If you had that much precious metal it wouldn’t be precious anymore.
The really juicy targets for exploitation are carbonaceous asteroids and the wet asteroid Ceres, the latter of which could be cut up into a habitat for a population larger than Earth can support. People have this obsession with technology and metals but really it is Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen that drive civilization in terms of human bodies, cattle, fabrics, plants, food, plastics, chemicals, etc.
Colonizing Mars looks unimaginative and unambiguous in comparison.
Which raises the chances of conflict over said metals.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. On one hand, a single country can't just flood the market with a valuable material. But at the same time it can't hoard it indefinitely, as other countries will want a piece of the pie.
> On one hand, a single country can't just flood the market with a valuable material
Can you elaborate? A few centuries ago Spain extracted so much silver and gold from the American continent that the price of those precious metals suffered in consequence.
Thank you, I mistakenly believed that there had been substantial amounts of gold as well, but it appears like it was insignificant in comparison to the silver from Potosí.
That story foreshadows the way many think the UK economy was saved in the 1980s by the discovery of oil in the North Sea. (As opposed to Margaret Thatcher.)
Think of it as if a publicly traded company just issued bajillions of shares onto the market. This is what dilution is, and the price of each individual share plummets, thus screwing over all existing shareholders. Normally, dilution is limited, but with this, i would be like issuing many times more shares than already exist on the market.
Shares in a company only have value because society assigns them value. If you hold them until the company no longer exists or go back in time before the company existed they are inherently worthless.
If you have more gold than everyone on earth and you flood the market people can use it for any numerous uses that help humanity instead of making people rich.
Science research is often hurt by the fact that materials like gold and diamonds have such high prices.
More platinum group metals and gold might not make a big difference on Earth.
On the other hand decadbonization requires metals like nickel and cobalt as well as methods for producing steel that don’t release CO2 in the atmosphere. Trouble is it is still hard to be terrestrial sources.
Exactly. The main problem with any space mining or processing is the extreme cost of transporting materials to a destination. If you extract materials on Luna you use them in Luna, extract them on Mars you use them in Mars, etc. Earth will be the cheapest source of most things in cislunar space for a long time. By the time we can get platinum group metals on Earth people will have advanced a lot in developing iron-based, synthetic enzyme and other chemistry that makes platinum group metals obsolete.
> If you extract materials on Luna you use them in Luna, extract them on Mars you use them in Mars, etc.
The Moon and Mars are relatively deep gravity wells. The economics of extraction in a deep well are totally different from those on light platforms. For an asteroid, over the long run, transport costs are minimal. (You can move mass very slowly and thus efficiently when you have that much of it.)
I have some notes on the problem of making a factory that builds a solar sail factory on a carbonaceous asteroid and then the sails fly back on their own power to the Earth-Sun L1 point and get commissioned as sunshades to fight global warming. I gotta turn it into a serious write-up or presentation.
I think this solves the transport problem for space manufacturing. I know the math can sorta work if you use volatiles for transportation (e.g. rocket) but it seems so wasteful to me. Two problems that bug me are: (1) How do you capture volatiles that will be released when you disturb the surface? (Have to do this early before you have a storage tank factory running) and (2] How do you debug problems in the system with 10 min+ latency. Is it good enough to have a manned replica factory in cislunar space? Do you send people? If so do you just go “all in” in building a large habitat in the long term?
Wouldn't Earth's even bigger gravity well be a problem for getting asteroid metal to the surface of Earth? I think you would need a tremendous amount of rocket fuel to bring back large quantities of asteroid gold. I don't think you can just "drop" all that metal onto Earth for free.
Most of the asteroid is iron with some nickle even though most the articles talk up the gold and platinum. I would think steel would also be great in establishing habitats in space and it would be nice to have a source without the launch costs of getting it out of earth orbit.
While the average content of gold and platinum-group elements in an iron asteroid is many thousands of times higher than their average content in the crust of the Earth, that does not mean that these metals are easy to mine.
