Risks in future asteroid mining.

There are two ways to look at the story of the 1^st issue of Vanishing Point comic book. First, it’s a story about an astronaut discovering a whole new lifeform out there in the space, or that said astronaut slowly losing his mind over time while working in extreme isolation.

Jim is an astronaut who is the captain of a Gold Class Harvester spaceship named Carpenter. He is the only crew member on that ship. His job is to harvest rare earth elements from asteroids. So he is operating his harvester in the Main Asteroid Belt where asteroids with rare elements are in abundance. During one of his mining missions he gets into an accident. An asteroid veers off course and hits his spaceship. Jim hits his head and sustains some injuries while the Carpenter takes damage to its digital communications system. So the ground control from the Earth switches Carpenter’s communications to its backup radio communications system, which means no more video calls, voice messages only. Soon after that screams begins.

Are rocks alive?

Only alive rock on the Earth is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. All other rocks are just inanimate objects. But our astronaut Jim has made a huge discovery. He found that some asteroids cry when they are being crushed by the harvester. He discovered this after switching ship’s communications into its backup radio communications system. Radio system was somehow picking asteroids’ screams.

Then Jim began receiving binary signals from the asteroids. After decoding, those signals contained a message. The asteroids were asking why Jim was killing them. Jim realized that some asteroids in the Main Asteroid Belt were sentient. They had developed consciousness over millions of years.

This is the first way to look at the story. After finding out that he was killing sentient beings out here in the space, Jim had developed a guilty conscious. He couldn’t bear it. When he tried to reveal this huge discovery to his company, replies from the company implied that they were already aware of this but they did not care about some rocks in the far outer space from the Earth. As an attempt to convince himself that all of this was a mere hallucination, Jim did a spacewalk to have a closer look at the asteroids. He noticed that asteroids had vein patterns on them similar to neuron patterns in our brains. This realization, and the reality of his financial situation – that he had to crush and collect his quota of elements whether the asteroids were alive or not – made his mind snap.

Maybe his mind was already snapped from the beginning.

When The Carpenter collided with an asteroid, that impact launched Jim forward from his chair. He hit his head on a panel. Screaming asteroids and all other crazy stuff happened after this accident. Maybe Jim had sustained a serious head injury and having hallucinations all this time. Actually if that’s the case, it explains some inconsistencies in the story.

The Carpenter lost its digital transmitter because of the accident. But later Jim said that he received binary signals from the asteroids. How Jim interpreted binary signals when the digital communications system was down? If the Carpenter’s digital receiver was intact and capable of receiving and interpreting binary signals then what stopped the ground control from sending one way video feed to Jim?

Asteroids screaming is one thing. But from screaming to sending messages in human language to a spaceship has an astronomical intelligence gap between them. Asteroids need to figure out human language and human electronic communication methods and binary system in order to send a coherent sentence encoded in binary signal.

Jim had asked ground control to do something about the screams. Jim said they fixed it. But apparently it wasn’t fixed. Jim kept hearing them. So my bet is that there were no screams of highly intelligent asteroids which were floating through the Main Asteroid Belt. The head injury, extreme isolation and losing the ability to see his family because of the digital communications system failure may have caused hallucinations in Jim’s mind.

Captains going Ahab

Going Ahab is a coined term inside the story to describe the phenomenon of spaceship captains suddenly stopping communications with Earth and never returning home. Looks like “going Ahab” is a prevalent risk in the space mining industry. It’s a significant enough risk to make Jim’s wife Denise worry about her husband’s safe return. Her worry was warranted. Jim indeed went Ahab. Jim sent the Carpenter back home with the full quota of minerals, but he stayed behind and aimlessly floated into the asteroids field without any end goal. He stumbled upon a graveyard of dead, mummified astronauts. I have counted 13 dead captains in that picture alone. Total count of all the dead captains could be much higher.

Did they all hear the screams of the dying asteroids? Or did they all go insane from the extreme isolation? The real reason for people going Ahab doesn’t matter. The most important thing is that asteroid mining seems lucrative enough to afford some people going Ahab. Otherwise the company would have changed its operating methods to prevent losses.