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# Fully Automated Luxury Communism A Manifesto

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The asteroid belt likely contains some 825 quintillion tonnes of iron with 140 pounds of nickel for every tonne of iron. According to one estimate, the mineral wealth of NEAs – if equally divided among every person on Earth, would add up to more than \$100 billion each. If we can access it, nature ofers not only more energy than we can ever imagine, but more iron, gold, platinum and nickel too. Right now the resources we have access to are like a crumb in a supermarket. With the right technology mineral scarcity too would become a thing of the past.

The necessary advances to make asteroid mining a reality are steadily emerging. Japan’s unmanned Hayabusa spacecraft successfully landed on the 25143 Itokawa asteroid in 2005, returning to Earth with samples of material from its surface five years later. In 2014 the Japanese Space Agency launched a successor mission, Hayabusa 2, with the asteroid 162173 Ryugu – widely viewed as the most cost-efective option for asteroid mining – its intended destination. Hayabusa 2 landed in June 2018 and is expected to return to Earth with samples some time in 2020.

Japan isn’t the only country on the march when it comes to prospecting asteroids, however – in 2016 NASA launched OSIRIS-REx to study and sample the asteroid 101955 Bennu, with a scheduled return date of 2023. Unsurprisingly China has similar ambitions with the China National Space Administration looking to send and return a lander to the dwarf planet Ceres at some point during the 2030s.

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But while most of the investment is coming from states, as has always been the case with space exploration, it is the private sector which is looking to reap the benefits. The leading actors in this embryonic field – Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources – have chosen to adopt a similar approach to one another, focusing on prospecting asteroids through a mix of low-cost satellite technology and landers. DSI have developed what they call the Xplorer while Planetary Resources have a strikingly similar architecture which goes by the name of Arkyd. With local fuel generation and mining some way of, the aim with this opening round of products is to better understand the composition of target asteroids as well as identify deposits of ice which could, in future, be converted into propellant. As with Moon Express, the missing link is the ability to create fuel of-world in a process entirely free of human oversight. Given the rapid improvement of things like autonomous robots and vehicles since 2004 that is likely sooner than you think.

Indeed Chris Lewicki, CEO of Deep Space Industries, is optimistic on this issue, speculating that the first commercial extraction of water on an asteroid will happen by the mid-2020s. That, combined with the rise of regular, ultra-cheap launches, and increasingly sophisticated landers and robotics, will shape the opening rounds of asteroid mining. When combined with improvements in precision robotics – see the rapid development of the Atlas robot – an outline for the necessary technologies begins to emerge.

Once the likes of Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources have prospected and claimed asteroids, and perfected methods to produce propellant from available ice, the industry will move from viable to profitable. This will be followed by a second round of products – extractors – which would use the propellant from asteroids to push them closer to

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Earth for mining or – for those with particularly large concentrations of water – to create the ‘gas stations’ for a burgeoning industry looking ever farther outwards.

The Scramble for Space

A 2012 Caltech study concluded it could cost as little as \$2.6 billion to move an asteroid into near Earth orbit for easier mining. That was confirmed in a 2017 report by Goldman Sachs which stated, ‘while the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high, the actual financial and technological barriers are far lower. Prospecting probes can likely be built for tens of millions of dollars each’. While \$2 billion might sound like a lot, it is comparable to the sunk cost for a new rare earth mine, which MIT presently puts at around \$1 billion. All of which means that once the full architecture is in place for asteroid mining, perhaps as soon as 2030, the marginal cost of each new mine will fall for every asteroid that is exploited. This will create a feedback loop of ever-improving infrastructure and rising incentives to extract minerals beyond our home planet.

That isn’t to say asteroid mining doesn’t have significant challenges to overcome before becoming a viable industry. Robots with the requisite levels of sensory-motor coordination are likely decades away although, as already highlighted in Chapter Four, that is more a question of when rather than if. Of greater concern is that the precise composition of asteroids, beyond predictive models based on broad categories, remains unknown. What if a company chose an asteroid only to find, upon arrival, that it holds far less water and platinum than expected? Between that and the immense costs required, specifically in robotics, it is dificult to see how nimble actors like DSI and Planetary Resources will fare when the likes of

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SpaceX and Blue Origin will have more developed technology and far greater capital to risk.

Nevertheless, all of these problems can be surmounted – although as with all emerging industries how it will unfold is impossible to predict. But given the terrestrial challenges asteroid mining could address, primarily resource scarcity, as well as the new horizons it will undoubtedly open up, its rise over the coming century appears inevitable.

Abundance beyond Value

There is one final issue, however, that many in the industry appear unwilling to face. It is a problem born of success, much as the Horse Manure Crisis of 1894 placed the limits of the First Disruption against the abundance of the Second. It is also a problem born of extreme supply, which, as we ’ve already seen, is dificult to reconcile with the price mechanism.

