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$10 Quintilian Asteroid to Stay Out of Reach of Space Miners
- peterisza 10y agoQUINTILIAN QUINTILIAN QUINTILIAN QUINTILIAN QUINTILIAN QUINTILIAN QUINTILIAN QUINTILIAN QUINTILIAN QUINTILIAN
- credit_guy 10y agoNot sure why you are getting downvoted. I guess you are just making fun at the misspelling of "quintillion".
- eloff 10y agoLet's hope Elon Musk doesn't find out about this. With his ambition and penchant for moon(mars?)shots he might just try redirecting this asteroid. Plus he owns a rocket company, so he's got more means to pursue such a goal than anyone else. But I'd sleep better knowing there isn't a 200km wide chunk of solid iron being redirected in our general direction by programmers who maybe fat-fingered a critical part of the data/algorithm somewhere.
- mcbits 10y agoThe only remotely realistic way to capture an asteroid is to start with one that's already in a temporary, unstable orbit. If asteroid mining is ever economical, it will either be for relatively small masses of extremely valuable minerals (not iron) or to build things in space that are meant to stay in space.
- darpa_escapee 10y agoThe cost and risk associated with such a task is way out of SpaceX's scope.
- mabbo 10y agoIs it? The IPT can theoretically go anywhere inside Saturn's orbit (maybe it was only Jupiter?). It's entirely possible to reach some pretty valuable asteroids in that range. Send an IPT with mining equipment, leave the equipment behind and fill the ship with the processed or semi-processed precious metals. 50 tonnes could be turned into a cool billion dollars[1] without absolutely destroying the market (ease them in slowly). There's risks, but that's sort of Elon Musk's thing. And the money would help cover this Mars colony plan. [1] ballparking using the going price of gold and platinum of around $1200 USD/ounce.
- erikpukinskis 10y agoI don't think Elon Musk's thing is risks... his thing is goals. He's not building rockets because it's risky, he's taking risks to make humankind multiplanetary. He's not starting a car company because it's risky, he's making cars to accellerate the transition to sustainable energy. What's the goal for getting 50 tonnes of gold and platinum to Earth? Cash? Musk is just raised $1.2 billion for Tesla this week, no asteroid required.
- lucaspiller 10y agoJust wait until a metal rare on earth, but abundant in asteroids, is discovered to make much better batteries than we have now.
- mabbo 10y agoHe borrowed $1.2 billion. He took on an incredibly large debt. No one ever got rich applying for credit cards. The purpose of getting 50 tonnes of rare earths is to pay back those debts, and pay for the next big project that needs a billion dollars. Lowering the cost of rare metals would also be a big boon for humanity. Mining in Earth is not an industry known for its safety or cleanliness, and lower prices of those metals would bring down the cost of many technological innovations to levels that more people can have them. I see asteroid mining as not just a profitable thing, but a project worthy of doing at a level beyond finance.
- arbuge 10y agoReminder: any such numbers are purely theoretical, and based on an infinite market capable of absorbing infinite amounts of product at current pricing levels. That is not the world we live in.
- pcurve 10y agoexactly. scarce enough, oxygen can be worth trillions.
- thaumasiotes 10y agoThat actually can't happen. If oxygen were that rare, all the potential customers would have died.
- feelix 10y agoThe first line of the article is: "The solution to all of Earth’s metal problems, or the space rock that would completely obliterate the world economy"
- olegkikin 10y agoThe important thing to note here is that "precious metals" and "rare minerals" really aren't. Given advanced enough technology, they become abundant. That happened with aluminum - they used to make very expensive jewelry out of it, till we learned how to mine it efficiently, and now it's $1.9 per kilo. I expect the same to happen to gold, silver, platinum. Diamonds are already on their way.
- tn13 10y agoObviously. Same goes for fossil fuels and water.
- thaumasiotes 10y agoWater is already abundant. And much less than $1.90 per kilogram.
- danbruc 10y ago[...] many others were worried about the absolute collapse in commodity prices that would have occurred if it were suddenly easy to get all the iron and nickel we’d need for centuries. Worried? Because of falling prices? Looks like someone didn't pay attention during economics 101 or is afraid of going out of business.
- danharaj 10y agoFunny how econ 101 doesn't predict the systemic damage that a precipitous price drop can inflict on an economy.
- danbruc 10y agoWhat kind of systemic damage could asteroid mining cause?
- M_Grey 10y agoWell lets see... are there any economies that depend on mining? It seems like it would cause quite a stir.
- danbruc 10y agoWhat does dependent mean? There are 8 countries with more than 10 % of their GDP from mineral resources. They are in order of decreasing share Togo, Suriname, Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mongolia, Chile, and Zambia. Togo has the largest dependency with 16.1 %. Chile is by far the largest economy with a GDP of 240 billion Dollar followed by Congo, Zambia, and Mongolia with 35, 21, and 11 billion Dollar. So depending on the exact composition, some countries might experience some pain. But space mining would not arrive over night, missions have to be planed, infrastructure must be build, and long distances have to be traveled. So there would almost certainly be some time to get prepared for the arrival of cheap cheap metals from space.
