asteroid mining

The news that Google head honchos Eric Schmidt and Larry are-you-sure-you-want-to-leave-this Page have teamed up with James Cameron and others to back an initiative to extract precious metals and raw materials from some of the 1500 near-Earth objects, as they are called, is indeed the stuff of SF. Or the SF of stuff, if you like, because this is about other-worldly material like rhodium and platinum and their ilk.

Cameron's involvement certainly wins all our hearts. You know what's coming.

Just before the very first miners – let's call them Jack and Rose shall we? (this is an equal opportunities pit) – are about to descend in the rickety lift, Jack will tell Rose to close her eyes and he'll hold her outstretched arms as they stand at the prow of the asteroid and, well, need I go on?

The only difference here is that when he lets go of her hands, she'll float off into interstellar space, accompanied by that drippy music, doomed forever to orbit the earth.

Some people will even claim that on clear nights you can see her.

Later, inevitably, there will be a pay dispute. You can't expect miners to work that far away from home and just put up with it.

One of them asks if he can claim mileage ("That's 87,000 miles at 20p a mile."). Very quickly Google is bound to want to introduce new technology, there'll be talk of lay-offs and it will turn ugly. Arthur Scargill, whose body was cyrogenically frozen in 2041 in an unusual collaboration between the NUM and Microsoft, is brought back to life and flown to P45, a large, lumbering – and, let's face it, unemployed – lump of rock that has been on a benefits orbit around the Earth since it was a teenager.

"The sooner Mrs Thatcher realises the working people of this country -" he begins, before aides show him a sheaf of papers and he changes tack. "And that is why we will return to work with our heads held high."

And indeed they do; a whole, magnificent line of space-walking miners, all holding their glorious banners aloft (digital now though) and accompanied by a space colliery band wearing specially adapted giant helmets that can fit a euphonium inside. It's a splendid sight. Billy Elliot twinned with NASA.