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A $20 Trillion Rock That Could Turn a Startup Into Earth’s Richest Company

• sad_panda 15y ago
  The price of the metals is based on Earth's supplies. If the expedition was successful, the supply would increase dramatically and the equilibrium would shift.
  • Xlythe 15y ago
    But having 1 entity control such a large amount of supplies means that entity can control the market rate (they simply hold on to it or sell it as needed). National banks, like the Bank of Canada, already do this with their country's currency.
    • Jimmie 15y ago
      Diamonds would be a good example too, right? Platinum would be even better in this situation, I think, because it has more practical uses than diamonds.
      • colechristensen 15y ago
        Diamonds aren't worth very much. Try reselling a diamond to find out how little they're really worth.
        • jquery 15y ago
          Computers aren't worth very much. Try reselling a computer to find out how little they're really worth. Cars aren't worth very much. Try reselling a car to find out how little they're really worth. Shoes aren't worth very much. Try reselling a shoe to find out how little they're really worth.
          • jquery 15y ago
            I love how HN is some bastion of free-market thinking, but when it comes to items of fashion (aka items that females tend to desire), suddenly supply and demand go out the window, and the pricing of diamonds (and other fashion items) is a vast conspiracy. Horseshit. De Beers monopoly died a long time ago. Diamonds are no more overpriced than any other item of fashion. If you want to buy diamonds at "wholesale" prices there is nothing stopping you.
            • iwwr 15y ago
              Diamonds are not an investment vehicle, but rather a consumer item. They carry high markups and have a limited resale market.
          • jdale27 15y ago
            Cars and shoes depreciate because they wear out. Computers depreciate for the same reason, and more so for the fact that the price/performance ratio of computing technology improves so rapidly. Neither of those apply to diamonds.
      • talentdeficit 15y ago
        diamonds aren't artificially scarce to control demand, they're artificially scarce due to low demand. bringing a gigantic chunk of platinum to earth isn't going to increase the utility of platinum, although if prices fall far enough it may increase the utilization
    • beambot 15y ago
      eg, De Beers for diamonds.
    • noilly 15y ago
      They would still be constrained to degrees by their marginal costs (the price floor) v what the market will bear. Who knows what the actual costs will be the day they have a giant rock in orbit, although I expect they will fall rapidly with advancing privatization. I am sure they will take very conservative actions, but imagine the potential liabilities–might be a lot more than the value of the rock.
    • asdf333 15y ago
      As a nation with an army, they could do something like this. As a private company--especially if this mineral becomes very necessary and expensive--would be a very big target for some sort of 'congressional oversight' to 'protect national interests' and prevent a harmful monopoly.
      • philwelch 15y ago
        With the Google folks running things, yes, that's very possible. Someone who's more savvy and experienced in these kinds of things would find ways around that problem, like De Beers has.
    • nhebb 15y ago
      They would be the De Beers of precious metals [1]. With that kind of wealth at stake, the monopoly wouldn't last long. You'd see competition from other private ventures, as well as from countries (Russia, China, ...). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers#Diamond_monopoly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers#Diamond_monopoly
    • jlarocco 15y ago
      First, there's already a ceiling on the price from the current supply. The price can only go down. Second, if it works out for them and they're able to start mining these, other people will start doing it, too.
      • gojomo 15y ago
        …other people will start doing it too… What if the pioneer's space manufacturing, using their cheap and plentiful resources, gives them an insurmountable lead? They win the race to claim and defend new prospects against latecomers. (To the planetbound, this might just look like a suspiciously long string of failures by all subsequent foothold missions…)
      • lusr 15y ago
        Out of curiosity, what happens if a second company (say, Anglo Platinum) goes out there and blows up the facilities of these guys? Maybe even murders their miners (if there are to be any humans out there). What would the legal protection be?
        • jerf 15y ago
          "Out of curiosity, what happens if a second company (say, Anglo Platinum) goes out there and blows up the facilities of these guys?" War. However, the good news is that even on Earth the benefits of cooperation tend to outweigh the benefits of aggression, in space for the foreseeable future it will be even more so. It is so, so easy to trash a space facility and so, so hard to defend against it that in essence all private companies in space will de facto be in a MAD situation should they decide to go that route. It will be a long time before anyone will have a position where they can afford to attack somebody and have a reasonable expectation of survival.
