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The race to the riches of asteroids
- 2sk21 8y agoMy first thought was of Seveneves by Neal Stephenson - not perhaps his best book but it did clarify the value of mining near Earth objects :-)
- TomK32 8y agoThe first two parts are great. Rip out the third one. But Seveneves was about using the resources of the broken up moon, which is pretty much like hopping onto the bus (on the middle lane of a three-lane-highway) compared to the challenges of getting an asteroid into earth orbit
- koboll 8y agoWhat a great book. I still get chills thinking about the way he describes the danger of alpha particles.
- TomK32 8y agoSure, but tbh, if he had split it up into three novels and give more time to the second and third part it might climed up to the hill-top from which, in my opinion, The Long Earth rules this decade of SciFi writing.
- maxxxxx 8y agoIn my view he should have written a fourth part. I would have been very curious how the people who stayed on earth survived in their caves and under water.
- MrMember 8y agoThe underwater group especially interests me. How do a group of people stuck in a submarine in deep ocean survive for centuries?
- rwmj 8y agoSurely if you flood the market with asteroid-mined minerals, then the price of those minerals will drop rapidly?
- Razengan 8y agoHow has that worked for petroleum?
- consumer451 8y agoFrom my limited understanding of the subject, unless we build something like orbital elevators, it will not make financial sense to bring the mined raw materials back to earth. However, as the linked article states, there are plenty of uses for water and hydrogen and oxygen in space. In the very long term, I could imagine automated processing of metals on asteroids leading to 3D printing of giant space station parts. Then one could attach an ion thruster and send the parts to the their destination for final construction.
- khuey 8y agoGetting stuff up into space is hard and expensive. But if you have a big chunk of metal in earth orbit it's not hard to get it down.
- Symmetry 8y agoOnce you have your rock in a stable Earth orbit you can aerobrake it down into low orbit and from there probably land it into some shallow sea. Though possibly the asteroid would be more valuable in orbit than on Earth. It's hard to get materials up there!
- jschwartzi 8y agoI'm pretty sure the Tunguska event was an asteroid aero-braking into the ground. Where are you going to put the kinetic energy? Once it hits atmosphere there's not a lot you can do. Maybe attach a really big parachute.
- partycoder 8y agoThe derivatives market has quadrillions of dollars, more money than asteroid mining.
- ben_w 8y agoThe derivatives market only has quadrillions of dollars if you do silly things such as counting a $1m transaction buy followed by an identical sell, each performed every hour of the year, as being worth 2x24x365x$1m = $17,520 million. You can’t just cash out a quadrillion dollars from the derivatives market and buy everything else in the world economy — apart from anything else, there isn’t enough currency around to do so.
- mrfusion 8y agoI’d like to see research in bringing captured small asteroids back to earth cheaply for processing. Maybe attach a large ballute. Or the bfs payload version could land one.
- ben_w 8y agoI believe it’s generally assumed to be significantly cheaper to process in situ and only return what is actually desired. Delta-v is expensive.
- mabbo 8y agoThe cost to do so would be so prohibitively high that it would never be worth doing. Whatever gains you got from "cheaply processing" it here would be completely eclipsed by the cost of bringing it back. The simple rule of space is that changing the velocity of anything is the most expensive thing. Getting an asteroid from whatever orbit around the sun it's currently in and bringing it to earth would cost far more than it would to instead bring an entire mineral processing plant to the asteroid, and just sending back the bits worth a lot of money.
- DmenshunlAnlsis 8y agoAlternative: crash the asteroids into the moon, have robots recover the valuable minerals. Use a rail gun system to fire it back to Earth, processed, while enjoying the low gravity of the moon.
- celticninja 8y agoAnd firing chunks of metal at the earth doesn't seem problematic to you?
- DmenshunlAnlsis 8y agoYou can fire it relatively slowly because of the low gravity of the moon, and take plenty of time bleeding v. Ideally there would be a space elevator and capture system to bring them back, but other methods work. You’re not just firing “at” Earth. Even if you were, Earth is mostly covered by oceans, and landing them there would be acceptable.
- mabbo 8y agoHas anyone made predictions on the implications of "rare-earth" minerals becoming "not-so-rare-anymore"? What, today, costs a fortune due to the requirement of certain matter that we don't have much of? Jewelry is obvious, but what else in my home right now is expensive to replace just because of the matter it's made of?
- LeifCarrotson 8y agoOne example of this from the past is aluminum. In the 1850s, it was extremely rare and difficult to produce - costing more than gold, used as serving utensils in Napoleon's court, and as the capstone of the Washington monument. Now it's one of the cheapest metals.
- kwhitefoot 8y ago> Jewelry is obvious But is it really? Most gemstones can be made artificially these days and the price has dropped dramatically so it seems unlikely to me that mining asteroids would have much effect. The price of jewellery is much higher than the value of the materials already.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- microtherion 8y agoDespite the name, rare earth minerals are not particularly rare.
- godelmachine 8y agoNeil Degrasse Tyson once said that if you wanna be the first trillionire in the world, start mining asteroids.
- zeristor 8y agoI have been looking into this, and one of the few commodities that has value at scale is Nickel, there is a large demand for it and the prices have been generally high. The Spanish brought back gold and silver from the New World, and crashed the markets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution Mansa Musa of Mali splashed gold on his trip to Mecca in the 1300s and caused economies to falter for several years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_I_of_Mali https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_I_of_Mali There would seem to be more danger to the economy by being flooded with rare metals than from an actual meteorite impact.
- theptip 8y ago> There would seem to be more danger to the economy by being flooded with rare metals I think that this case is not directly comparable to the price revolution; in the cases you've linked, Gold==Money, and so by bringing back gold the Spanish massively increased the money supply (from the first article, "Prices rose on average roughly sixfold over 150 years. This level of inflation amounts to 1–1.5% per year, a relatively low inflation rate for modern-day standards, but rather high given the monetary policy in place in the 16th century"). In the case we're discussing, Metal!=Money. The more metal you bring back, the lower the price falls, until it reaches a new equilibrium where it's no longer economical at the margin to bring back more. This would significantly affect certain markets (i.e. mining, industrial processes that consume these metals), but it's not the same thing as creating money; you can't spend nickel, you need to find someone who will buy it from you in order to turn it into money.
- zeristor 8y agoThat was the point I was trying to make, seemingly not very well. That Nickel is a metal commodity that would probably be able to soak up much of the production. I need to work out how to deal with too many ideas hitting me at once.
- sammyo 8y agoMove the nasty industrial processes out there, factories in space and only ship high end processed materials. Once there is rocket fuel in large quantity "boost backwards". Slow a well designed space plane to a safe entry velocity and fly to a regular airport. It's and idea that can not even be imagined until there is a filling station in space but should be standard after the first water asteroid.
- FrozenVoid 8y agoAre there any regulations preventing "asteroid collectors" crashing them in the middle of sahara or where they own the land?(i.e. only redirecting the asteroid to the place)
- blendo 8y agoWe'll need "commerical astronomers" to help find promising asteroids. At last February's AAAS meeting in Austin, Martin Elvis (quoted in the article) noted that over the next several years, a number of larger (20 to 30 meter) terrestrial telescopes will be coming on line. That will free up some the smaller 10-15 meter instruments, some of which could be used to search for watery and/or metallic asteroids.
- perilunar 8y ago> We'll need "commerical astronomers" to help find promising asteroids. Isn't that what Planetary Resources are doing? https://www.planetaryresources.com/ https://www.planetaryresources.com/