- M_Grey 10y ago
- dzdt 10y agoWhat rubbish! A commodity only has value in a form and location where it is under demand. There is no way iron will ever be delivered to the surface of the Earth from an asteroid in a way cost-competitive to terrestrial mining. So the effective value with existing markets is zero.
- AlexCoventry 10y agoThe article suggests that the metals would be useful for construction of orbital structures, so the comparison to terrestrial mining costs doesn't relate to their argument.
- cftm 10y agoI would argue that actually it does - in order to bring the world commodity market crashing, as is suggested by the article, it requires iron coming down to earth and bringing mass down the gravity well, safely, requires either a great deal of energy or something like a space elevator. Under the assumption that no space elevator exists, then this argument is spot on. The iron outside of earth's gravity well would be cheap for building in space, the iron on earth would be "cheap" for building on earth. Commodity movement in either direction wouldn't make sense, so two distinct markets for iron would exist.
- candiodari 10y agoGravity is a conservative force, so bringing the metal down with a space elevator will release exactly the same amount of energy as just crashing it into the surface. The rate may be different (though how would you dissipate that energy ? Note that there is essentially zero thermal contact with the athmosphere or anything else on a space elevator except at the bottom 20km or so) That's one of the reasons why space miners are proposing to just crash the asteroids into desert areas.
- M_Grey 10y agoGrimaces As though deserts were somehow magical "dead zones" we could afford to lose. On the other hand, we might reach a point where controlled ET impacts could be the only near-term way to generate the net cooling we need to survive climate change. Wouldn't that be a treat for a method of geoengineering! A more realistic idea would be a Lunar base, probably automated. We crash asteroids into Luna, break them and process them there, then either rail-gun them into Earth orbit for an elevator grab, or a controlled descent into water. That minimizes the Delta-v all the way, while still making concessions to a realistic need to process this stuff before "importing" it... i.e. crashing or "snatching" it.
- lifeformed 10y agoThere's $118 quintillion of unmined iron on earth right now.
- nine_k 10y agoIncluding the core?
- lifeformed 10y agoJust in the crust.
- danjoc 10y agoOr just drag it into orbit under the guise of space mining, then drop large chunks of it on governments you don't like. Unstoppable once nudged into a drop. Completely annihilate your enemies.
- nine_k 10y agoThe US had a military program like that: orbital "arrows" that would hit a target on surface in an unstoppable way. But a few literal kilotons is a different deal.
- CapitalistCartr 10y agoWe called it "Project Thor", or "Rods from God". Seriously. Phone poles made of tungsten. In orbit.
- candiodari 10y agoWhy tungsten ? The idea of warfare using "mass drivers" has been studied for quite a while. It means that the first nation to do this is essentially unstoppable and can destroy whatever they want. Including all life on earth. By contrast, for nuclear weapons, lots of people seem to believe that they can destroy all life on earth, or at least all animals, and they most definitely can't. They release lots of energy, but not enough. Mass drivers, however, are in fact capable of doing it.
- M_Grey 10y ago>Why tungsten? Dense. Great thermal properties, unlike say lead, steel, or iron which would burn up on re-entry. Kind of the ultimate fuck-you to the life when you think about it... ...First because of the obvious utility for anyone who has them, and is willing to use them as you say. Second, because it would cost sooooo much to lift those heavy bastards, their casing, and the fuel to keep them up there into orbit.
- bane 10y agoless melty
- bpodgursky 10y agoDon't get me wrong -- I liked the asteroid recovery mission concept. But this asteroid has radius of ~250km, so getting that into earth orbit was a bit out of the scope of the mission to begin with.
- M_Grey 10y agoThat's... a pretty big rock. Honestly, that's more like a sci-fi candidate for "bubble-forming" with some hypothetical fusion-powered reaction, and I don't mean deuterium-tritium fusion either.
- astrodust 10y agoGetting it into orbit is harder than not getting it into orbit and accidentally the apocalypse.
- sova 10y agoThat is a fantastic parable for greed and endless hunger if I ever imagined one: that tasty asteroid looks so good, let's just bring it a little closer.
- averagewall 10y agoYou seem to imply that there's something bad or dangerous about greed and endless hunger. Without those, there would be no life. You could almost say they're the meaning of life. Perhaps a more direct parable would be "A poor person starves to death by not trying hard enough to find food."
- throwawaymaroon 10y agoweird pointless logic argument you got there you're feeling bad about desires I guess
- geezerjay 10y agoRecognising the usefulness of something is not the same thing as greed.