    • willvarfar 15y ago
      Its only worth the $8 trillion because they haven't any. Imagine they release 100 tons / year. The world supply of platinum has just gone from 100 to 200 tons / year. Or they release 200 tons, and the world supply goes up to 300 tons / year. At some point really low they'll make platinum as common as dirt and worth about as much. * exaggeration to make point. Point stands.
      • sliverstorm 15y ago
        Wait, your argument is that because they could flood the market and tank platinum, platinum will tank?
        • willvarfar 15y ago
          Absolutely. You cannot value the asteroid at weight * current_price_per_ton. Because the earth is surviving on 100 tons of platinum / year, and the current_price_per_ton is based on demand to supply. If you rocket back with a whole 100 tons in the first year, you dramatically affect supply. The price drops; platinum suddenly becomes more affordable for more things, demand may increase and so on. But we can all see that if there were mile cube of platinum delivered to earth, it wouldn't actually be worth $1500/ounce any more.
          • sliverstorm 15y ago
            Sure the price would be influenced, but as expensive as dirt?
            • willvarfar 15y ago
              * exaggeration to make point. Point stands.
      • salvadornav 15y ago
        Price will surely go down, but as long as they have exclusive control on supply, and the ability to manage it smartly they could still make a ridiculously huge amount of money.
  • daniel-cussen 15y ago
    Yeah, it would. Modeling a demand curve is a really hard problem in economics; it's one of the holy grails in the field. That being said, I'm sure you can either take that into account and reduce the scope of the mission to more cheaply mine a smaller asteroid that won't flood the market.
  • jeffool 15y ago
    It could, but you also have to consider the cost of getting these materials back to Earth. No article has mentioned the details of that. I don't know if Planetary Resources has disclosed that. And then there's extracting the material. Yes, the sheer scope does mean a huge wealth... But it costs to access. And until I hear a professional suggest a price tag on that, I'm not too worried about it destroying economies. (Or maybe they could extract it in space... But that would need new first gen technology, but at least retrieval from space may pay off in the long run, as they'll no doubt require space extraction eventually.)
  • tspiteri 15y ago
    I'm not so sure it would work like that; the costs of mining an asteroid are a bit too high for that. Mining in space is not even new yet, it is still a plan, and if it goes according to plan, it will still be very expensive, and there will be limitations in the system that limit the speed with which the metals are brought to earth. My guess is that in the initial stage their profit margin would be low, or they'd have to work at a loss, if they have to compete with current prices. As scarcity drives the prices further up and their technology improves, their profit margins would soar, but that would only happen in the long term. Only then would supply start bringing the prices down.
  • rayiner 15y ago
    Only if there was competition. If they were the only ones with an astroid, then they could limit their sales to keep prices high. It's basically what DeBeers did back in the day.
• evoxed 15y ago
  Sooner or later, this sort of money is just going to become completely meaningless. There is no "$20tril check waiting to be cashed", there is an economic bomb in the form of a massive space rock. I'm still very excited and hope they get results but there going to be some pretty large, unforeseen consequences if they succeed.
  • gilrain 15y ago
    The dollar amount might become meaningless, were it to happen, but they might still be called the "richest company" merely by virtue of controlling such a huge amount of valuable resources.
    • ars 15y ago
      Their control would be quite short lived. I haven't heard that they have anything that someone else could not do. If this appears very valuable, and especially once proven, you can bet other investors will do the same.
      • swombat 15y ago
        The "everyone else will catch up" argument is based on the idea that there are plenty of genius rocket scientists who can deliver this project and that it's just a matter of throwing money at the problem. That may be true, but we definitely don't know that for sure. Seems oddly reminiscent of the iPhone/iPad market. How's throwing money around worked out for the competition so far?
