Human society, particularly in its industrialised, modern form, is resource hungry. The idea that our supplies of precious materials might run out and require mining from elsewhere has been a persistent theme in science fiction over many decades. Here I take a look at the many and varied mines in science fiction, and the idea that the resources of our cosmos are there for the taking [1].

Space Mining

The asteroids, principally those lying in a main belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, have been eyed with speculative eyes since the idea of space flight was first seriously explored. These rocks are debris left over from the formation of the solar system, gathered into a region held broadly stable by Jupiter’s gravity, but prevented by that same gravitational force from condensing into a single planet.

We now know that a fifth planet never existed in the asteroid belt’s orbit. However for many years, the idea that a planet might have disintegrated there raised the tempting prospect of exposed material rich in the dense metals locked into the core of planets like the Earth. This isn’t true, but some of the bodies are themselves large enough to have differentiated, while others may have been thermally processed in the early stages of the solar system’s formation. Individual asteroids range in composition from those formed of carbonaceous chrondrites (essentially rocky conglomerates) to others which are almost entirely made of solid iron. Crucially, with the mass of the asteroid belt scattered through a large volume, any attempt to exploit the mineral wealth to be found there can be carried out in low gravity conditions, which presents certain practical advantages. On the other hand, they must also be carried out in vacuum, with its accompanying challenges.

Asteroid mining was a staple of 1950s, 60s and 70s science fiction, with writers including Poul Anderson and Larry Niven placing many of their stories against an American-west inspired picture of independent prospectors, small-scale mining concerns and lawless frontier towns [2]. This picture has changed relatively little over the years, with the asteroid belt often seen as a haven for tough free-thinkers and a region likely to rebel against the influence of Earth. This is seen, for example, in modern science fictions such as the role of the Belters in The Expanse (TV, 2016-2022, based on the novels of S A Corey). There was also enormous scope for variants on the theme, as for example in John Varley’s Eight Worlds series (novels and short stories, published 1974-1986) in which the focus of speculative and individualistic prospectors shifted to the Oort belt, where they hunt for signs of microscopic primordial black holes, or Larry Niven’s Protector (novel, 1973) in which the characters search Saturn’s rings for magnetic monopoles.

An interesting alternative to this independent-miner paradigm is rooted in the commercial and industrial “New Space” vision of space exploitation. Here, asteroid mining comes instead under the aegis of large corporate concerns. An example is Stephen Baxter’s novel Time (1999), in which an unconventional entrepreneur launches an asteroid mining business (in this case redirecting his efforts to the near-Earth asteroid Cruithne). The same vision also informs children’s science fiction television such as Thunderbirds are Go (episode “Slingshot”, 2015), in which a commercial mining incident throws asteroid 21 Lutetia out of its orbit, necessitating the rescue of the crew (consisting of one man, Ned Tedford, and one geranium, Gladys). The vulnerability of the workers in such a profit-driven environment was highlighted by Doctor Who episode “Oxygen” (2017), in which the workers of the Chasm Forge asteroidal copper mine were declared unprofitable - and hence expendable by their corporate masters.

Many of the same themes (e.g. isolation, commercialism vs individualism, atmosphere and resource limitations, albeit not zero gravity) can be found in narratives of mining in hostile planetary environments. Prospecting on Earth’s Moon is a common theme, appearing for example in Heinlein’s novels, as well as (memorably) in the film Moon (2009, dir. Jones) where the protagonist oversees a commercial and largely robotic Helium-3 mining operation. A more extreme case can be found in stories of mining under the hot sun-side conditions of Mercury. Again, Thunderbirds Are Go has an example here (episode “Night and Day”, 20218), as does Arthur C Clarke with the Hermian settlers of Mercury in Rendezvous with Rama (novel, 1973). Children’s television series Escape from Jupiter (TV, 1994) also begins with a flight from a mining settlement on Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io.

Mining colonies on other planets with varying degrees of hostility are common fodder for science fiction serials, including Star Trek, whose starship Enterprise frequently comes to the aid of mining outposts (as in, for example, “The Devil in the Dark”, 1967 [3]). Doctor Who, for example, placed a mining colony on hypothesised volcanic planet Vulcan (in "Power of the Daleks", 1966). Further afield, the Star Wars universe also has a number of such mining outposts, most memorably on volcanic world Mustafar, where Anakin Skywalker acquired the injuries that transformed him into Darth Vader (most clearly shown in Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith, film, 2005, dir. Lucas).

Mining and Exploitation

A related but distinct theme in mining narratives of science fiction is to provide a commentary on the exploitative and environmentally-harmful practices of commercial mining operations - sometimes dubbed extractivism (extracting resources from one location for the benefit of those elsewhere rather than the local peoples or environment). By transposing these narratives to other planets rather than other countries, authors can explore the consequences of such mining for the indigenous peoples and others without risking local sensitivities or making specific accusations.

