Back-of-envelope math: strip-mining Mercury would take ~6.9 centuries with a billion robots
davidad · x · 2026-10-02
Researcher davidad pushes back on Mercury-mining optimism with a Fermi estimate: the largest mining robot humans can operate harvests 8.5e6 ft³/day of raw material. Even a billion such machines (each with 3-5 human operators), under far more favorable conditions than Mercury offers, would need about 6.9 centuries to process the planet's volume. He takes this as a win for his 'at least several centuries' intuition.
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