        • ars 15y ago
          > Seems oddly reminiscent of the iPhone/iPad market. How's throwing money around worked out for the competition so far? Extremely well: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_SKOREA_EARNS_SAMSUNG http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_SKOREA_EARNS_SAMSU...
          • swombat 15y ago
• bdhe 15y ago
  Does anyone know of any good hard science fiction that deals with such "first generation of space exploration" themes? This might be way off base, but something like the future East India Company of space, where corporations end up colonizing planets and asteroids and get immensely wealthy and powerful in the process.
  • technolem 15y ago
    A lot of ben bova books are about the earlier space exploration of asteriods, the moon, planets, etc. For example the asteroid wars v1 - v4 are more first persony.
  • ramidarigaz 15y ago
    Not quite exactly what you asked for, but Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (and sequels) are absolutely fantastic hard sci-fi books. By far the best books on the colonization of Mars that I've ever read.
    • sad_panda 15y ago
      And the nice thing is that the trilogy gives you a view into the lives of multiple successive generations of space colonists. Those books were beautiful.
      • sanxiyn 15y ago
        Yeah, the description of "Martian natives" was interesting.
    • gaius 15y ago
      Ugh, those books are excruciating. The protagonists are unbelievable superheroes (curing cancer and inventing a fair economic system that everyone agrees on in an afternoon, oh while colonizing another planet, and partying lots). It's not hard sci-fi because it has no basis in any reality.
      • gbhn 15y ago
• ajays 15y ago
  How do they know what's under the surface of these asteroids?
  • DanBC 15y ago
    (http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=13 http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=13) I don't want to do a TL;DR because I'd mess it up.
    • paulhodge 15y ago
      TL;DR - Science!
  • gliese1337 15y ago
    They assume that it's probably pretty similar to the surface, which is a good assumption as long as the asteroid hasn't undergone geological processes to cause differentiation. If it's spherical, it has enough to gravity to have made itself that way, and stuff probably melted and floated and sank and it's probably not the same on the inside as the outside. If it's not spherical, it's probably a pretty uniform blob of stuff all the way through. They know what's on the surface by looking at IR and radio spectra. This is complicated by overlapping spectra from different minerals, but you can still get a pretty good idea of what range of minerals are there. And since we know the elemental compositions of the minerals on Earth that produce the same spectra, we can use that to predict how much of any particular element the asteroid contains.
    • phreeza 15y ago
      In addition mass and therefor density are known so they can probably be used to cross verify this?
• rsanchez1 15y ago
  This is what is needed to finally get real private money into space exploration. With those kinds of resources waiting out there, private companies have significant incentive to pick up where NASA left off.
• nullfinch 15y ago
  Has everybody forgotten that it's REALLY expensive to get into space? Per the BBC, They struggle to see how it could be cost-effective, even with platinum and gold worth nearly £35 per gram ($1,600 an ounce). An upcoming Nasa mission to return just 60g (two ounces) of material from an asteroid to Earth will cost about $1bn. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17827347 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17827347) So a back of the envelope calculation: Assuming that it costs as much to haul gold from orbit to Earth, and the Space X Falcon can haul 6.4+ tons per flight, we could bring down $167,116,800 of gold per flight. Since each launch costs $80M+, we're down to $80M of profit. However, this assumes we're just plucking gold out of orbit, not hauling asteroids to orbit, harvesting and processing the gold, and dealing with all of the logistics of this operation - which are bound to be very expensive. It's ambitious to be sure, but we're very far away from platinum as the new aluminum. Price of gold per ounce: http://goo.gl/htL7b http://goo.gl/htL7b Falcon launch costs: http://goo.gl/SWZlw http://goo.gl/SWZlw
  • gliese1337 15y ago
    > Assuming that it costs as much to haul gold from orbit to Earth It doesn't. Coming down is way cheaper than going up. But that may not even be particularly relevant, as there's a good chance that a lot of the material may be sold in space. After all, we want to launch more stuff into space, and that's expensive, so why bring it down if you're just going to shoot it back up again? Of course, not all of it's going to be sold in space. A tonne of aluminum or a tonne of water would be very valuable in orbit, but, at least for now, a tonne of platinum is going to do much more good down here on the ground in catalytic converters and electronics than it would up there being used in... I dunno what. But the stuff that stays in orbit could still be a pretty hefty chunk of the bottom line.
