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Silver is antimicrobial. Gold is highly conductive. If we had these materials in absurd excess, we could literally build hospitals from silver and the electric

Silver is antimicrobial. Gold is highly conductive. If we had these materials in absurd excess, we could literally build hospitals from silver and the electric grid from gold, and it would be great for our civilization.

otabdeveloper4 2y ago
Gold and silver is less common in space than here on Earth.
- blooalien 2y ago
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2023/06/05/golden-asteroid-mission-is-back-on-track-says-nasa/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2023/06/05/go... You sure about that? Here's just one asteroid made of mostly gold, nickel, and / or iron that's supposedly worth many times more than the entire global economy. Pretty sure that anything we have here on Earth also exists "out there" in much greater abundance than we could ever possibly imagine here on our finite little speck of a planet (except maybe "life", which we only have absolute proof of here on Earth).
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    In the whole Earth the abundances of the elements are similar to the averages of the Solar System, with the exception of some volatile elements, most of them being non-metals, which have been lost in space during the condensation of the Earth and also later. However the Earth is made of layers with different chemical compositions and many elements are concentrated in layers that are too far from the surface to hope that we will ever reach them. So in the accessible part of the Earth, close to the surface, those elements are seriously depleted. Some asteroids, unlike the Earth, have never been melted. In that case their composition is homogeneous, similar to the averages of the Solar System. Other asteroids are broken parts from the cores of bigger planets, so they have a composition like in the Earth at very high depths. However, in the latter kind of asteroids the useful metals are dissolved as tiny percentages in an iron-nickel-cobalt-germanium alloy. This will make their extraction incredibly energy-consuming. On Earth such metals have been separated during millions of years from their surrounding minerals and they have been accumulated as native nuggets or metallic sulfides that are very easy to process for their final separation and purification. With the alloy that exists in planet cores and asteroids nobody has demonstrated an efficient separation method yet. The laboratory methods used for such separations use huge amounts of water and acids and they will be impossible to implement on an asteroid. Carrying raw metal from asteroids, which is almost completely iron, would also increase the costs tremendously. So it is absurd to even consider asteroid mining before demonstrating a method that can extract the metals from iron at the mining sites and with a minimum consumption of energy and of non-recyclable reactants.
  - yowzadave 2y ago
    > gold, nickel, and / or iron that's supposedly worth many times more than the entire global economy You hear these statements sometimes about asteroid mining, and they betray a misunderstanding of the way economies work. The reason gold/etc. is expensive is because it is scarce. If we suddenly have an abundance of these materials, then they will be cheap. The intrinsic value of these metals is not worth multiples of the global economy.
    - DennisP 2y ago
      For precious metals that doesn't necessarily mean it's not worth going to get them in large quantities. Aluminum used to be more precious than gold. Now we make airplanes out of it.
      - nsxwolf 2y ago
        Soda cans too!
      - beerandt 2y ago
        It's a pretty good example with the difference being energy to retrieve vs energy to refine. Even with/if there's a 'flood the market' eventuality, you'd have approx multiple generations for the market to grow and mature, improving the associated technologies along the way, and wealth generated orders beyond the Carnegies Rockefellers and Vanderbilts combined.
    - dhosek 2y ago
      I’ve had an idea for a sci fi story lurking in the back of my head of an earth-based cartel sabotaging space mining to preserve the value of their precious metals. The catch is being able to communicate the economics in a way that’s both accurate and entertaining.
      - blooalien 2y ago
        As long as you double-check it's work, you could always ask an LLM for help with some of that, maybe? I'd install something local like Ollama or somesuch and download one of the larger more popular more recent models and give it an appropriate system prompt related to being a "writing assistant" or something like that. Then bounce ideas off it and maybe throw a few related articles at it for "context" to work with. It's one of the things a lotta recent LLMs are actually useful for and somewhat good at.
- notfish 2y ago
  What? Carbonaceous chondrites (the toyota corolla of asteroids) are like .1ppm gold, whereas Earth’s crust is ~0.005ppm https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1968/0603/report.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1968/0603/report.pdf
