps ‘obsession’ would be a better description.”
Fortunately for the world, Tidhar’s obsessions—whether writing, collecting Hebrew pulp fiction, writing screenplays, or what have you—tend to be entertaining, evocative, and enlightening.
How about James Ellroy’s blurb for The Violent Century: “A brilliantly etched phantasmagoric reconfiguring of that most sizzling of eras—the twilight 20th.” What do you think of it? Is he spot on? Off?
To be honest, I’m just so chuffed to have a James Ellroy blurb! I finally got to read his books when I was living in Laos, in 2008—a short time after writing Osama, I think—and I admire more than anything just how deep he is willing to go inside, the courage of putting everything on the page, no matter how sordid or terrible it is.
It’s a courage I don’t quite have yet, though I hope I am getting closer—the novel I’ve been working on the past year is the one where I’ve really tried to go deep into the dark, if that makes sense (and it was a strange and uncomfortable experience! It can really mess you up, that sort of thing).
Can you expand on “deep into the dark” and how it relates to the novel you’re currently working on?
I think in a way it’s my most personal novel, in that it goes deepest into my obsessions, particularly with the Holocaust, but with pulp fiction, with pornographic fiction (which I’ve been fascinated by as a mode of storytelling). I wrote it very quickly, mostly at night, because it was such an unpleasant space to inhabit, but at the same time, like with Osama, it felt very true to be doing it. I think it’s very dark, but also very funny, if that makes sense. We’ll see what happens!
Can you talk a little bit where you started with The Violent Century? How you developed it? What some of the surprises were along the way?
I keep referring to The Violent Century as my “accidental book”. I never meant to write it!
It started with an e-mail exchange with a friend of mine who’s a film producer in the UK. She mentioned in passing they had been looking to make a British superhero film, but never found the right script. So I fired off an e-mail banging on about how well of course you can’t do that because you have to understand superheroes in terms of the Jewish experience during the lead up to World War 2 (virtually all the creators of superheroes were first generation Jews born in the United States to immigrant parents). And once I wrote that, I kind of thought, well, actually, that’s not such a bad idea! So I sat down that same day and wrote, I think, five or eight pages of script, and then forgot about it.
At the time I was moving back to the UK, and I got stuck for a couple of months visiting my parents, sorting out paperwork, so to keep myself occupied I worked on the screenplay of what was going to become The Violent Century. And I was quite happy with it! It was fun (I write screenplays occasionally for fun, as weird as that sounds!)
I showed it to my friend, and she liked it—but she also pointed out that, as a movie, we were looking at something that could only really be done by a big Hollywood studio. “Why don’t you turn it into a novel?” she said. And again, this little light bulb went off in my head and I thought, well, why not turn it into a novel!
So it was all very accidental—and also a very different experience, an experience in adaptation, really, which is something I am fascinated with. It was hard work . . . It went through an enormous amount of drafts and, of course, the book is a very different creature to the screenplay. I was also working on a comics adaptation of it, to the extent that we had the first issue written, and a few pages of art—I hoped we could sell the comics first and then the novel but, as it turned out, the book sold very, very quickly after submission, and my artist (Paul McCaffrey) and I went on to do a comic called Adler instead (Titan Comics is releasing it next year).
What’s “fun” about working on a screenplay. Or, put differently, how is it different for you to create stories in that form as opposed to narrative prose?
Maybe it’s stripping the story down so much. I’m quite minimalist, which is good. I don’t need to provide elaborate descriptions or instructions, I can just go straight in with character and dialogue and a maybe little bit of stage-setting. It’s different! And a ninety page screenplay is much quicker to write than a novel, it’s like taking a break. And of course writing screenplays has worked out quite well for me—one eventually became The Violent Century, one became Adler (my forthcoming comics mini-series) and I’m actually writing one now for some producers, so I have a genuine writing “gig”. We’ll see what happens with it!
What’s at the heart of the book for you?
