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And because these http://www.mining-technology.c... never happened, which is just IN ADDITION to the tons of deaths caused by coal burning pollution, black lung, etc

The deepest gold mine is now 4 miles deep.

That's 4 km not miles

A recent wildfire in Victoria spread to the Hazelwood open-pit coal mine , setting ablaze two disused coal faces and prompting a 45-day firefighting effort. Photographs released by Victoria's Country Fire Authority show the terrible power and persistence of coal seam fires, which in some cases can burn for decades.

Just wait until commercial trucking companies figure out that they don't need to employ drivers anymore.

Where do you think this all started? I was working on some of these projects more than a decade ago.

http://www.komatsu.com/ce/currenttopics/v09212/index.html

http://www.mining-technology.com/features/feature125450/

I don't think that the AC poster really has thought through his comment very well. Nice comment there about the role meteors have played in terms of mining.... which offers some excellent thoughts on the topic.

One of the problems with heavy metals is that most of them have sunk into the center of the Earth over time, and that it is only rare exceptions.... usually due to volcanism or meteor landfalls mentioned above.... that you find deposits of the heavier elements in even modest quantities. Going to an asteroid you don't have to worry about trying to dig down a couple of miles or more to get at the ore.... because going a couple of miles you have already shot past the center and are coming out the other side.

Also not mentioned..... there is a reason most mines only go at most a couple miles down: There is this pesky thing called "gravity" that we constantly have to fight here on the Earth. Trying to push up a couple miles of pure rock at 9.8 m/s^2 constant acceleration is an incredibly difficult task if you are trying to squeeze under that rock to get at a vein or ore body that happens to lay underneath that rock. The engineering requirements for keeping that rock suspended for at least the duration you are extracting the minerals is an incredible accomplishment that has spawned its own engineering discipline: mining engineering. If you have ever heard of some of the famous "A&M" schools around the country, notable a school like Texas A&M, the "M" comes from the mining engineering school that was the very purpose for the establishment of the university (with biology programs related to agriculture being the other). I can point to a couple dozen universities across the USA that were established explicitly for this purpose. It isn't easy, and even today there are dozens of people in 1st world countries that die from mining accidents each year.... many more in developing countries like China where they die not by the dozens but by the hundreds or even thousands each year.

Another issue is that mining is an incredibly destructive process that causes incredible environmental damage, wiping out whole habitats and even ecological niches. One mine that is close to my house grew to the point it took out a whole city and even an entire mountain in the quest to dig ever deeper down to obtain the ore. In this case, to avoid problems with the overburden of the rocks, the mine has simply moved the entire mountain down the road in an attempt to get at the minerals in the mine. Why not move this environmental damage to a place that has no "environment" to damage? Mining asteroids sounds pretty good to me on this issue too, where streams aren't filled with toxic metals or even entire climate zones are left alone. Heck, once a good asteroid has been hollowed out, it might just make a new environment that we could put stuff into to develop new environmental niches that until now have simply not existed.

Recycling is also never 100% effective as much as some people would have you think otherwise. You always need to have at least some input from raw sources to maintain any sort of supply of an element no matter how effective you have become at reusing the material.

Getting back to the AC poster above:

So dig in the planet, my friend, it's all there. I know, a shovel is not as sexy as a rocket.

No, it isn't all there, at least as easy as those would have you think. Easy spots to dig and extract ore from has pretty much disappeared from the Earth. On a rare occasion you might hear about another gold rush due to a mineral deposit in a generally previously unexplored area, but where exactly are the new frontiers for humanity right now? Oh, that is right, in space! As I tried to explain above, getting down to deeper and deeper pockets of minerals is an incredibly difficult task. Modern mines that operate on the scale of current productio

After all, my Uncle says that is what they do with the radio active mining equipment, and he has been down the largest uranium mine in Australia - Olympic Dam.