He said that if China had the same density of private cars as, for example Germany, it would have to produce 650 million vehicles -- a target that environmentalists say the world's supply of metal and oil would be unable to sustain.

Couple this with a press release by the WWF (World Wildlife Foundation) that in order to support global affluence we would need the equivalent of two more Earths, and you have a pretty bleak vision for the future. This is a problem for those of us who are space advocates because we know that the sentiments espoused by these institutions are simply wrong!

They would be right if we lived in an empty solar system, bereft of other planets, moons and asteroids. The fact of the matter is that we live in an incredibly resource rich solar system with a second planet (Mars) capable of supporting a civilization, moons such as our own with vast intrinsic resources such as titanium, iron, and aluminum, along with the products of impacts from asteroids and the asteroids themselves, rich with Platinum Group Metals (PGM's), cobalt, nickel, and iron.

These same resources are available on Mars from impactors as well as the hundreds of thousands of Near Earth Asteriods (NEO's) and the millions of main belt asteroids. Rich resources of water are now known to be on Mars and more limited amounts on our nearby Moon.

Hydrocarbons and water are known to be richly represented in comets and certain asteroids that may be extinct comets. With all of these riches, which easily exceed by orders of magnitude all of the proven reserves of Earthly metals, why would anyone make statements like the above?

The reason that these very well meaning, intelligent, people and groups in positions of influence make statements like they do is that they don't believe in their hearts that space either has these resources or that we can access them in a cost effective manner.

I have a friend, Dr. David Webb, who is responsible for many of the graduate programs in space studies around the globe. He was on the board of directors of the group that funded the study that became the basis of the book "Limits to Growth" which in turn influenced that Earth tone wearing Mr. Albert Gore to write "Earth in the Balance".

When "Limits to Growth" came out in the early 70's space was not considered as a solution to the "intractable problems of the limited nature of resources on the Earth". Dr. Webb related that he asked them why space was not considered. They replied that they saw no evidence that space had anything to offer in terms of solving these problems. Well maybe at that time there was some small validity to that position but no more.

We as a civilization have learned so much more about the nature and composition of Mars, the Moon, and the asteroids than we knew 30 years ago. Dr. William Boyngton and his team at the University of Arizona built the Gamma Ray Spectrometer on Mars Odyssey that has found literally oceans of water (or at least some small seas) resident a few feet below the surface of our planetary companion.

Couple this with the inferred metallic resources from impacted asteroids and you have the basis for a planetary civilization. Dr. Allen Binder was the principal investigator for the Lunar Prospector mission that found convincing evidence of water on the Moon. This validated the inferred measurements of Dr. Pedro Rustan's Department of Defense Clementine mission of a few years before.

We also have the inferred resources from metallic asteroid impacts on the Moon. Dr. John Lewis of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Lab, along with Dr. Tom Gehrels, Dr. Glow Helen, Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker assembled an avalanche of data concerning the number of NEO's and their composition.

Dr. Lewis likes to point out that one of literally thousands of NEO's of metallic composition like the 500 meter in diameter 3554 Amun is worth, at today's market prices, over $20 trillion dollars worth of PGM's , gold, cobalt, nickel, and iron. Literally hundreds of trillions of dollars of resources are littered around our cosmic back yard with no pesky natives to exterminate. What we seem not to have today is the will by the Earth's global leadership to do anything about it.

NASA, with its current mindset of science over everything is not doing anything to develop these resources. Since the end of the Apollo program NASA has been dominated by the scientific community that works on a consensus basis. Consensus is a decent way to do science but has little value in developing and implementing pro development polices for the nation. ESA is constructed the same way.

Maybe this could be the great gift of the Chinese people to mankind to aggressively go after the development of these resources. Why not? The choice is clear, even for the west in a few decades. The oil is eventually going to run out. That is a one hundred percent probability event. The climate is going to change, whether or not we rein in hydrocarbon burning, that also is a one hundred percent probability event.

We have lived in a blissfully benign climate for the past several thousand years and this climate is the anomaly not the norm. In the blink of a geologic eye we have transitioned to and from Ice Ages several times within the evolutionary lifetime of man and almost within recorded history. All we need today to enable us to break our chains of planetary resources depletion is to utilize the vast resources that are around us.

What we lack today is bucks for Buck Rogers, not technology, not ideas, not people willing to dedicate their lives to this great adventure. What we need is money. This is the crux of the issue. Money, not a lot of it either in comparative terms.

We have recently spent a hundred billion dollars taking care of some bad guys in the Middle East. If we do not find a way to free ourselves from our slavery to the hydrocarbon molecule we will have to do this again and again. We could put a fraction of these expenditures into developing space resources.

China recently spent about $26 billion dollars for the work associated with the Three Gorges Dam. We in the U.S. have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to build our Interstate Highway system and other large infrastructure projects.

Our technological capabilities have advanced so far in the past 34 years since Apollo 11 and its 16k of RAM computer landed on the Moon. We can do this without the near national mobilization that Apollo took. Government supporting private enterprise (not as contractors but as implementers) can do this.

What is the alternative?

The Chinese people as well as the rest of the world's poor have a legitimate right to the same level of affluence that Americans and other advanced nations enjoy. Americans and people the world over deserve a better tomorrow than yesterday and today. It should be the best destiny of America to open the space frontier to all mankind. It is our duty to move this forward. The future is not written in stone. The future is up to us, to our generation to build.

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