Given that folks want to automatically mine asteroids I'm amazed at how little I can find on automating mining. There is this puff piece: http://www.miningaustralia.com.au/features/automation-leadin... from 2011 where someone from Rockwell Automation was trying to sell mining companies on this stuff but this should be an interesting topic for anyone who wants to do anything on remote planets/asteroids/moons.
Obviously no automatic machine is going to ever be as cheap as a few $1200/month miners here on Earth, but I wonder how that would work out in space. With the cost of sending people/equipment into space being huge anyway, sending humans might be actually more expensive than sending machines.
Good article, though writing the distances involved like this:
"twenty-four hundred and eighty vertical feet"
Makes it very hard to imagine. Partly because I would read 2480 as two thousand four hundred and eighty, and partly because they are changing between feet, yards and meters all over the place. The world will be a better place when the USA uses metric.
There is also an aspect of overcoming obstacles. The article intensely focused on the point that these guys had to leave their families and travel hundreds, thousands of miles to become miners. By definition these were the guys with the psychological makeup to survive, thrive in changes and challenges. So now they're stuck underground, but the population is already self selected for to be the peak achievers of a "can do attitude" in their culture... These dudes are old school tough.
If you just picked a random collection of cubical dwellers out of an office, they would not be intensely self selected for toughness and psychological endurance like these guys... they would be toast in a scenario like that.
I won't pretend I've ever gone thru anything like these guys, but in my .mil reserves time a long time ago, you don't volunteer to join and go to basic training unless you self selected as the small segment of the population who can survive basic training. So no anxiety needed. If you couldn't hack it you wouldn't be here to begin with, and that calmness gives strength, sometimes unnatural strength, when you need it. This sucks; but I can do it, that is the mindset. But again, I emphasize these guys are both tougher and have gone thru far worse than I've ever seen, I only caught a taste of what their life is like.
This is the aspect that is sometimes not understood about personal growth thru suffering. Its not the suffering or the pain that is the point, or going thru the motions of a ritual. Its the toughness.
There is a startup aspect to this. Old lion says something like "do it and fail at it, you'll be better off having failed". New lion is all WTF. The intentional rational cultivation of toughness, that is the point the new lion might not get.
