As long as something like 99% of Antarcticas surface is below a mile or so of moving glacier ice, and behind an ocean covered by several meters of pack ice for most of the year, anything short of unobtanium isn't worth extracting there.
I agree with you here.
Even though the economics would be still much, much more sensible than any kind of extraterrestial mining.
Not true. You don't have to plow through pack ice with a multi-million dollar icebreaker ship with a multi-million dollar convoy following it to bring back resources from an asteroid. You could automate a return from Antartica probably as easily as you could automate an asteroidal return, so you could save money there. I'd even go so far as to say that by the time we have the robotics capable of mining an asteroid (not far off) we could probably apply them to Antartica as well (though in many ways the environment in Antartica is much harsher for machines); so I'll call that even as well.
However, you have to spend much more resources to get the resources back from Antartica due to what I just said about icebreakers/tankers, plus the fact that rocket fuel is on asteroids and a robot ship can float for free in space until it's trajectory brings it back to Earth + most of the materials you would build the return ship out of come from the asteroid, which you can't say about a tanker or a icebreaker.
But the pack ice problem might be taken care of and at least a small part of the ice sheet on land could be gone in a century or two, rendering it not much different from gold or oil extraction from Alaska at that point.
Yeah probably. Eh, it would probably still be colder, but maybe close enough.
The distance to Antartica is pretty far too, so we have to consider that. There are places not to far from the Antartic coast, but I don't think they are built up to handle a massive effort like sending off a mining expedition.
With space mining, you just use one of the pads you have already got to launch the stuff. The scale of infrastructure to start such a venture is smaller for asteroid mining, on the ground at least. You still have to build infratructure up in space, but you'd have to build it up in Antartica as well, so it's a wash here. But you don't have to go and build more pads to send stuff to space where you *might* need more ports/bigger ports to send stuff on this scale to Antartica. But I could be wrong.
Unless humanity has access to virtually limitless cheap energy, extraterrestial mining won't be feasible, and given enough energy any resource shortage could be solved here on earth.
We do have access to limitless cheap energy in space; it's called 24/7 sunlight. You're looking at this the wrong way.
In any case, why would you want to wreck another continent and incur more environmental penalties when the technology needed to exploit Antartica is much the same you'd need to exploit space? Why wreck our home when there is lots of dirtballs in space to wreck? Hell, it'd be easier and cheaper to do that simply because you *could* wreck them without recourse.
Hobbsyoyo, good luck finding your ice on small bodies inside of Jupiter's orbit unless you want to go chasing after comets
Inside of Jupiter's orbit is a hellhole, the radiation is extreme there. So I won't be looking for them there.
However, there are lots of near earth asteroids we could exploit that are relatively close, both physically and from a delta-V perspective (a measure of how much energy it takes to get somewhere in space). Asteroids and many moons also have much water, and believe it or not, many asteroids were former comets that lost most of their surface layers of water over time. But they still have it buried beneath the regolith.
I could see drilling for oil work, if you can find a place where the ice is not moving a lot. Does oil freeze?
Yeah brah, it's not helium.
(cars in Alaska have special plugs where you can plug in their heating units in parking lots to prevent this)
