Resources to justify long-distance space mining missions

Earth is setting up mining colonies on Tau Ceti e. But how can they justify the enormous cost of sending people there? ...Because during the initial exploratory missions, it was discovered that in addition to being human-habitable, the geology of TCe is just filthy with some natural resource(s), which are very scarce, very valuable, and most of all, very useful back on Earth.

What are those resources?

For example, some science fiction works revolve around mining the moon for helium-3. Is this a good enough resource to go to TCe for? What about other rare elemental isotopes?

Some notes:

• No unobtainium. I'm looking for some real-life ore or compound. Edit: Creative biological resources are okay, even if they currently do not exist. But if you're going for elements, try to stick to what we know exists.
• Implausibly large deposits of the resource are okay, i.e., I'm not so interested in the geological/biological processes that may account for how the resource got there; I'm more interested in the fact that there is a lot of it, and that there is not much of it on Earth.
• A round trip to Tau Ceti e would take about 30 years (from someone on Earth's frame of reference). It is also very expensive. Earth government can provide a lot of cheap labor, though, and the value of the resource(s) more than make up for the cost.

posted almost 9 years ago

Seth‭

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