Unlike on Earth, where various processes have concentrated the precious metal into some deposits where they are much more abundant than on average, e.g. in alluvial deposits in river beds or in magmatic sulfide deposits, on such an asteroid the precious metals are dissolved in iron and spread uniformly through all the asteroid.
Therefore even if the total amount of precious metals is very great, a huge quantity of energy is required for its extraction. For instance, in order to produce one kilogram of gold more than four hundred tons of iron will have to be processed (e.g. by first producing hundreds of tons of some acid used to dissolve the iron and the other non-precious metals).
So it is very unlikely that we will see any such mining operation soon. There are other metals much easier to mine in such a place, e.g. iron, nickel, cobalt, germanium, chromium, gallium, manganese (but which are not worthwhile to be brought back to Earth).
Aside from the mining difficulties, I think the transportation costs of bringing large quantities of metal back to Earth would be expensive. Even if there were pallets of gold bars stacked neatly on the surface of the asteroid, it would be expensive to bring large payloads back on spaceships.
Ocean levels are going up anyway and that is a problem. It doesn’t seem that climate change is worsening hurricanes directly in Florida. But you better believe a lot of Miami is low lying and storm surges will get wors.pe.
My understanding is that almost all the water in small bodies inside Jupiter’s orbit is in Ceres and the amount of water on Ceres is similar to what is on the Earth’s oceans. I think it is better to send people there and grow a population organically as you could reassemble Ceres into more living space than Mars and get people ready for colonization of generic outer solar system and interstellar objects.
We talk about the ppm of co2 in effect on climate. I was even thinking of releasing additional o2 in that above comment. Or similar -“dissolve“ the carbon in additional atmosphere. But no ideas on secondary effects.
I think there's some fun chemistry we could do if we had gold reaction vessels. It's conductivity is pretty good, too, I bet the combination of that with it's corrosion resistance could be useful.
Just don't dump it on the market all at once? You sell it off slowly to maximize profit. Undercut the competition, put the terrestrial gold industry out of business, and capture the entire market.
If we ever reach a point where missions like this can be funded via private enterprise, we'll never actually hear about these objects. The real strategy is to come up with a fictitious "research initiative" then go to another object and secretly exfiltrate the precious metal loot. As to not flood the market on earth or earth bound markets (assuming we aren't trading between planets by then).
No, the money would be made in the futures market. Keep a competent mission secret and short futures contracts. Profits would be locked in long before launch.
One might say that strange huge bets in the futures markets would be the signal of a credible future mission - but BBs, CBs and BIS do that all the time, because they can put illegal naked shorts and rehypothecate where necessary (i.e. print paper gold contracts as if they had really mined an asteroid).
Asteroid mining is kinda the plot of Goldfinger, but in reverse. Don't go long and restrict supply with a nuclear detonation in Fort Knox (not that it has any unencumbered gold LOL), just short the metal and flood supply from the heavens.
I wonder why there aren't any missions to go to Saturn's moons for raw materials. Iapetus is basically a sphere made of ice and has an orbital velocity as low as 3.26km/s and 2% of earths gravity. I don't know anything about its solar resources but a large scale RTG should be enough to kickstart the industry.
Yeah I wondered the same thing - without doing any research beyond reading the article, is gold actually useful for anything if it's plentiful? Now, if they could find a lithium asteroid for instance, that would actually be useful.
Gold is crazy useful. Platinum is one element I could see having expanded uses if it were suddenly much more abundant too. Lots of use cases for things that are hard to deteriorate.