Probably the best known example here is the blockbuster film Avatar (2009, dir. Cameron). In this narrative, a military force is deployed to strip mine the planet Pandora (technically a moon of a gas giant rather than a moon in its own right) for the essential mineral unobtanium which underlies key Earth technologies. However this is done against the resistance of the native Na’vi, whose environment and lifestyle will be destroyed by the mining. The film’s narrative shows a human researcher, studying the natives, gradually being won over to their viewpoint and eventually leading their attempt to stop the corporate mining concern involved.

However this theme again appears in earlier science fiction. Resistance by the native Fremen against mining for the narcotic spice on the planet Arrakis provides a setting for the political and cultural narratives of the Dune series (novels, television and films, starting with Dune, Frank Herbert, 1965). The television series Doctor Who also explored this topic in stories such as “Colony in Space” (1971), in which the unethical practices of the Interplanetary Mining Corporation are opposed both by the natives of planet Uxarieus and by human settlers in search of a more sustainable lifestyle.

Another interesting take on this premise can also be found in another feature film Star Trek: Insurrection (1998, dir. Frakes). In this narrative the crew of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV series, 1987-1994) become involved with the plight of the pastoral Ba’ku people. Rather than mineral resources, their planet possesses a constant shower of “metaphasic particles” from its rings which give longevity and rejuvenation. Another race attempts to relocate the Ba’ku in order to strip their planet and its rings of these particles. As might be expected, this plan faces resistance from the Enterprise crew.

Atmospheric Mining

The mineral resources mentioned above may be most common in terrestrial environments or rocky worlds, but an alternative source of resources for humanity might instead be found in the dense gas envelopes of giant planets.

Perhaps the best known gas mine in science fiction floats in the atmosphere of gas giant planet Bespin in the Star Wars film The Empire Strikes Back (1980, dir. Kershner). Run by Lando Calrissian, this is described as refining “tibanna gas”, a fictional but apparently desirable material.

However this was far from a new idea. “Industrial Revolution” by Poul Anderson (writing as Winston P Sanders, Analog, Sept 1963) is a familiar story of a fight for independence by asteroid miners. However a key crunch point in the growing conflict occurs on a station built into an asteroid that travels between the asteroid belt and Jupiter on its orbit. As we’re told:

"Jovian gas is rich stuff," he explained. "Chiefly hydrogen and helium, of course; but the scoopships separate out most of that during a pickup. The rest is ammonia, water, methane, a dozen important organics, including some of the damn ... doggonedest metallic complexes you ever heard of. We need them as the basis of a chemosynthetic industry, which we need for survival, which we need if we're to get the minerals that were the reason for colonizing the Belt in the first place."

The scoopships released their yield in balloons which were collected at the asteroid-based processing station. Anderson’s interest in the possible future of the asteroid belt was manifest in a large number of his stories, and Jupiter-diving scoop-shops from a later period in the development of this society also form the focus of the novella Que Donn’rez Vous (first published as What’ll You Give? as by Winston P Sanders, Analog, April 1963), which appeared in his linked collection of asteroid-belt stories Tales of the Flying Mountains (1973).

Both the concept of scoop-ships (either collecting gas for commercial purposes or able to refuel themselves from passing planets) and of floating balloon collection was widespread in science fiction for years, appearing in other examples such as The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (novel, 1974) [4]. Gas giant mining is also a feature of Kevin J Anderson’s Saga of the Seven Suns (novels, 2002-2008) and of Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space universe (novels, 2000-2021), where refineries are mentioned, for example, in the atmosphere of the whimsically-named gas giant planet Tangerine Dream. Indeed in some examples, attempts are made to mine the core of giants, as well as their envelopes, with dense materials such as metallic hydrogen potentially available if they can be extracted from below the depths of atmosphere.

This concept has also made it into children’s science fiction. The 2002 animated series Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future included a two part story “Saturn Rocs” which combined critique of commercial resource exploitation with concern over the rights of native intelligences (as discussed above) when giant, stingray-like creatures are discovered during scouting for a new “meta-helium” fuel supply in Saturn’s gaseous envelope.

While Saturn is unlikely to host such advanced life, the mining of our own solar system’s giant planets has been discussed in scientific and commercial literature - perhaps most prominently by the Project Daedalus study developed by the British Interplanetary Society in the 1970s. This proposed an interstellar probe powered by an inertial confinement fusion rocket, and enabled by first mining Jupiter or Neptune for deuterium and Helium-3 (both rare gases on Earth). The idea was revived as Project Icarus in the 2000s and remains under discussion amongst enthusiasts, despite its enormous associated costs.

