Question: By the time our natural resource levels become low, do you think we will be effectively harvesting them from large meteors or other planets?

James Hickey answered on 21 Nov 2013:

Hey Andyy,

From your questions you seem like quite the explorer…Nice one!

Again, I don’t think I can give a proper answer to this (without being able to predict the future). I’d like to think we will be – I’d love to be an astronaut, space travel is awesome and it would be great if we could preserve our way of life by efficiently managing resources from other planets/meteors.

However, one of our main resources are fossil fuels and being able to find these on other planets would require finding a planet that once had life on it (fossil fuels are the remains of old plants and animals). It would also need to be cheap enough for us to extract the resources from planets and transport them back across space to Earth. Both of these seem unlikely at the moment.

So I guess it is more likely that as our natural resources become depleted we discover and develop new resources. For example using Hydrogen, as it is highly abundant in sea water or other renewable resources. For this to work, we need scientists to work on new technology. Maybe you could be one of them.

But I still maintain hope that we can explore space before I die…:)