I am genuinely trying to give constructive feedback here - when you say things like "I didn't do any research" when asking a question, it has a tendency to cause people to be dismissive of your question because the act of asking without first expending effort and then advertising that fact makes the questioner sound entitled. Sort of like implying "my time is too valuable, but yours isn't". Next time try leaving that part out, and keeping the question simple, e.g. "What is special about having an overabundance of gold that isn't possible with a limited supply?" or by first doing a reasonable amount of research and leading with that, e.g. "I read a couple of webpages about the current uses of gold in science and industry, but I still can't figure out what would be possible if we had a limitless supply of it, can someone with more knowledge about this topic help me out?"
Hope this helps, like I said, I am genuinely trying to be constructive here, and no negativity intended towards you.
Well, as this CHATGPT answer [0] states, it's all theoretical (since we do live in a supply constrained world), so I focused on the two key enticing properties of goal.
If you are interested in speculation, the ChatGPT response is pretty good.
I disagree a little with the first item. Copper has a higher conductivity than gold, so there isn't an advantage in electrical performance to use all gold conductors. It's only used in specific portions of a circuit board that you want to prevent from oxidation. Even if gold was cheaper than copper, you wouldn't want to make your whole circuit with gold metal.
Even on IC's, which don't use a lot of metal, they switched to copper traces for the performance benefits.
Thanks, that’s actually what I was wondering. Which, apparently, I should have just done my own research on rather than asking an off the cuff question here hoping somebody would know and be interested in sharing.
I'm really uninterested in human spaceflight, but very enthusiastic about space exploration. In particular I like the idea of mining asteroids and not doing much mining on earth.
>But the rest of the journey, once Psyche separates from the launch vehicle, will rely on solar electric propulsion. This form of propulsion starts with large solar arrays that convert sunlight into electricity, providing the power source for the spacecraft’s thrusters. They’re known as Hall thrusters, and the Psyche spacecraft will be the first to use them beyond the orbit of our Moon.
>In fact, the thrust is so gentle, it exerts about the same amount of pressure you’d feel holding three quarters in your hand. But it’s enough to accelerate Psyche through deep space. With no atmospheric drag to hold it back, the spacecraft eventually will accelerate to speeds of up to 124,000 miles per hour (200,000 kilometers per hour) relative to Earth.
Since that asteroid will only be "observed" by this mission, it's exact value if retrieved is moot.
Not that we have the technology to move a dense space object that's "173 miles at its widest point" to a useful place.
What would that useful place even be? Would you put an object "173 miles across" in LEO next to the ISS? I doubt it. We also don't have the technology to land it in a controlled way.
> Not that we have the technology to move a dense space object that's "173 miles at its widest point" to a useful place.
Would that really be out of reach for what we can currently do? Naively I would think that strapping a few boosters to a rock to nudge it in a direction closer to Earth, and then decelerate it to keep it in a stable orbit, seems like something within our capabilities. It might take a lot of time and resources to accomplish, but I've heard crazier ideas from Elon before. Any reason why it wouldn't work?
That said, are there nearer and smaller objects we could mine first? Any ideas why NASA decided to focus on precisely this one?
> Would that really be out of reach for what we can currently do?
Naively. I would say yes. I think you're far far underestimating the thrusts needed to move big rocks and match orbits. But please go ahead and do the math if you think that this extra-ordinary idea can work.
Having a 173 mile metal object in LEO is also a non-starter - getting it there and keeping it there are both insanely dangerous if anything goes wrong. The ISS's orbit is not stable without periodic booster thrusts (1). And higher orbits where there is not-one around - how useful are those exactly? They could become useful, maybe. but that's not what we can currently do.
Sure, I'm aware it would take an extraordinary amount of thrust, but the exact amount will depend on the acceleration and speed we want it to move. If we would be willing to wait decades (centuries?) for it to reach us, it could possibly be done cheaply with solar sails.
And this wouldn't have to be anywhere near LEO/HEO to be useful. Getting it somewhere in the order of the distance to the Moon, or even much closer than Mars, would make mining and transportation that much cheaper.
We could even blow and transport chunks of it at a time instead of the whole thing, as a sibling comment mentioned. It's not much worth to us in its current location, so these missions are merely exploratory.