    • chii 15y ago
      Or that those mined from astroids become ships. I.e., industrial complexes built in space, for large scale manufacturing of more ships, with the intend of eventually conquering/colonizing a planet.
  • Sapient 15y ago
• cletus 15y ago
  Firstly, this isn't the first time Amun 3554 mining has come up [1]. Look, I'm a sci-fi fan like so many other HNers but the economic reality just doesn't add up. Amun 3554 has a highly eccentric orbit [2], even though it does cross Earth's orbit. JPL has data [3]. You need to consider that: 1. It's expensive to get into orbit. Even at SpaceX's prices, you're talking ~$1000/kg for LEO insertion; 2. You need to get equipment to the asteroid; 3. You need to get to the asteroid. Proximity to Earth isn't the problem here. The problem is the delta-V required to match velocities; 4. You either need to bring back the entire asteroid, which would require a massive amount of delta-V, or you need to mine the asteroid, which would take a massive amount of equipment; 5. If you get raw materials back to Earth orbit, depending on the application, you may then need to get them back to Earth, which granted is significantly easier than escaping Earth's gravity; and 6. If you get a massive quantity of some valuable material it'll change the economics. That $20 trillion won't be $20 trillion with the added supply. I am assuming this would be an automated operation as the cost of manned spaceflight is significantly higher and automated systems should hopefully improve in the intervening years. Now, compare this to some other materials we have on Earth. Iron is pretty abundant (both on Earth and in the universe, due to it's energy relationship with fusion). On Earth, we dig up iron for under $30/ton and can ship it anywhere on Earth for another $50-100/ton (IIRC). For the cost of a single SpaceX launch you'd need to bring back about a million tons of iron to be on the same scale. Obviously that's why they're targeting much more valuable materials like platinum but I hope that puts things in perspective. Our society is built on cheap and plentiful resources (fossil fuels, metals and minerals). As abundant as they might be in space, increasing the cost of iron 1000 times is going to have profound implications for our entire species. At some point of course recycling makes more economic sense but that's just a temporary cushion (eg you lose materials through corrosion). I believe we're coming to a resources-crunch within the next 100-200 years that will result--one way or another--in a massive drop in population and a fundamental change in our society. Let's just hope we survive it. As much as I'd wish otherwise I have a hard time envisioning space mining or even prolonged living in space as being economically viable in any way, shape or form. [1]: http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/27/technology/business2_guidetospaceintro/index.htm?cnn=yes http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/27/technology/business2_guideto... [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3554_Amun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3554_Amun [3]: http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=3554+Amun http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=3554+Amun
• kayoone 15y ago
  Sooner or later these gigantic resources will be the reason for armed spacecrafts and intergalactic conflicts :)
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  • chii 15y ago
    ...ala deadspace.
• havemurci 15y ago
  It's a cute concept, but apparently the visionaries have little sense of supply and demand. The high prices on rare earth metals are dependent on their extreme scarcity. If the supply is bolstered (in this case, to the tune of $20,000,000,000,000), the selling price will decrease. It's simple economics. I'm not saying it's anything but amazing. However, if the founders think they're going to get today's prices for every last ounce, as the article seems to imply, they are in for a realization.
  • tspiteri 15y ago
    Oh I think the visionaries do know about all that, after all, they do know a bit about how money works at large scales. I'd be really surprised if they are in for that realization.
  • Tipzntrix 15y ago
    I really think it's just the article authors that are trying to hype this innovation up too much. I doubt the actual CEO is going around presenting this potential revenue to investors if he wants to be taken seriously.
    • tlrobinson 15y ago
      “There are $20 trillion checks up there waiting to be cashed,”
      • Tipzntrix 15y ago
        mmm. You're right. I wonder how much he believes that himself.
        • RandallBrown 15y ago
          he doesn't. It's just a great quote to give to journalists.
