What motivation would people have for mining planetary rings?

People have proposed mining the moon for Helium-3 and mining asteroids for gold, iridium, and other precious metals. Suppose we have the means to do so in an economically-viable manner. We've got fusion power for long-term power generation far from Earth, space stations that can deal with the major problems of humans living in space for long periods of time, and clean-fusion based plasma thrusters with specific impulse measured in the millions of seconds range for scooting about the solar system.

With all of these developments, would there be any economically viable reasons to start mining the rings around the gas giants? What resources could be found there that would motivate people to start mining there, instead of hunting for those resources in other environments. Lastly, if the resources found in planetary rings aren't worth obtaining at the proposed level of technology, what sort of technological developments would be required to make such mining operations economically viable?

posted almost 9 years ago

ckersch‭

31 reputation 30 2 4 0