Undersea Mining

Having considered rocky worlds and gaseous ones, it’s also appropriate to turn our attention to another element often explored in science fiction: the idea that Earth’s oceans may themselves prove a valuable source of resources for human exploitation [5].

Undersea mining operations - both gas extraction and mineral mining - form a crucial worldbuilding element of submarine science fiction. The foundational text of the subgenre, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (novel, Verne, 1870) described Captain Nemo mining underwater coal seams in his Nautilus. Just as mining outposts form frequent ports of call for the starship crews of series like Star Trek, they are also a preoccupation for the super-submarines Seaview in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (TV, 1964-1968), seaQuest DSV (TV, 1993-1996) and even Stingray (TV, 1964, whose crew mostly spend time patrolling against hostile aquaphibians, but sometimes has to defuse tensions between human miners and other undersea natives).

In seaQuest DSV in particular, the scientific and semi-military mission of the titular vessel is set against a picture in which the exploitation of Earth’s oceans, and their colonisation, is under rapid development, with a population very similar in principle to the independent mindset often portrayed for asteroid miners. The formation of a United Earth Oceans (UEO) organisation to parallel the more terrestrial United Nations recognises and attempts somewhat to police this new frontier. Indeed direct parallels with the Old West were drawn in the seaQuest episode “seaWest” (1993), which features lawlessness in an underwater gold mining settlement.

Like seaQuest, the earlier Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea spent a fair fraction of its time visiting undersea mines. By contrast though, these tended to be more experimental, scientific stations with small crews, rather than the more free-for-all approach of an undersea frontier. Other science fictions, for example the long running Tom Swift series of children’s novels (e.g. Tom Swift and His Deep Sea Hydrodome, novel, 1958) or Jack Williamson and Frederick Pohl’s Undersea Trilogy (novels, 1954-1958), also considered fixed ocean floor mines, often under large domes allowing machinery to be operated without the problem of a salt-water environment.

An alternative to the idea of individual mining settlements is the possibility that resources can be extracted by less static means. Polymetallic nodules are nuggets of (almost pure) metal which condense from ocean water onto impurities such as sand or shell fragments. These can contain a variety of rare minerals (notably manganese and iron oxides) and grow to fist sized, or even larger. They are believed to cover a large fraction of the deep ocean bed, although their abundance varies.

Commercial harvesting of these from the ocean sediment has been proposed repeatedly over the years, with a number of firms currently engaged in exploratory technology development, against the opposition of ocean scientists. Such mining would require crawling vehicles much like a combine harvester, but capable of operating under pressure in the deeps. The near future, technology-rich world of Thunderbirds Are Go (again!) includes an example of such a device (episode “Under Pressure”, 2015), although in this case the machine is intended to collect toxic heavy metal waste and clean the ocean floor rather than explicitly mining. Either way, its crew soon requires rescue from International Rescue’s submarine Thunderbird 4.

The destructiveness of such mining continues to draw protests and objections from marine scientists, who have pointed out that much of the ocean floor and its ecosystems remain poorly understood. The recent discovery that electric currents between metal nodules may be an important source of oxygen production through electrolysis might well strengthen the call for further research before large scale deep sea mining is permitted.

There for the Taking?

Despite their very different settings, these stories of mining have key themes in common. Much of the science fiction of resource acquisition is now interpreted in the context of extractivism dialogues - either because of the unquestioned assumption that humans (either as a species or as corporate entities) have an absolute right to extract whatever resources they wish from the universe around them, or because the story is deliberately positioned to challenge that assumption. Early fictions, including much of the asteroid mining dialogue, never doubted that humans, having depleted Earth of its accessible resources, could and should do the same in the asteroid belt. Increasingly, though, as was the case particularly with Avatar, such fictions deliberately set out to highlight the social and environmental challenges created by commercial pressures. Throughout though, most of these narratives are fundamentally aspirational - they look forward to technological futures and a humanity reaching out beyond its traditional confines.

There are questions to be asked over the plausibility and financial viability of many of the narratives.

