How plausible is this as a corporate motivation?

250 years in the future, humanity has colonized Mars and the Moon, and built thousands of orbiting outposts and hundreds of O'Neill cylinders in the zone between Venus and Jupiter. The key enabler of this development along with the associated population boom that comes with all this free space is the lucrative asteroid mining business, which saw a massive increase in profit in the 22nd century when antimatter production became efficient enough to support quick and easy travel throughout the solar system.

However humanity's providence has, as it usually does, created a problem. Civilization has overextended, and now requires more resources in the form of metals and liquid water to support all of its off-world colonies than it is capable of providing. Mars refuses to share its abundance of freshwater, preferring to look after its own people first, and Earth's water has become so contaminated with chemical runoff and antibiotic-resistant super-diseases caused by corporate negligence that its vast oceans and lakes are all but useless without expensive methods of filtering.

Without a steady drip of water and metal mined from the asteroid belt, humanity's offworld colonies will slowly waste away and die. The vast megacorporations that rule this future, ever eager to turn a profit, spin this resource crisis into a means with which to grab humanity by its collective balls and squeeze, effectively cornering the market on asteroid mining and its resources by virtue of being the only economic entities with enough resources to devote to the prospect. Decades later, they are the one thing keeping humanity afloat and more or less run society from the shadows by holding the billions of people who rely on their asteroid-mined water and metals to stay alive in the cold, vast expanse of space hostage.

To keep their business profitable, they've begun to bleed resources not just from the asteroid belt but the moons of Jupiter, mining additional ice from Europa to be shipped back to Earth and its off-world colonies. This water must first be desalinated, but compared to filtering the contaminated water on Earth, it still turns a profit, especially with the bulk it can be found in on Europa. As such, a large mining colony has been built inside the ice layer, extending down into the ocean below where in addition to ice mining the native wildlife can be studied for potential use in pharmaceuticals and the biotech industry. This colony is largely populated by scientists and a large number of noncons (non-consensual labor or "non-convicts"; essentially literal wage slaves who serve out their prison sentences doing unpaid manual labor for the company), as well as a small security force.

Is this kind of scenario (i.e. interplanetary water crisis) plausible? Would a mining/penal colony on Europa make sense as an investment in this environment?

posted over 8 years ago

Z.Schroeder‭

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