You see, there is so much mineral wealth beyond our planet, on other planets, moons and asteroids, that the moment ofworld mining becomes a viable industry, the price of the very commodities investors had previously found so precious will collapse.

The most instructive example here is the asteroid 16 Psyche, located in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. Measuring over 200 kilometres in diameter, it is one of the largest asteroids in our solar system, composed of iron, nickel and rarer elements such as copper, gold and platinum. The ‘value ’ of this giant floating mine? Around \$10,000 quadrillion – and that’s just the iron. To be clear, Psyche is a rarity. But it demonstrates a crucial point: mining space would create such outlandish supply as to collapse prices on Earth.

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In August 2017 Peter Diamandis, co-founder of Planetary Resources, asked Blue Origin’s Erika Wagner who would win in a fight between her boss, Jef Bezos, and Elon Musk. ‘So, Peter, let me tell you about what we ’re doing at Blue Origin,’ Wagner diplomatically replied. ‘We ’re really looking towards a future of millions of people living and working in space. The thing I think is really fantastic … is that the universe is infinitely large, and so, we don’t need any fisticufs … we ’re all going to go out there and create this future together.’

While Wagner is correct in identifying that our solar system has more mineral wealth than we can possibly imagine, the likes of Musk and Bezos aren’t risking their personal fortunes – the former stood on the brink of bankruptcy multiple times while refusing to take SpaceX public – so that others can get rich. What is more, once the shareholder model is applied to companies like DSI and Planetary Resources, and their inevitable competitors, the emphasis will be on the rate of return rather than social progress.

As we ’ve already seen with information in the early twenty-first century, under conditions of abundance capitalism pursues a form of rationing in order to ensure profits. Given the potentially limitless wealth made possible by asteroid mining, that same logic would be applied by private enterprise in the sector and their allies in politics.

As with information, and soon renewable energy too, that will necessitate the formation of temporary monopolies of some kind. How might this look? One answer is that private companies will prospect and claim the most valuable asteroids decades before even attempting to exploit them – something we are already beginning to see. Another might be intellectual property rights applied to certain technologies used for mining, perhaps in the process of converting ice to fuel, creating scarcity there instead. Finally, and perhaps most sensibly, one could foresee the adoption of predatory pricing for commodities mined of-world, with the price of each fixed marginally below the cost of operating the cheapest terrestrial mines. This would serve to keep drills turned of on Earth while maintaining price stability and guaranteeing huge profits for mining companies.

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It isn’t hard to imagine how this might be justified by big business and the political establishment, with of-world mining companies presenting themselves as custodians of the future. ‘We have learned our lesson as a species,’ they might say, internalising seemingly progressive arguments from the green movement. ‘We have ruined one planet, we will never ruin others.’ In the meantime, as Peter Diamandis has publicly predicted, those engaged in mining would join the ranks of the wealthiest people on Earth.

That isn’t to say such abundant resources should not be managed responsibly, nor that we should exploit of-world mines as recklessly as we have treated the Earth. Rather, the Outer Space Treaty should be made clearer, in particular the rules concerning the exploitation of of-world minerals for profit. A template here might be the Madrid Protocol within the Antarctic Treaty System,<sup>\*</sup> Article Three of which states the ‘protection of the Antarctic environment as a wilderness with aesthetic and scientific value’ shall be a fundamental consideration, while Article Seven adds, ‘any activity relating to mineral resources, other than scientific research, shall be prohibited’.

Similarly, the Outer Space Treaty states that the exploration and use of outer space is ‘the province of all mankind’. But lacking the clear language of the Madrid Protocol, the Treaty would appear to necessitate an international body to ensure the fair distribution of wealth before private entities, like DSI and Planetary Resources, can take a thing. Indeed, President Eisenhower alluded to precisely that when, addressing the United Nations in September 1960, he proposed the world ‘press forward with a program of international cooperation for constructive, peaceful uses of outer space under the United Nations’.

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\* Addressing the General Assembly on 22 September 1960, President Eisenhower indeed proposed that the principles of the Antarctic Treaty be applied to outer space and celestial bodies.

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Space is indeed the province of us all, if for no other reason than the technologies which bring its abundance ever closer were impossible without public funding. The money spent on the International Space Station alone totals some \$150 billion, a similar figure to that of NASA’s Apollo missions.<sup>\*</sup> From the V2 to Sputnik, and even today’s SpaceX, the costs of space exploration have been socialised. It is only right, therefore, that the gains be as well. Private business was incapable of even launching a liquid-propellant rocket into orbit until 2008, sixty-four years after a V2 left the Earth’s atmosphere. So much for private sector innovation.

