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The Largest CU mine in the US, Kennecott Copper's Bingham Canyon mine in Utah, in fact the largest open pit mine in the world and the only man made structure visible from space with the naked eye, has roughly 50 years of copper left before they tap out the deposit. Although the amount of work per ton of ore is increasing drastically with every additional foot they excavate the ore deposit itself gets richer the deeper they go. Not only that, but the amount of gold and silver extracted from the same mining operation pays for the entire copper operation making all the copper pure profit.

Not only does the cost go down, but by driving the costs down for metals like this from off-world sources it will make terrestrial mines for similar materials to be forced out of business.

For the most part this will be a good thing, as most of the current mines are located in what is today largely wilderness... for exactly the same reasons why people go there to search for these metals: They don't have to deal with purchasing property at huge prices (like downtown Manhattan or Tokyo) in order to extract the minerals. Fights over mineral rights and appropriate methods for extracting those minerals lose one of their main justifications: If we don't to it here, where else are we going to get it?

Mines like the Kennecot Copper Mine in Utah is an example of something that will be a relic of the past. If you ever fly into or out of Salt Lake City International from the south end of the airport, you will fly right over this mine and be rather low to the ground as well. You would miss it only if you didn't pay any attention to it at all. The residents of Salt Lake City realize the large number of jobs this mine represents, and it has been there for more than a century, so they don't really mind too much that the mine is there. Still, it has had a devistating impact on the wilderness of Bingham Canyon, not to mention that the canyon nor the mountains that were next to it even exist anymore. The tailings hill left from mining these mountains is a permanent feature to Salt Lake Valley that has also had a major impact on the local environment that is not to be ignored either.

All of this damage, and under control of U.S. mining regulations that are hard to deal with, yet the mine is still profitable. This is a mine that would definitely be shut down due to extra-terrestrial mining efforts, and no similar mine would ever be started either. Oh, some limited mining would still occur because of national priorities, welfare service projects (keeping people employed through government subsidies... although it might be cheaper to simply pay the miners directly and close the mine anyway), or simply because of the need for a specific mineral that is required for a certain industry from a very reliable source. That and it will take centuries for extra-terrestrial mining efforts to really be developed, so something needs to keep businesses operating in the meantime.

Try the link to the mine itself: http://www.kennecott.com/

Comes up with a directory listing.

Ouch!

One existing terrestrial mine comes to mind as a counter argument to what you are saying here. This mine I'm referencing makes almost all of its operating expenses just off of the processing of precious metals like Gold and Silver, with the profits themselves coming from the Copper as a side line... even though that is the principle metal that comes from the mine. It also serves as an example of what kinds of engineering is needed to get much deeper into the Earth as you are suggesting. Going much deeper is simply not economical or practical in most cases, and even this mine is going to be closed in about 50 years simply because they will have dug so deep that it won't stay profitable to pull the ore up from the deep hole. And this is open-pit mining where you don't have to worry about the overburden collapsing on top of you or other nasty issues inherant in mining.

Of all of the objects in the Solar Sytem that you can physically touch (i.e. excluding the Gas giants and the Sun as having metalic cores that are unreachable even by future technologies), the Earth has by far the strongest gravitation pull in the Solar System. That makes mining here on the Earth incredibly expensive and makes mine collapses a constant worry as well as a source of industrial deaths.

The advantage of mining on an asteroid... especially a small asteroid (less than 10 km diameter) is that gravity ceases to be a major issue in terms of trying to keep the whole rock supported. You also have access to huge energy sources, especially solar power, that are simply unavailble for terrestrial mines.

Another major plus for asteroidal mining operations is that the minerals will not be as nearly stratified like they are on the Earth. Here, most of the heavy metals are in the core of the Earth and might as well be in the core of Jupiter or the Sun for as much good as it will do for us. Occasionally a mountain will pull up some stuff from deeper in the Earth (which is one reason for many mine in mountainous regions). They will still be clumpy and need surveys for mineral compositions and mining candidates, but you are likely to find richer veins of rare elements in the asteroid than would be possible on the Earth.

Keep in mind that most of the early mining operations in space will be done mainly to avoid having to pull up these minerals and elements from the Earth, with the huge costs of launching something from the surface of the Earth. Volitle Chemicals like Oxygen, Hydrogen, Water, and Ammonia are going to be as likely to be mined as are metals like Iron, Magnesium, or even Gold. If any metals are going to be shipped back to the Earth for consumption on the Earth itself in large quantities, that would only happen when mining facilities in space are already well developed and already profitable from other operations.

Mining may take place, BTW, on moons that orbit Jupiter, not necessarily on the "surface" of Jupiter proper, although there are thousands of candidates in the Asteroid belt that are likely to be tapped well before anything gets done near Jupiter except for projects that are specific to manned exploration of the Jovian moons themselves. That is centuries away from happening at best.

Don't miss Kennekott. It's the largest open pit copper mine in North America. You get to see where all those nasty heavy metals in your PC come from plus some HUGE trucks and explosions and smelters, etc.

Check out Kennecott Copper Mine near Salt Lake City, UT. Don't worry, you'll be able to find it. It's purportedly one of two man-made features on Earth visible from space with the naked eye, the other being the Great Wall of China. (I don't think they're counting reservoirs.) If you arrive at the right time of day, you can watch them blast away the hillside using tons of explosives. The entire site is crawling with huge trucks and steamshovels, trains, pipelines and the like. The complex stretches for miles and miles, and there's a lot of interesting industrial stuff to see around the area in addition to the tour itself.

Another cool tour is the Soudan Underground Mine State Park in Soudan, MN. They run you deep, deep underground in an old iron mine, and show you what it was like working a mile below the surface. That's also where the University of Minnesota built their cosmic ray detection lab.

I don't know about that. If you ever get a chance to come into the Salt Lake City, Utah International Airport by air, you can see one of the largest open-pit mining operations in the world. I guanentee that you will be able to see this from the moon as a major crater on the earth.

That said, I would prefer having a mine like that on the moon than having to breath the smelter fumes coming from the processing plant.