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Gold is a special case, but tanking the price of expensive metals is exactly the point of asteroid mining. If prices for nickel, iron, copper, platinum, etc we
by BurningFrog 5y ago
Gold is a special case, but tanking the price of expensive metals is exactly the point of asteroid mining.
If prices for nickel, iron, copper, platinum, etc were cut by 99%, it would raise human living standards ENORMOUSLY.
- skykooler 5y agoIt would be nice if people stopped stealing catalytic converters because the plantinum, palladium etc were no longer worth the effort.
- Retric 5y agoWe can significantly expand mining of common elements like copper and iron, the demand simply isn’t there. Over 5% of earths crust is iron, aluminum is over 8%, we really aren’t running out of them. Amos stuff is more rare, but for scale roughly 700 million metric tons of copper has been mined out of 2800 million tons of copper discovered in economically viable concentrations. With perhaps another 3500 million metric tons in undiscovered but economically viable mines.
- BurningFrog 5y agoDemand isn't there at current prices. Lower prices, and demand will rise!
- Retric 5y agoMetal prices rise and fall quite a bit. They have fairly inelastic demand because raw material prices are a small fraction of total costs. A skyscraper may need a lot of steel but in total it’s still a small fraction of total costs. Even just making steel from iron is rather expensive. A great deal of copper is used in new construction, but the number of outlets in the average new home isn’t going up because raw copper is suddenly 1/3 the price.
- BurningFrog 5y agoI'm sure you're right about current trends. I'm thinking/dreaming about a world where prices are orders of magnitudes lower. Is there some advantage to make tin cans out of palladium rather than tin? Then we can just do it because the metal cost is the same! A bit of utopian fantasizing, sure. But even cutting end user prices in half should have important effects.
- Retric 5y agoUnfortunately, I think that’s more from sci-fi taking place in space rather than some inherent advantages to asteroid mining. 100% automated manufacturing process in space seem like a minimum requirement, but presumably doing the same thing on the ocean floor gets you to the same place.