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    Carbonaceous chondrites are bodies that have never aggregated into a big planet, so their chemical composition is close to the average composition of the Solar System. They are extremely numerous, but most of them are extremely small. Changing the spaceship orbit to catch one of them, which might have a few tons only in rare cases, will provide only a few grams at most of useful elements, far too little for the energy spent to achieve this. Mining a big asteroid that is a fragment of the core of a former bigger planet has much more chances to be worthwhile, but even for that nobody has gives any suggestion yet for how to separate the mined metals from iron and nickel at the extraction place, otherwise the transportation of the raw alloy would also need too much energy.
- adrian_b 2y ago
  The average content of gold and silver and of platinum-group metals is very similar in the whole Earth and in the rest of the bodies of the Solar System. Nevertheless, in the crust that covers the surface of the Earth, the abundances of gold and silver and of platinum-group metals are many orders of magnitude lower than their average abundances in the Solar System. For instance most of the silver has remained in deep parts of the mantle when the crust has formed, so silver is 11 times less abundant at the surface of the Earth than in the Solar System. Gold and the platinum-group metals have gone to even higher depths, in the iron kernel. So at the surface gold is almost 300 times less abundant than in the Solar System, rhenium almost 600 times and nickel more than 900 times less abundant than in the Solar System, palladium around 3000 times, platinum and ruthenium around 5500 times and osmium and iridium around 50000 times less abundant than in the Solar System. Similar numbers apply to all of the 8 planets that are big or medium-sized and also for some of the small planets and big satellites, because all these have been melted at some point in their history, when all the metals with high affinity to iron or sulfur have gone to inaccessible depths below the surface of those planets. In the outer parts of the Solar System, the bodies are covered by thick layers of ice, but for the 4 inner planets the silicate crust that we see covering their surface is similar to the slag that forms at the surface of the iron smelted in an iron furnace and it is similarly depleted in the metals with low electropositivity.
  - schiffern 2y ago
    You can also find asteroids that are enriched in platinum-group metals, by that same process. The shattered core of an ancient ("Iron catastrophe" differentiated) planet should be highly enriched in these metals. 16 Psyche might, or might not, be such an object. If so its surface is still covered by a "rubble pile" layer of rocky material. https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-psyche-planet-core-mystery https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-psyche-plan... https://www.freethink.com/space/psyche-asteroid https://www.freethink.com/space/psyche-asteroid
    - adrian_b 2y ago
      You are right, but the enrichment of those asteroids in platinum-group metals is very small in comparison with the corresponding depletion of the surface of the planets. While the depletion has reduced the amount of platinum-group metals by many thousands of times, the enrichment only increases their concentration a few times over the average concentration. The reason is that the planet cores still include iron, one of the main 10 elements of the universe, the least abundant of which is many times more abundant than all the other elements combined. The enrichment consists only in the removal of the magnesium, silicon and oxygen from the planet core, while the iron stays there. Even with all the platinum-group elements in the core, their abundance cannot increase beyond the limit imposed by the ratios between their average abundances and that of iron (actually their abundances become a little larger than those ratios, because a bigger fraction of iron remains oxidized in the mantle than the corresponding fraction of platinum-group metals, but the difference above the average ratios remains very small).
- fnordpiglet 2y ago
  Thank goodness there’s a lot more space than earth then!
coryrc 2y ago
Gold is a worse conductor than copper. Silver is slightly better per volume but worse per mass.
- schiffern 2y ago
  Per mass, aluminum is better than copper. That's why modern high voltage lines have aluminum conductors around a steel core, while "advanced conductors" (aka High Temperature Low Sag) densely pack aluminum around a composite core. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/11/20/reconductor-existing-transmission-to-unlock-renewables-says-uc-berkeley-study/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/11/20/reconductor-existing-... https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP343.pdf#page=26 https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP343.pdf#page=... https://www.entsoe.eu/Technopedia/techsheets/high-temperature-low-sag-conductors-htls https://www.entsoe.eu/Technopedia/techsheets/high-temperatur...
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  It’s better in oxidizing environments.
  - hypertele-Xii 2y ago
    So basically everywhere under the sky.