Capitalism has a number of useful features. Yet none of its shortcomings match its inability to accept natural abundance. Facing such conditions for resources – as with information, energy and labour – production for profit begins to malfunction.

All of this can be explained by the fact capitalism emerged in a world fundamentally diferent to the one now coming into view. That meant it accepted a diferent set of presumptions – ones it took as permanent, but which were, in fact, contingent. Faced with a limitless, virtually free supply of anything, its internal logic starts to break down. That is because its central presumption is that scarcity will always exist.

Except now we know it won’t.

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\* In 1973 dollars it was calculated to have cost \$25.4 billion.

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7 Editing Destiny: Age and Post-Scarcity in Health

We are as gods … we might as well get good at it.

Stewart Brand

An Ageing Species

By 2020, for the first time in human history, there will be more people over the age of sixty-five than under the age of five. By 2050 there will be more people over sixty-five than under fourteen. This is perhaps the crowning achievement of our species – nowhere else in nature do the old outnumber the young.

While certainly welcome, such a shift brings with it numerous problems, not least that living longer, while having fewer children, imperils forms of collective insurance which presume a larger ‘working age ’ population than dependents. Indeed, those first two conditions have, in many countries, already been met and are presently going global. What remains uncertain is whether public pensions and socialised elderly care will be viable in the future. If not, it would be ironic: capitalist afluence means more of us reach old age, yet many would lack the resources to be cared for.

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In the middle of the seventeenth century the philosopher Thomas Hobbes described life in a state of nature, a hypothetical condition without government or rule of law, as ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Those words, particularly the last, could have been applied far beyond the shores of Hobbes’s England. Besides the issue of war in both his homeland and abroad – relative constants prior to the twentieth century but particularly severe in the 1640s – his was also a world absent of modern medicine and where adult men rarely lived beyond forty. By the mid-1800s, however, that had changed as the application of the scientific method to healthcare and hygiene saw the mortality rate of infants and children sharply decline. Previously high fertility rates, combined with more children surviving to adulthood, inevitably meant unprecedented population growth among those countries at the forefront of the Second Disruption.

The implications of this were profound. While it took hundreds of thousands of years for the world’s human population to reach 1 billion by 1800, it would only be another hundred and twenty before it doubled once more. This proved to be just the start, however, and by the end of the twentieth century the Earth’s human population had reached 6 billion, with forecasts for the middle of this century of around 9.6 billion. If confirmed that will mean the world’s human population has increased tenfold in around 300 years.

Two other trends accompanied this surge in population. The first was extended life expectancy. By 2015 the average human, anywhere in the world, could expect to reach seventyone years of age – an improvement of four decades on even the early twentieth century. The second was an inverse correlation, with fertility rates falling as a country becomes wealthier. Just as a country’s population increases during industrialisation, this later self-adjusts as birth rates fall once a certain level of development is attained. Thus while the last two centuries have seen the world’s population surge, and the time between respective doublings becoming successively shorter, this is now slowing down, and many expect the world’s population to peak towards the end of this century. Just as with energy consumption, it appears that there is something of a ‘natural’ limit on demographic growth.

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While this is positive from the perspective of distributing limited resources – in the mid-twentieth century many viewed the rate of population growth as liable to continue indefinitely – the challenges presented by societal ageing are, if anything, even greater.

That much was clear in a 2013 simulation conducted by the credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s which found that, as a result of ageing demographics, 60 per cent of the countries analysed were predicted to see their credit status reduced to junk within a generation. Their subsequent conclusion, unsurprisingly, was that the status quo was unsustainable and that major reforms, from increasing the pension age to shrinking the public sector, were necessary. A larger study published three years later revealed less pressing problems, concluding only a quarter of countries seemed destined for trouble as people lived longer and fertility rates continued to fall. Yet perhaps most notable about that second report’s findings was the geographical spread of the countries it identified with the Ukraine, Brazil, China and Saudi Arabia all facing major problems ahead. It appears the prospective crisis of elderly care is bigger than any single economic model or set of cultural values.

What is more, ageing will diminish growth. In 2016 the research division of the US Federal Reserve published a paper detailing how changed demographics will render central banks powerless to raise long-term interest rates. Citing an example based on the changing demographics of the United States it concluded, ‘low investment, low interest rates and low output growth are here to stay … the US economy has entered a new normal’. These trends are observable across the Americas, Europe and Asia. While the default policy response in recent decades has been calls for greater immigration (with a few exceptions such as Japan), given ageing is one of the inevitable consequences of the Second Disruption – an experience that has and will continue to visit every society – that is clearly inadequate. As Africa and Asia experience the same trends that Europe and America did before them, the call for economic migrants to make up labour shortages will increasingly be met with the response, ‘from where?’

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