- saagarjha 10y agoIs there some kind of joke I'm missing with the "Quintilian"?
- rckrd 10y agoRelevant might be Paul Krugman's college thesis at Princeton, "The Theory of Interstellar Trade"[0] [0] https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf
- sova 10y ago"It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer travelling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved."
- sova 10y agoOkay I have an important question about mineral rights. If something is in space, who do the mineral rights belong to? Whoever nabbed it? Or is that just uncharted and untested?
- sulam 10y agoWe certainly haven't tested it. Right now all extraterrestrial bodies and even empty space are international commons by the terms of th UN outer space treaty, which has been ratified by all space-going powers. However a nation can withdraw from the treaty with 1-yr notice, so this is of questionable value in predicting what will happen when we can make economic use of these resources.
- mkempe 10y agoJohn Locke answered that question centuries ago, his answer remains valid.
- sova 10y agoCould you remind me what his conclusion was?
- mkempe 10y agoI have property in my own person, hence the labor of my body and the work of my hands are my property. What I remove from a state of nature and mix my labor with, becomes my property. That's how asteroids and planets ought to and will become property. See Chapter V of Locke's Second Treatise of Government, Of Property.
- SlipperySlope 10y agoCome on. What purpose does the US government have when the exploitation of this celestial resource is clearly in the province of private industry. Planetary Resources has a reasonable approach. http://www.planetaryresources.com http://www.planetaryresources.com
- Animats 10y agoWhat, is someone suggesting moving a 200KM asteroid closer to the earth? With what? A really big H-bomb? It might be nice to go take a look, and it may be useful someday, but short of fusion drives, we're not going to be moving asteroid-sized hunks of iron around the Solar System.
- averagewall 10y agoMaybe with a solar powered ion thruster. One has already been run for 6 years non-stop. [1] Also, an asteroid is made of reaction mass. That's not in short supply like it is with a normal rocket. Don't forget Newton's 2nd law says that if you even touch it with your little finger, it'll keep going somewhere else forever. You don't need a lot of force to move large distances in space. [1] https://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/about/fs21grc.html https://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/about/fs21grc.html
- sbierwagen 10y agoAlso, an asteroid is made of reaction mass. An asteroid is made of physical matter, yes, but it's not made out of the noble gas xenon, which NEXT used. Skimming the electric propulsion doesn't reveal any high-isp thrusters designed to use powdered asteroid. Don't forget Newton's 2nd law says that if you even touch it with your little finger, it'll keep going somewhere else forever. You don't need a lot of force to move large distances in space. This is... true... but your intuitions as to the forces involved are badly off. Let's run the numbers for 16 Psyche real quick. Assume you're putting together an asteroid tug that has an array of a thousand NEXT thrusters, and the 10 megawatt solar array you need to power the thrusters. Assume they're making a solid 50km/s exhaust velocity, the top end for ion propulsion. And, just for fun, include 10,000,000,000,000 metric tons of xenon. This is a pretty big spacecraft, but it's a thousandth the size of 16 Psyche. (2.27×10^19 kg) Light off the thrusters, and run them until they use up all the xenon. It'll take a while. 63,218,390,804 years, in fact. (870 tonnes per 5.5 years) But, good news! After that burn, you've added 0.05km/s to 16 Psyche's orbital velocity. Delta V between the belt and Earth is around 5km/s, so you'll need to do that about a hundred more times. There are better candidates for asteroid capture than 16 Psyche.
- deepnotderp 10y agoImagine how powerful whoever controlled this would be. In one stroke they could decimate economies that either have a lot of gold or whose central bank has a lot of gold. I'm just surprised the military, Cia or some other deep state agency isn't already on good.
- runeks 10y agoWe haven't really used gold for the past 100 years or so, except that we pretended the US Dollar was backed by it from ~1950-1971. By which process will bringing back large amounts of gold "decimate economies"? And which economies, specifically?
- deepnotderp 10y agoIndia. Even China to some extent. Large amounts of savings would be negated overnight. Rival economies like the US could benefit from such incidents.
- kr7 10y ago16 Psyche is far to big to move anywhere. 16 Psyche's mass is 2.27·10^19 kg and its orbital speed is 17.34 km/s. Earth's orbital speed is 29.78 km/s. So a perfect orbital transfer (not even possible) to get 16 Psyche into Earth's orbit would take an impulse of at least (29780.0 m/s - 17340.0 m/s) · 2.27·10^19 kg = 2.82388·10^23 kg·m/s. A Saturn V rocket produces 3.51·10^7 N of thrust. So it would take one Saturn V rocket 8.0452·10^15 seconds to move 16 Psyche, or 2.5511·10^08 years. If we had 1 million Saturn V rockets, it would take just over 255 years.
- Balgair 10y agoOh hey, I know that mission. A family member of mine is making the rad-detector for it.