lopsided and yet balanced

That dark matter and dark energy make up so much of our universe is rather peculiar. It isn't that they are dark, per se, it is that they do not react to light or an electromagnetic field, so they are undetectable. We know they exist because they do react to gravity and without them our observations of the universe don't make sense.

I wonder what a popular cocktail would be at the first Club Med resort located in a dark part of the universe.

I read recently about asteroid mining. There are 10s of thousands of near Earth asteroids (NEAs) and many millions of them out beyond Mars and before Jupiter. Of the NEAs, there are a few dozen of easily retrievable objects (EROs). Clearly we would start with the easiest EROs and work our way to the more difficult ones as we improve our space technology.

All asteroids can be classified into three major types, C-type that is mostly water and carbon, S-type which include a wide variety of metals but also a lot of rock and M-types which are similar to S-type but are much more metallic (10x) and less rocky. It is not known what is the ratio of these three types. Most of what can be mined is already plentiful on Earth and so it is not economical to mine unless mining becomes much less expensive and the mined products are used in space. Platinum as an example of a rare Earth metal, could be economically profitable to return to Earth, though, if an amount is brought down that is 2x or 5x what is the total amount that has been found on Earth, this could flood the market and drop the price lowering the economic feasibility.

In terms of how we actually mine the EROs, there seems to be three options:

1. we can transport the asteroid back down to Earth so that raw asteroid material can be processed on Earth
2. we can mine the asteroid where it is so as to get out of it the most important elements, or
3. we can create the space infrastructure to do in-space manufacturing by taking the asteroid, moving it to a processing area, processing it so as to get the water, carbon, metals and regolith, and then use those raw materials to create things like potable water, rocket fuel, iron ore, space bricks (bricks that can be used in space construction to reflect sunlight and block electromagnetic waves), and from the iron and other metallic ores any variety of steel products

What would be key to make this possible is to get robots and AI to a point where they can operate in space so that the expense of having people in space is removed. I can imagine a whole class of them:

• tugbots, one or more of these would be told to fly to the next ERO, attach to it in the strategic locations that they themselves determine, and then they collectively communicate to apply thrust to the ERO to move it to the desired orbit/location and then would detach and return to a refueling station, ready to be sent out to the next ERO
• capturebots - the tugbot would bring the ERO to a capturebot that would grab hold of the ERO and move it into the 'hopper' of the first processing plant. I imagine this capturebot is an arm attached to the processing plant that communicates with the tugbots to let the tugbots know that the asteroid is being held by the capturebot and so the tugbots are free to disengage
• processing plant - this would be a multi phase complex manufacturing facility that receives as input an asteroid of any of the three types above and is then processed such that some finished and some interim products are made, for example, it could make the potable water, the spaceship fuel and it could refine the various metals to produce space ingots 
• Fabrication plant - this could be connected to the processing plant to receive the ingots to then do orders of making finished products like metallic panels used for space ship or space station construction, and all sorts of other finished products that could be useful

Tugbots could be created on Earth and then shipped up into space, preloaded with fuel and can be used to help with the construction of the processing and fabrication plant. These two plants could be created on Earth in modules or sections that can be shipped up to orbit and then connected and configured.

So what is the purpose of all of this? What is the market? Who is the market? It is important that there becomes a market that is reasonably affordable for people to at first vacation in space in an LEO resort. Next, to be able to create much larger settlements that can be in the upper edge of LEO that has a centrifugal gravity and is intended for permanent residency. Then, to help build larger space ships that would only exist in space, for the purposes of having a large crew that works to go out and expand our presence in our solar system.

I have many more thoughts about this, but I will leave it here for now.