$10 Quintilian Asteroid to Stay Out of Reach of Space Miners
60secondstatistics.com
60secondstatistics.com
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.
Read More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond
Of note:
>Gem-quality diamonds grown in a lab can be chemically, physically and optically identical (and sometimes superior) to naturally occurring ones. The mined diamond industry has undertaken legal, marketing and distribution countermeasures to protect its market from the emerging presence of synthetic diamonds.
Over human history, about 165 thousand metric tons (or 182 thousand short tons, or about 5.3 billion troy ounces) of gold have been mined, or at a spot price of $1200, almost $6.4 trillion dollars of gold. 33 thousand metric tons of it is currently held by banks and individuals as monetary gold.
Gold mining produces 2.5 to 3 thousand tons of gold each year.
But get this: if we melted the entire planet down, there would be single digit or possibly low double digit quintillions of metric tons of gold. In other words, we have mined less than a trillionth of the gold.
What keeps gold prices so far up is it costs about $1000 per ounce to mine, although this is dropping due to larger and larger mining machines and more automated processes that involve less people.
Outside of electronics, gold has no real world usage. Monetary gold and jewelry are largely artifacts of the past, imo. Once we eliminate those, the continued fast pace of growth of industrial and electronic consumption will be handled for quite some time, and also drop the price of gold significantly.
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.
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.
That's one of the reasons why space miners are proposing to just crash the asteroids into desert areas.
If only rockets had regenerative brakes!
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.
Nobody (I hope) is suggesting just putting an asteroid on a crash course with earth. Rather the idea is to bring the asteroids in an orbit around the earth and/or the moon and then leave them there, biting off small chunks and deorbiting them one at a time. So what would impact would be something like 10-100 tons at a time, in 10 tons-at-a-time chunks, maybe even less (enough weight so they survive reentry, or maybe we package them to "fly"/crashland like the space shuttle)
So capturing an asteroid refers to moving them into a parking orbit around earth, nothing more.
And don't worry. Earth orbit is an unbelievably big place. If you don't want to be at special places (like geosync orbit, or just as close as possible), there is no shortage of space whatsoever.
If we shatter the moon, well, let's put it this we : at that point we're fucked. As in close to end of human race fucked. There will be worldwide constant meteor showers for years, which will impact with enough force to penetrate nuclear bunkers. Oceans will boil for years.
Once an industry exists transporting commodities to Earth, it will improve over time. Maybe eventually it will be economical for iron. Or maybe it could justify the cost of a space elevator.
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.
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.
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.
The amount of fuel needed to park it in a perfect orbit is more than to park it in a sloppy, potentially decaying one.
Landing is very hard. Getting into a medium-high orbit is not. Such an orbit might be sloppy, but it won't decay.
Yes I know about the mars climate orbiter, but that was a very low orbit because of the use of aerobraking, and it was small enough that extra fuel would more easily go unnoticed.
A minor miscalculation on a slingshot approach sends you straight into the planet instead. That we hit Mars with the lander by accident should demonstrate it's not only possible, it's actually not that hard.
Worried? Because of falling prices? Looks like someone didn't pay attention during economics 101 or is afraid of going out of business.
If you were certain you'd get it back to earth, you could offset this effect by slowly selling futures contracts. But if you then fail to bring back the iron you'd just cause he opposite problem: a sudden increase in scarcity (when you default on your futures contracts), rather than a sudden increase in abundance.
I believe the solution is to partner with an insurance company, but I'm not sure anyone is large enough to cover the amounts we're talking about here. The amount you could bring back safely would probably mostly be limited by the insurance premium you can afford to pay.
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.
By the way, I don't think space mining will be of any practical relevance in the foreseeable future. I would also much prefer if we would learn to operate economically with the resources we have instead of just reaching for more resources. So I have no real skin in the argument, I just found this position against space mining unjustified.
I worry that it would be cheaper and more profitable for some to simply write them off. You're right however, that it's not a problem with space-mining, it's a problem with people.
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.
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.
Also, an asteroid is made of reaction mass.
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.
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.
By which process will bringing back large amounts of gold "decimate economies"? And which economies, specifically?
See Chapter V of Locke's Second Treatise of Government, Of Property.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes. The company is piggybacking on the millions of dollars and man-hours that went into past government research on space exploration. It is going out of its way to recover and reuse equipment that went through the extremes of being shot into orbit and reentering the Earth's atmosphere to lower costs.
If you feel your posts are your own work in spite of all the piggybacking you do to post them, do give Musk some credit for actually doing the work no one ever did.