The race to the riches of asteroids
physicsworld.com
physicsworld.com
The Spanish brought back gold and silver from the New World, and crashed the markets: 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
There would seem to be more danger to the economy by being flooded with rare metals than from an actual meteorite impact.
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.
I need to work out how to deal with too many ideas hitting me at once.
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.
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
Kinda like the glut of oil reserves in the world. Everyone knows the time of internal combustion engines is drawing to a close and so they are trying to sell every barrel they have before barrels of oil become worth pennies.
Once enough people have asteroid material in orbit, the material cost will drop as sellers try to recover any value out of the market.
If there’s enough production going on in space to bubble-and-pop at that kind of scale, I’d expect overcapacity to be used for construction of space habitats, not lowering prices below cost in a fire-sale.
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.
Though possibly the asteroid would be more valuable in orbit than on Earth. It's hard to get materials up there!
When astronauts return from space they have to carefully control how they descend and make sure that they don't get too low while they're traveling too fast. Otherwise they'd burn up.
Or even a hollow sphere.
Easier solution - park the asteroids somewhere and have the nations of the world pay you not to.
If I acquire a bunch of asteroids and double the size of that supply, I now own X/2 dollars worth of minerals, instead of the zero dollars worth that I did before.
For a simple example, consider the case of decorative diamonds today.
Suppose it costs a terrestrial mining company $1000/ton to extract a material, and the price is $1005/ton, and you can bring the same metal down from space for $100/ton, and sell at $110/ton. Under this set of facts you can make a better margin than the terrestrial miners make, take over the whole market, and everybody except the terrestrial miners will be better off.
Your only competitors would be other space miners, and the capex/research investment required to set up a space mining operation would constitute a significant moat (though certainly not a permanent one).
Who knows if these hypotheticals are remotely close to how this will play out, but I think this is an interesting scenario.
The point I was making was that even if you cause a price drop by flooding the market, it might not be a bad outcome; you could end up making more profit than was being made by your competitors before you entered the market.
To your point, it's true that even if the equilibrium state isn't more profitable for an actor, they would still be incentivized to increase the supply if they could temporarily widen their profit margins while the price is changing (e.g. until the competitors can catch up). But I think that the equilibrium state provides a simpler working example of the general point I was making.
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.
Isn't that what Planetary Resources are doing?
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.
The moon is, astronomically speaking, as near to Earth as you can get. The problem is that everything else, including asteroids, are many thousands of times further away.
The other problem is that even if you intend to use it safely, you have just built a massive gun which is too far away to shoot back at and which has the capability to target specific locations on this planet.
But how difficult would it be to intercept the payload safely outside the atmosphere? Seems it would be easier than intercepting an ICBM.
While it is often said that stealth is impossible in space, that tends to assume the appropriate tech has actually been manufactured rather than sitting in a lab somewhere waiting for a purchase order. Radar, even lidar, is going to have awful signal-to-noise ratios and almost all of the return signal will be stuff that bounced off the moon rather than any projectile. Even the lunar retroreflector turns 10^17 photons out into one photon back, according to Wikipedia, and that’s about as far from stealth as you can get.
Edit: I suppose one could reasonably argue that any industrialisation of Luna would, as a result of my own argument, make governments choose to put loads of effort into appropriate defence technology. On the other hand, I’m told trench warfare was more accident than deliberate planning in WW1, so perhaps governments would be as myopic as ever even with a massive space gun on the moon.
I’m more concerned that there’s nothing much you can do to redirect such an object in the few hours it takes to fall on your head. By that time it will have reached 4km/s.
As for hacking being possible, that’s just the observation that basically everything is hackable. Even things that were given as examples of clueless parents fretting over nothing when I was a teen, such as making JPEG files execute when opened, turned out possible due to exploitable bugs.
However, my main focus was supposed to be other people who are “legitimately” in space, because of the aforementioned trillion dollars, and of hacking. Because both hacking and mutiny/secession haves happened lots already, even in situations where one might expect them not to.
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.