otabdeveloper4 2y ago

Gold and silver is less common in space than here on Earth.

blooalien 2y ago
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2023/06/05/golden-asteroid-mission-is-back-on-track-says-nasa/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2023/06/05/go... You sure about that? Here's just one asteroid made of mostly gold, nickel, and / or iron that's supposedly worth many times more than the entire global economy. Pretty sure that anything we have here on Earth also exists "out there" in much greater abundance than we could ever possibly imagine here on our finite little speck of a planet (except maybe "life", which we only have absolute proof of here on Earth).
- adrian_b 2y ago
  In the whole Earth the abundances of the elements are similar to the averages of the Solar System, with the exception of some volatile elements, most of them being non-metals, which have been lost in space during the condensation of the Earth and also later. However the Earth is made of layers with different chemical compositions and many elements are concentrated in layers that are too far from the surface to hope that we will ever reach them. So in the accessible part of the Earth, close to the surface, those elements are seriously depleted. Some asteroids, unlike the Earth, have never been melted. In that case their composition is homogeneous, similar to the averages of the Solar System. Other asteroids are broken parts from the cores of bigger planets, so they have a composition like in the Earth at very high depths. However, in the latter kind of asteroids the useful metals are dissolved as tiny percentages in an iron-nickel-cobalt-germanium alloy. This will make their extraction incredibly energy-consuming. On Earth such metals have been separated during millions of years from their surrounding minerals and they have been accumulated as native nuggets or metallic sulfides that are very easy to process for their final separation and purification. With the alloy that exists in planet cores and asteroids nobody has demonstrated an efficient separation method yet. The laboratory methods used for such separations use huge amounts of water and acids and they will be impossible to implement on an asteroid. Carrying raw metal from asteroids, which is almost completely iron, would also increase the costs tremendously. So it is absurd to even consider asteroid mining before demonstrating a method that can extract the metals from iron at the mining sites and with a minimum consumption of energy and of non-recyclable reactants.
- yowzadave 2y ago
  > gold, nickel, and / or iron that's supposedly worth many times more than the entire global economy You hear these statements sometimes about asteroid mining, and they betray a misunderstanding of the way economies work. The reason gold/etc. is expensive is because it is scarce. If we suddenly have an abundance of these materials, then they will be cheap. The intrinsic value of these metals is not worth multiples of the global economy.
  - DennisP 2y ago
    For precious metals that doesn't necessarily mean it's not worth going to get them in large quantities. Aluminum used to be more precious than gold. Now we make airplanes out of it.
    - nsxwolf 2y ago
      Soda cans too!
    - beerandt 2y ago
      It's a pretty good example with the difference being energy to retrieve vs energy to refine. Even with/if there's a 'flood the market' eventuality, you'd have approx multiple generations for the market to grow and mature, improving the associated technologies along the way, and wealth generated orders beyond the Carnegies Rockefellers and Vanderbilts combined.
  - dhosek 2y ago
    I’ve had an idea for a sci fi story lurking in the back of my head of an earth-based cartel sabotaging space mining to preserve the value of their precious metals. The catch is being able to communicate the economics in a way that’s both accurate and entertaining.
    - blooalien 2y ago
      As long as you double-check it's work, you could always ask an LLM for help with some of that, maybe? I'd install something local like Ollama or somesuch and download one of the larger more popular more recent models and give it an appropriate system prompt related to being a "writing assistant" or something like that. Then bounce ideas off it and maybe throw a few related articles at it for "context" to work with. It's one of the things a lotta recent LLMs are actually useful for and somewhat good at.
notfish 2y ago
What? Carbonaceous chondrites (the toyota corolla of asteroids) are like .1ppm gold, whereas Earth’s crust is ~0.005ppm https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1968/0603/report.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1968/0603/report.pdf
- adrian_b 2y ago
