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I suspect that flooding the market with those metals would depress the price of those commodities significantly.

• aberman 17y ago
  Fortunately, if you depress the price of a 20 Trillion dollar asset, you're still in pretty good shape ;)
• mynameishere 17y ago
  Yeah, the same bit of ignorance bothered me about alchemists: The only purpose alchemy could serve would be turning gold into lead, with respect to the marketplace.
  • dantheman 17y ago
    The trick is that you own the process, so you can buy up everything before people realize gold is worthless.
• noonespecial 17y ago
  Its not really about that. The point is that the wealth of a single small planet is insignificant compared to the wealth of even the extra bits floating around our solar system. What could we build if titanium was free (or very close)? What would our houses and cars look like if there was a limitless supply of aluminum? A vital step to us getting off this planet in a meaningful way is sending robots out to gather resources, both to build the ships we'll need outside of our gravity well and to return some of that abundance to the surface so we can alleviate our scarcities here.
  • tjic 17y ago
    > What would our houses and cars look like if there was a limitless supply of aluminum? There IS a limitless supply of aluminum. The top kilometer of crust all over the earth is stunningly rich in aluminum. It's just that PROCESSING it takes energy. ...just like processing an asteroid. Dirt, though, has the added advantage of already being HERE.
    • noonespecial 17y ago
      There's "plenty" of titanium here too, most of its just in the form of titanium dioxide which happens to be very hard to turn back into the good stuff. (But its fantastic for making paint..) As I recall, the allure with metals in asteroids that they are "hunks of cut up planets". Instead of digging and processing, you just scrape the good stuff off the surface and (being in deep space and all) its not oxidized or otherwise contaminated like it is when found on earth. You build your kickass starship out of it right then and there or encapsulate it in some heat shielding and drop it in the nearest ocean for retrieval. A great many people who bought a bunch of gold as a hedge against inflation might be disappointed though...
      • prewett 17y ago
        I suspect the metals are oxidized on the asteroids, too. If aluminum takes so much energy to liberate from the oxygen, it must really like to combine with oxygen. I'd guess there was a fair amount of oxygen floating around with the aluminum before it clumped together into asteroids, even if there isn't now.
        • noonespecial 17y ago
          Asteroidal resources are unique and diverse. In general, they are different from the dirt beneath our feet and the ores that we mine from our planet's crust. Likewise, they are much different than the Moon, Mars, and other planets' crusts. Asteroids are much more metal-rich, like the core of the Earth, Moon, Mars and any other planet, and unlike their crusts. The asteroids are normally not as enriched in oxides, silicates, and the other lighterweight elements that floated up to dominate a planetary crust. Many asteroids are like a mixture of a planetary metal core plus a crust plus the mantle in between. Some are entirely like a core or a mantle or a crust, having come from a large parent body which was broken up. In most asteroids, free metal is abundant in the mix, and often dominant. This free metal can be used without any further industrial processing. http://www.permanent.com/a-overvw.htm http://www.permanent.com/a-overvw.htm
        • pmjordan 17y ago
  • idlewords 17y ago
    We might be able to make metal foils so cheap we could just use them once and throw them away!
• sown 17y ago
  We'll figure out something to do with it. :) But yeah, to consume that much materials would take entire worlds, colonized.