> Getting it somewhere in the order of the distance to the Moon, or even much closer than Mars, would make mining and transportation that much cheaper.
Actually I disagree, placing an object "somewhere between the moon and mars" is at our current space ability, uselessly "out of reach". Perhaps there is a plan where this makes sense in the next century, but I think you're far far overestimating the utility of it and "what we can currently do".
I'm a developer, not an engineer, but if you wanted it closer, I'm guessing you'd need to move into an orbit that is close to earth's orbit and close to earth's position in that orbit. Far easier, probably, to cut out small chunks of it and send them on a trajectory we can manipulate easier because the forces are way smaller. Large chunks of gold in an orbit anywhere near the earth would be enough motivation to find a way to retrieve them, I'm guessing.
I'm sure there are plenty of 173 sq mi areas on earth to put it. And if there's not, by the time it reaches the surface that area will be pretty clear!
I also can’t imagine gold being worthwhile enough to bring back. Sure it’s quite valuable per oz but there’s plenty on earth for all industrial uses. Most of it is sitting in vaults, “preserving value”
> JPL is also providing a technology demonstration instrument, Deep Space Optical Communications, to fly on Psyche. This instrument is designed to test high-data-rate laser communications
> ...increased data rates throughout the solar system with 10 to 100 times the capacity of state-of-the-art radio systems currently used by spacecraft.
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> Ground systems: A high-power near-infrared laser transmitter at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Table Mountain facility near Wrightwood, California, will uplink a modulated laser beam to the flight transceiver and demonstrate the transmission of low-rate data.
> The uplink laser will also act as a beacon for the flight transceiver to lock onto. The downlink data sent back by the DSOC transceiver on Psyche will be collected by the 200-inch (5.1-meter) Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, using a sensitive superconducting nanowire photon-counting receiver to demonstrate high-rate data transfer.
If this probe confirms what this asteroid is made of, and it's as rare as some articles say we should be putting a colony on this rock before Mars. All the stories talk up the gold but that is a lot of iron that does not require launch costs (or greatly reduced costs). It may not be profitable in the short term, but who ever controls this resource may have a leg up in solar system colonization in the coming centuries.
Or more accurately, "It's only worth that as long as it's in space, if you bring it to Earth then it's worth very little, along with all of the iron, nickel and gold on Earth."
> if you bring it to Earth then it's worth very little
Years ago I did some back-of-the-envelope commodities analysis on this. (Of course, the firm I worked for didn't represent it as such.)
It's worth more than "very little," though obviously not quadrillions of dollars. In the long run, the dominating component of unit costs are refining, not transport. The latter is amortized over a large mass; the former limits the rate at which commodity hits the market.
In the short term, measured in tonnes, it would be transport. Scaling such that the short term, in tonnes, is a short amount of time, in present dollars, defines the venture's economies of scale and thus minimum viable configuration.
NASA, capable to capturing a $10 quintillion asteroid but, according to the hacker news commenters, completely incapable of making rational economic decisions. These Internet commenters are so smart.
> NASA, capable to capturing a $10 quintillion asteroid
They really aren't capable of capture. It hasn't been done yet, even for much smaller space rocks. This mission will "observe" i.e. fly by or orbit the rock.
That's all we're capable of now, so the valuation is quite moot and selling the mission on that basis is close to deceptive.
The least it can cost is as much as it's marginal cost of extraction and delivery. These asteroids are so large it would take trillions of dollars to extract all the resources.
The really juicy targets for exploitation are carbonaceous asteroids and the wet asteroid Ceres, the latter of which could be cut up into a habitat for a population larger than Earth can support. People have this obsession with technology and metals but really it is Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen that drive civilization in terms of human bodies, cattle, fabrics, plants, food, plastics, chemicals, etc.
Colonizing Mars looks unimaginative and unambiguous in comparison.