• girishw 15y ago
  If a huge supply of platinum became available, its price would plummet. If one company figures out a way to mine asteroids, competition would soon follow. So they won't be able to control the supply and hence price of platinum. So even if they do succeed in mining and transporting the metal, they are not going to make anywhere near the money they're claiming.
  • chii 15y ago
    i say worth doing even if they only break even. The tech and new injection of resources will give the world something to hope for. Plus, i dont think the price will "plummet". It will at most reach some equibrium, and that new equilbrium ought to still be profitable. More plentifyl resources can only be a good thing.
• jeffool 15y ago
  Crazy question for hobbyists probably not otherwise suitable for Hacker News: Could a large body like an asteroid be used to clean up space junk? Or would that just be way too risky?
  • pm90 15y ago
    I don't quite understand...how exactly do you intend to use an asteroid to clean up space junk?
    • user24 15y ago
      I'm guessing via gravity, but I think drawing something big enough to attract space junk close enough to attract space junk will be too dangerous for earth.
      • Thrymr 15y ago
        That's not really how gravity works. In low earth orbit you have thousands of objects moving at high relative velocities, which is why they are dangerous. You can't just "attract" them with the gravity of a large object, all you would do is deflect them a little. They are moving fast enough that the gravity of a large nearby planet (Earth) is only bending their path enough so that they don't escape completely. An asteroid in LEO would do pretty much nothing to change that. You just might be able to deflect some (very small) fraction of the objects into different orbits, maybe enough so that they reenter the atmosphere. But most of them wouldn't interact at all.
        • jeffool 14y ago
          I was actually thinking deflection. Assuming they're going to bring it near Earth anyway, why not, say, slowly circle the ISS? Sure, it wouldn't do MUCH good... But it's the biggest space squeegee we're going to have access to for the near future... Why not?
• negamax 15y ago
  This much extra metal will surely crash the markets. Remember the Ducktales episode of "soda caps in the valley".
• Porter_423 15y ago
  Of course, a sudden influx of massive quantities of gold and platinum from space would cause the price of those commodities (which are driven by scarcity) to plummet on earth, potentially bankrupting the mining company in the midst of an EXTREMELY costly extraction effort and wreaking havoc on global markets. Sounds like fun otherwise.
• MrJagil 15y ago
  See, why is it that the mining companies are seemingly keeping quiet as some new innovative entrants are gonna wreck their market, and why is it that the music/film industry cry like babies when a "similarly" technologically inventive disruption happen to them? I'm not trying to twist this into an argument against the MPAA, just observing how differently capitalism can unfold itself.
  • danssig 15y ago
    Not a fair comparison. MPAA has been losing sales for years already. This may never even happen.
    • MrJagil 15y ago
      Fair enough. Do you expect the mining companies to pursue a similar path as the MPAA once they actually start losing money?
      • danssig 15y ago
        Yes, absolutely. There's a lot of money on the line, right?
• geon 15y ago
  > You couldn’t offload all those metals on the world market at once, for fear of crashing their prices. So instead of lowering the price of gold and palladium, metals that have innumerable uses in technology, revolutionizing the industry, you should create an artificial scarcity?
  • gaius 15y ago
    You have it backwards. Without scarcity where the demand? Without demand where the the money? Without money, where is the expedition? Lather, rinse, repeat.
    • geon 15y ago
      > Without scarcity where the demand? Iron is hardly scarce, but it is in high demand. There are a thousand uses for cheap gold. It's not like if the asteroid would be made of rare postage stamps that become worthless without the scarcity. Let's say the huge chunk of gold would drop the market price to 10% of it's current value. If they earn $ 2 trillion at once instead of $ 2 trillion slowly, is it really a problem? It should still be enough to finance the next run, and earn even more.
• mrich 15y ago
  I wonder how exploitation rights are handled. Can any company just send robots up there to mine it? Or will there be a remote war fought on the asteroid over the resources?
• ksec 15y ago
  Can you really just bring back the whole Asteroid? I mean without even knowing what exactly is inside and extraterrestrial hazard? But As somebody pointed out the operation cost does not yet make this feasible. The RAW materials inside are priced by supply and demand. While the cost of mining is pretty much fixed for a long period of time.