The challenges of living in the gravity-free and atmosphere-free environment of the asteroid belt is significant. Human mining efforts would require substantial investment and need hurdles to be overcome in terms of both the miners’ health (musculature, circulation, digestion and reproduction would all suffer in low gravity) and simple subsistence (food, water and air would all need to be produced in situ). Indeed mining with robots would almost certainly be more economical, if such robots could be sufficiently autonomous in those conditions. There is also the challenge of returning any resources obtained to the main population centres - often Earth. This is all a question of changing the velocity of the cargo. Material mined in the asteroid belt will be moving with the orbital velocity of material at that distance from the Sun. To transfer it to Earth means placing it first on an elliptical orbit that falls in towards the Sun, and then recircularising it to match Earth. Thus anything travelling from the asteroids to Earth’s orbit must be slowed down by a significant margin, requiring fuel expenditure (fuel would also need to be obtained in situ) and carefully calculated orbital transfers. Many stories, such as those in Poul Anderson's Tales of the Flying Mountains, simply assume a cheap and energy-efficient form of space flight (in Anderson's case 'gyrogravitics') which lie beyond the constraints of current physics. One possibility that is perhaps more plausible given current knowledge might instead be to use asteroids on naturally highly elliptical orbits as transfer vessels - rendezvousing with them in the asteroid belt and separating as they pass Earth - although again this would require deliberate and expensive changes in velocity and direction (known as delta-v).

The same considerations would apply to mining of resources from the gas giants or beyond, and - to a large extent - also to mining on the Moon (from where returning materials to Earth is easier but first requires lifting against the moon’s own non-negligible gravity). In addition, both gas giant mining and deep ocean mining efforts face an additional challenge - they take place in environments in which technology must survive steep changes of external pressure, and potentially also exposure to corrosive materials which will limit the lifetime of any equipment.

All of these problems can, in theory at least, be overcome. Deep ocean submersible vehicles are a well established technology. Similarly existing interplanetary space probes and comet or asteroid rendezvous missions have demonstrated the technology required to reach the asteroid belt or other bodies. While mining in-situ has not been demonstrated, this is plausibly within the scope of current technology - certainly for robotic missions, and even for human missions given a waiving of health and safety concerns for the astronauts. However what is less clear is the economic viability of mining in extreme environments.

Whether we consider asteroid mining, mining on other solar system bodies or deep ocean mining, the development of large scale mining machinery that is sufficiently robust to operate autonomously over a long period despite the harsh environment is going to be expensive. Very expensive. The materials mined would need to have a very high value per unit weight to justify the initial investment and ongoing operations costs. This also precludes materials, such as gold, whose value relies on their scarcity. This may explain why so many of the narratives of non-terrestrial mining assume one of two scenarios

In the first, Earth has fully depleted its resources. While this is by no means unrealistic, increasing awareness of resource limitations and a push towards more sustainable technologies may perhaps be making it less likely as time passes. Where this scenario might yet come into play is in some of the rarer metals which form key elements of modern electronics and are used for semiconductor doping. An exhaustion of these metals could indeed occur, although innovation in material usage may yet be cheaper and more efficient than extreme mining of rare minerals.

In the second scenario, narratives circumvent this practicality by instead invoking a material that simply cannot be obtained elsewhere - famously Avatar’s unobtanium (which The Science of Avatar (non fiction, 2011), by science fiction writer Stephen Baxter, explains was created by a neutron star becoming stripped as it passed through Pandora’s proto-solar system) falls into this category. 

Advocates for asteroid mining have nonetheless continued to discuss its commercial viability. John S Lewis’s 1997 book on the topic Mining the Sky pressed the idea in the same vein of human space optimism that earlier gave rise to Gerard O’Neill’s The High Frontier (1976). Space technology expert and science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle published an earlier detailed essay on the subject in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in July 1975 (later rewritten as “Those pesky belters and their torchships” in his non-fiction book A Step Farther Out, 1979) in which he laid out the acceleration requirements and concluded that fusion technology might well be necessary to make asteroid mining viable, and even that would be challenging [Fig 18+19 from book]. Indeed, he considered an independent belt of family miners fundamentally unviable. Interestingly, he was able to accompany his article with his own novellette of asteroid-mining and the conflict he foresaw between individual and corporate interests, Tinker (1975). 

Into the modern era, asteroid mining continues to be an aspirational goal for technology entrepreneurs, with regular articles on the topic appearing both in academic press and in venues such as Harvard International Review, New Scientist, the BBC and CNN. However while technology development is continuing, and a number of start-up companies are pursuing this goal, its practical and commercial application, and a robust legal framework for asteroid mining, still feel a long way from fruition. 

Whether humanity has the moral right to deplete its environment of usable resources is perhaps most likely to come to the fore in debates of ocean floor strip-mining, where the chances of negatively affecting other life are demonstrably very real. However the same principles will undoubtedly apply to the asteroid belt and planetary surfaces in our solar system - where the possibility of life is slim but not entirely ruled out. Whether we ever get to apply the question to exo-worlds, let alone ones with intelligent life, remains a distant prospect both in time and probability.

In the meantime science fiction narratives will continue to explore the ethical implications, practical limitations, political consequences and eye-opening possibilities of mining new environments, whether beyond the skies or beneath the oceans of our own all too small world.