Europe's dependency on imports of strategic metallic minerals is growing every year despite efforts in the development of recycling technologies and advances in material science that allow for the replacement of these minerals by alternative substitutes. External geo-political circumstances are now directing the attention of policy makers to assess the feasibility of exploiting mineral resources within the EU that are located under such difficult formations and depths that a few years ago they would have been out of scope of mining operations. The technological challenges to extract these minerals are, however enormous. Fundamental breakthroughs will be needed in the fields of automation (e.g. self-organised swarms capable of adapting to dynamic geo-environmental conditions), tele-presence (e.g. completely new modalities for individual and group perception), data transfer and automated processing (e.g. self-aware and adaptive autonomic data processing systems) in order to build the clean, robot-operated, intelligent mines of the future.The objective of the present proposal is to define and develop a series of FET Proactive topics that will provide foundational ICT knowledge for Europe's extractive sector to meet future technological challenges. This objective will be reached with the help of a foresight exercise that includes surveys and a series of complementary workshops. As a part of the foresight a future scenario will be created in which Europe is self-sustained in strategic minerals and large-scale underground developments are taking place. Working back in time by reversing the process that leads from basic research to full scale industrial demonstration, we intend to identify future industry requirements in the present and corresponding research avenues starting from the level of basic/exploratory sciences that could mature into technological solutions via applied research and demonstration by 2040 or beyond.