  • jerf 15y ago
    The idea that there could be something bizarre and dangerous is basically a Hollywood science fiction idea. In a Hollywood movie, sure, the inside of this rock would house an alien space fleet that was just waiting for us to mine it and attack and try to wipe out humanity, only to be stopped by the plucky scientist who was skeptical about the operation all along and warning about how dangerous it is. In reality, it's a rock with some metals running through it, and that's basically a full description. It isn't covered in deadly deadly viruses; if it were, Earth would long since have been exposed to them, we're hit by space rocks all the time. It isn't housing an alien fleet. It isn't anchoring a wormhole to a dimension of Cthuluian horrors. There isn't any bizarre chemistry that will cause a chain reaction that will turn all the oceans into gel if it so much as orbits. It's a rock, except it's in space. Everything that could go wrong in such a scenario did, a long time ago, over and over again.
• deepGem 15y ago
  Well, may be the USS Enterprise will become a reality.
• guelo 15y ago
  This strikes me more as billionaires wanting to play big adventure games with their cash then as a real business opportunity. But I can't blame them, if I had the cash I would want big toys too. Or maybe I'd go the Bill Gates route. On the other hand, it really feels like we are living in another guilded age with Robber Barons gracing us with the equivalent of Carnegie's libraries or Rockerfeller's universities.
  • Vivtek 15y ago
    I'm not complaining if this generation's robber barons give us asteroid mining...
• fbailey 15y ago
  Do we trust some billionaires with a massive asteroid in earth orbit?
• bceagle 15y ago
  I think the comments here have a lot of logical, well thought out ideas. The thing is, who cares whether they will ever be able to do it or what the implications would be if they succeeded? The fact that someone is seriously thinking about this type of thing is just awesome. Regardless of whether they succeed or fail, the most valuable output of this won't be the precious metals. It will be the technical innovations that would be created in order to attempt to achieve the goal. It's sort of like how the value of going to the moon was not just the PR and historical significance, but all of the technical innovations like satellites that ultimately came from that effort.
• read_wharf 15y ago
  "Of course, there’s a catch. You couldn’t offload all those metals on the world market at once, for fear of crashing their prices. But the company would still own that much in equity, which would allow them to borrow against it. They would be that wealthy, to all intents and purposes. That’s just how capitalism works." You don't have equity to borrow against unless you can liquidate and transfer to the lender. You can't liquidate and transfer to the lender unless you can bring it all down here (destroying the market and making the equity worth much less), or transfer any on-going and steady operation that is bringing it down little by little (show me the money), or by bring us up there in the form of widespread operations across multiple companies. If we go up there in a big way, well, precious metals aren't so precious.
  • RandallBrown 15y ago
    It doesn't really matter though does it? The people backing this company have billions of dollars they can throw at this until it makes money.
• rbanffy 15y ago
  > You couldn’t offload all those metals on the world market at once, for fear of crashing their prices If you have a disruptive innovation (such as cheaply bringing tons of Platinum from space), prices will just settle at the new equilibrium. You wouldn't be able to sell a million tons of Platinum at US$ 1500 an ounce, but, as long as you make a profit, you're good. But how about the Moon? It's nearby (making remote operation feasible) and bringing back stuff doesn't require more than a large railgun that can be built and powered locally. There is gravity and vacuum (a combination that's very good for working with metals - they fall towards the ground and they don't react with the atmosphere). And we already have soil samples. Plus, people can live there and repair equipment that breaks down. And for the science types, the far side is an excellent place to put a radiotelescope.
  • RandallBrown 15y ago
    using a moon as a base for asteroid mining is so Ender's Game. I love it.
• ema 15y ago
  I'm skeptical about this. Lets see in 8 years[1] if i was right. [1]http://predictionbook.com/predictions/6696 http://predictionbook.com/predictions/6696
• tocomment 15y ago
  I've wondered if we could simply controlled crash asteroids into deserted parts of earth and then cheaply mine them? I'm wondering if you could build some kind of shock absorbing device to "catch" the asteroid and prevent a crater, or other adverse effects? I don't see why it wouldn't work in principle.