To me, and I think like Osama, The Violent Century is a love story. That’s the core of it.
There’s a murder mystery of sort in there, and the big historical stuff I love to do, and it does I hope say something about our conception of heroism, and it’s about World War 2, and to a much smaller extent the Holocaust (which, again, I think you can only understand superheroes if you understand the world that created them). But at the heart of it, it’s a love story. What else is there to write about, if not love?
Ironically, some early reviews seem to suggest I was “obviously” inspired by all different kinds of comic books. The truth is I never read much comics—it wasn’t something we really had when I was growing up. I have been trying to educate myself more in reading them, and I love hanging out with comics creators, who are some of the nicest people you’d ever meet—but I was trying to come at the theme as if it were being created from scratch, in the 1930s, by these geeky Jewish kids (which I suppose is what I am!)
You know, they all had to change their names—Stanley Lieber became Stan Lee, Jacob Kurzberg became Jack Kirby, Robert Kahn became Bob Kane. I was fascinated by that erasure. And Lee and Jerry Siegel both appear as minor characters in The Violent Century!
I wonder what your geeky Jewish kid turned early 20th Century American comic book writer would’ve been. And how would changing your name to fit a market effect your writing? Would it be freeing? Limiting? Like wearing a mask? Like being forced to hide?
I was thinking about this recently, actually—I’d have gone for an Anglophone sounding equivalent—Larry Tiddler or something equally ridiculous, which sort of sounds the way English people usually tend to pronounce my name anyway!
My writerly alter-ego, who sometimes appears in the fiction, is Lior Tirosh. I also quite like the pen name “Sebastian Bruce” (who is briefly mentioned in Osama, and who I have written a short biography of—where he said “never trust a man with two first names.”).
The habit of using Anglophone names was quite common in Hebrew pulp fiction, where it was by “Mike Longshott” or “Kim Rockman”—great names! And then the actual writer’s name was usually given as “Translated by”. So I love the idea of alter egos and fictitious identities, but I think I’m far enough in to just stick with ‘Lavie Tidhar’ and hope for the best.
Hebrew pulp fiction! Can you talk a little more about Hebrew pulp novels influenced your writing?
They’re wonderful—wonderfully bad, and with the most amazingly lurid covers i
maginable. They were pocket books, cheap paperbacks from the 1950s and 1960s—so many of them essentially produced by this one publisher, under different names. It’s said some of the best Israeli writers got their breaks writing pulps to begin with (under a host of pseudonyms).
I’ve been fascinated with them for a long time, especially the infamous Stalag novels, or Nazisploitation material that was incredibly popular (in an under the counter sort of way) in the 1960s, and which is incredibly rare (and collectible) now. They’re violent, pornographic (though very tame by today’s standard) and I think were able to say something, in pulp, that mainstream fiction wasn’t able to deal with.
I collect Hebrew pulp, to an extent—I was lucky recently that I lived in Jaffa right next door to its grand flea market, and I was able to walk through the market and pick up these incredibly rare books for next to nothing—romance chapbooks from the 1940s, early pornography, spy series (the improbable Patrick Kim: Karate Man, about a two meter tall Korean secret agent, which ran for years and an enormous amount of titles)—the marginal literature that people read but that is seldom recorded, seldom acknowledged.
The one I’m particularly obsessed with is the (real life) figure of David Tidhar, known as “the first Hebrew Detective”. He was a larger-than-life character who became the hero of a series of chapbooks written about him. I have two of them—they date back to the 1930s. I also have a signed copy of his autobiography, which is utterly bizarre—in four pages early on he seems to single-handedly—and in cold blood!—kill about forty people! He’s appeared in a couple of my works—particularly “The Projected Girl”, a novelette Ellen Datlow published a couple of years back in an anthology called Naked City. And he’s forthcoming again in a story I did for an anthology called Tel Aviv Noir. But I’m not done with him yet . . .
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