The Vision for the Future of Asteroid Mining

Abstract

In recent years, the contradictions between various energy problems, environmental problems and human development have become more and more intensive, and the imbalance distribution of natural resources in various countries has become severe. In order to address these problems, the concept of asteroid mining came into being, which brings people the hope of obtaining resources from outer space. In this paper, we model global equity in the context of asteroid mining, and ask how people's lives could be improved. What will happen to the fairness of the world? First, in order to build a model to measure global equity, we select some indicators according to Maslow’s Hierarchy of human needs theory, including happy-planet-index, youth employment rate, life expectancy, infant mortality rate, and the proportion of female students to male students in higher education in 2021 of eight zones to construct the EWM-TOPSIS model, results illustrate that UK is the most unfair country and Japan is the fairest country. The equity indexes is classified into three levels, and are used to achieve the clustering of the fairness degree of each country in the world. Second, we describe the current status of asteroid mining, and realize that although the asteroid mining project is developing rapidly at the technical level, there is still a lack of global unified regulation and constraints at the institutional level. On this basis, we design a mature and complete global asteroid mining system, and envision the distribution of the mined resources according to the nature endowments.