  • ahelwer 15y ago
    Heh, this was the plot of a second-series Tom Swift novel. Ah, childhood. Anyway, there are a lot of problems with the idea, most having to do with risk and resources required.
• wisty 15y ago
  Could this work? A large mirror planted on the astroid focuses sunlight onto a small point. The heat from the mirror blasts off (ionizes? vaporizes?) bits of rock. Over a long time period, the rock gradually sails into a more accessible orbit.
  • tlrobinson 15y ago
    It just detonate a nuclear bomb on one side.
• Tipzntrix 15y ago
  EVE is coming to real life. Watch out for space pirates out there man. "2mil ISK OR PODDED"
• jonnycowboy 15y ago
  The main problem with this 'rock' is that Planetary Resources' plan only allows for ~10m diameter asteroid. This one is over a mile large!
• allenp 15y ago
  I'm seeing lots of comments talking about how they will bring all this platinum down and it won't be worth anything but not very many people talking about using platinum as a raw material for something worth far more than just platinum. What if Planetary Resources creates a lab to have the world's best researchers across a variety of fields be able to invent with a nearly unlimited source of free platinum? Could they make a product that is worth more than the raw platinum (or whatever else they pull down)?
• ImprovedSilence 15y ago
  An interesting thought I just had: Suppose we did bring back voluminous quantities of raw material back to earth, what could the environment impact of this be over hundereds of years? Could we bring back so much that we change the weight of the world to shift to a different orbit? or to wobble more or less (the cause of seasons) What forms of energy do we loose by importing these new forms (assuming conservation of energy applies) Ie fuel for material.
  • zopa 15y ago
    The earth is ~ 6*10^24 kg. So if you bring back a billion kilograms, you'd increase the Earth's mass by around 0.000000000000017 percent. You get variations in surface gravity well over a trillion times larger just by traveling from Ecuador to Antarctica. (The Earth is flattened a bit at the poles, so you're a bit closer to the center of the planet there, and 'g' is a bit bigger.) I wouldn't worry about that one.
    • ImprovedSilence 15y ago
      Yeah, but I'm sure the first person to find oil spurting out of the ground didn't have to worry about it running out anytime soon. Ingenious peoples cutting down the first tree on Easter Island never saw the trees running out. We a humans tend to underestimate our impact as it scales and grows over time. But as growth goes exponential, industries scale, and population explodes, the story, elapsed over time, changes dramatically. Look how far technology has advanced in 100 years. Who knows what crazy shit will go down in the next 300. A billion kilograms might just be "one truckload" out of hundreds being imported daily. We have no idea how big it could scale. You're right, it's a metric shit-ton of material to make any difference, but to say we'll never have done that much is just impossible.
      • zopa 15y ago
        By all means worry about environmental problems. Like the various suggestions on this page to crash-land a mining asteroid on Earth---let's not do that. But at the moment the possibility of changing the mass of the earth has to be really low on the list of environmental worries. When we're moving a billion kilograms an hour, net, to Earth, I will sign your petition and donate to your campaign.
• firefoxman1 15y ago
  There isn't any real claim to ownership of that asteroid though, so it really sort of a land-grab? Couldn't China build a system to go retrieve the asteroid first?
• cma 15y ago
  The $20 Trillion valuation is dubious. Platinum has industrial uses, but it is also a Veblen good--the price decrease due to increased supply wouldn't be the only factor; the abundance of a Veblen good affects the demand curve itself.
• SudarshanP 15y ago
  The KISS Papers about asteroid mining: http://www.kiss.caltech.edu/study/asteroid/20120307_IEEE_Presentation.pdf http://www.kiss.caltech.edu/study/asteroid/20120307_IEEE_Pre... http://www.kiss.caltech.edu/study/asteroid/asteroid_final_report.pdf http://www.kiss.caltech.edu/study/asteroid/asteroid_final_re... http://www.kiss.caltech.edu/study/asteroid/20120314_ESA_ESTEC.pdf http://www.kiss.caltech.edu/study/asteroid/20120314_ESA_ESTE...