  Carbonaceous chondrites are bodies that have never aggregated into a big planet, so their chemical composition is close to the average composition of the Solar System. They are extremely numerous, but most of them are extremely small. Changing the spaceship orbit to catch one of them, which might have a few tons only in rare cases, will provide only a few grams at most of useful elements, far too little for the energy spent to achieve this. Mining a big asteroid that is a fragment of the core of a former bigger planet has much more chances to be worthwhile, but even for that nobody has gives any suggestion yet for how to separate the mined metals from iron and nickel at the extraction place, otherwise the transportation of the raw alloy would also need too much energy.
adrian_b 2y ago
The average content of gold and silver and of platinum-group metals is very similar in the whole Earth and in the rest of the bodies of the Solar System. Nevertheless, in the crust that covers the surface of the Earth, the abundances of gold and silver and of platinum-group metals are many orders of magnitude lower than their average abundances in the Solar System. For instance most of the silver has remained in deep parts of the mantle when the crust has formed, so silver is 11 times less abundant at the surface of the Earth than in the Solar System. Gold and the platinum-group metals have gone to even higher depths, in the iron kernel. So at the surface gold is almost 300 times less abundant than in the Solar System, rhenium almost 600 times and nickel more than 900 times less abundant than in the Solar System, palladium around 3000 times, platinum and ruthenium around 5500 times and osmium and iridium around 50000 times less abundant than in the Solar System. Similar numbers apply to all of the 8 planets that are big or medium-sized and also for some of the small planets and big satellites, because all these have been melted at some point in their history, when all the metals with high affinity to iron or sulfur have gone to inaccessible depths below the surface of those planets. In the outer parts of the Solar System, the bodies are covered by thick layers of ice, but for the 4 inner planets the silicate crust that we see covering their surface is similar to the slag that forms at the surface of the iron smelted in an iron furnace and it is similarly depleted in the metals with low electropositivity.
- schiffern 2y ago
  You can also find asteroids that are enriched in platinum-group metals, by that same process. The shattered core of an ancient ("Iron catastrophe" differentiated) planet should be highly enriched in these metals. 16 Psyche might, or might not, be such an object. If so its surface is still covered by a "rubble pile" layer of rocky material. https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-psyche-planet-core-mystery https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-psyche-plan... https://www.freethink.com/space/psyche-asteroid https://www.freethink.com/space/psyche-asteroid
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    You are right, but the enrichment of those asteroids in platinum-group metals is very small in comparison with the corresponding depletion of the surface of the planets. While the depletion has reduced the amount of platinum-group metals by many thousands of times, the enrichment only increases their concentration a few times over the average concentration. The reason is that the planet cores still include iron, one of the main 10 elements of the universe, the least abundant of which is many times more abundant than all the other elements combined. The enrichment consists only in the removal of the magnesium, silicon and oxygen from the planet core, while the iron stays there. Even with all the platinum-group elements in the core, their abundance cannot increase beyond the limit imposed by the ratios between their average abundances and that of iron (actually their abundances become a little larger than those ratios, because a bigger fraction of iron remains oxidized in the mantle than the corresponding fraction of platinum-group metals, but the difference above the average ratios remains very small).
fnordpiglet 2y ago
Thank goodness there’s a lot more space than earth then!

coryrc 2y ago

Gold is a worse conductor than copper. Silver is slightly better per volume but worse per mass.

schiffern 2y ago
Per mass, aluminum is better than copper. That's why modern high voltage lines have aluminum conductors around a steel core, while "advanced conductors" (aka High Temperature Low Sag) densely pack aluminum around a composite core. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/11/20/reconductor-existing-transmission-to-unlock-renewables-says-uc-berkeley-study/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/11/20/reconductor-existing-... https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP343.pdf#page=26 https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP343.pdf#page=... https://www.entsoe.eu/Technopedia/techsheets/high-temperature-low-sag-conductors-htls https://www.entsoe.eu/Technopedia/techsheets/high-temperatur...
mensetmanusman 2y ago
It’s better in oxidizing environments.
- hypertele-Xii 2y ago
  So basically everywhere under the sky.