<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class="">As long as the planet didn’t belong to “everyone” or to “no one” (creating a tragedy of the commons), we would find ways to renew the resources we used. We might not need it for mining at all, as mining might be done in space; farming seems a much more likely use of a planet. Factories would be off-world, so pollution could be avoided. And human cities would be off-world, leaving only tourists and pilgrims to enjoy large wilderness preserves interspersed with the farms. Hence, rural, even wild, would describe the condition of such a planet.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Why, yes. I <i class="">am</i> an optimist. </div><br class=""><div class="">Tara Maya<br class="">Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads<br class=""><br class=""><br class=""></div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class="">On Dec 7, 2015, at 10:59 AM, Ben <<a href="mailto:bbenzai@yahoo.com" class="">bbenzai@yahoo.com</a>> wrote:<br class=""><br class="">Tara Maya <<a href="mailto:tara@taramayastales.com" class="">tara@taramayastales.com</a>> wrote:<br class=""><br class="">"It's interesting to imagine a future (fairly far out) where planets become the rural resource providers to the urban space station cities"<br class=""><br class="">I can agree that planets could well provide a lot of our resources in the longer-term future, but 'rural' is hardly the word I'd use to describe planetary-scale strip-mines. And in any case, they'd only last so long until you'd devoured them right down to, and including, the core.<br class=""><br class="">Ben Zaiboc<br class=""><br class="">_______________________________________________<br class="">extropy-chat mailing list<br class=""><a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" class="">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a><br class="">http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat<br class=""></blockquote><br class=""></body></html>