Here's how space mining could be the solution to pollution on Earth

You don't need to be a scientist to understand that the mining industry is, at least to some degree, impacting Earth negatively. So, how do we solve this problem?

Well, there are a few ways humans can solve the pollution issue from the mining industry, and one of them is to take our mining ventures off Earth and into space. As explained by Kurzgesagt in the above video, many of the metals found in very common devices are metals that are ripped out of Earth, and through the extraction process there's a loss of "biodiversity soil erosion, and contamination of surface water, groundwater, and soil."

Luckily, these same metals are also found in space but are trapped inside the surface of asteroids. If humans pooled their resources together to attempt landing on one of these asteroids to harvest its resources, and when considering the sheer size and resource capacity of some asteroids floating close to Earth, we could potentially rule out any mining done of Earth altogether. The idea would be to change one of the resource-heavy asteroids' trajectory and redirect it, so it was much closer to Earth.

Humans would then land robotic drilling machines on the surface of the asteroid and begin harvesting the resources - flying them back down to Earth's surface periodically. Committing to this method of mining, or essentially -- space mining, not only solves a large portion of the pollution issue on Earth, but also propels humans forward as a civilization that is now utilizing the resources in our solar system.

For more information on this topic, check out this link here.