Sorry if this is remotely tangentially related, but wasn't there a startup many years ago backed by silicon valley bigwigs with the mission to mine asteroids for gold and diamonds? Or did I see that in a movie?
https://www.space.com/30213-asteroid-mining-planetary-resour...
The Colorado School of Mines even has a graduate program in it.
The parent post argument is that we can get as much gold as we need on earth with techniques that aren't used because they're too expensive, but even those would still be far cheaper than space mining.
Space mining can be solution to prevent the price of some rare earth material skyrocketing in the future because we're running out of it, or to get something that's very rare and expensive (it's just that nobody has a clear proposal on what it's going to be) but at the moment gold is too common and cheap to justify the expense of mining it in space.
At current costs it would be a waste of money to pick up gold bars orbiting Earth; after (if!) SpaceX Starship cuts down cost of bulk transfers to orbit ten times, then it may become economic to bring down certain exceptional cases of highly concentrated rare materials - but it certainly will not be cheaper than the price of any raw minerals that exist on Earth in reasonable quantities, such as gold ore (alluvium ores, which aren't that valuable by weight due to low concentration in gold)
Then there's pollution and the constant talk about exploitation of child workers in mines. You won't get pollution on Earth if a robot mines the stuff in deep space, a rocket brings it to lunar orbit where a commodity is manufactured, and then brought back to Earth for consumption.
This is a very silly article, the interesting investment in space right now is in LEO communication satellites and to a lesser extent in launch services.
Do we have anyone as an expert on any of those options?
Indeed what gold and other rare(-ish) metals we mine today are largely the remains of asteroid impacts which deposited metals into the crust of this planet after formation, then got mixed around by plate tectonics and water cycles. Go to the source and you’ll fine pure, reduced metals at the original concentrations.
Like for example, there are near earth asteroids classified as “non-metal” types that are 1-4% gold and platinum group metals by weight, which would totally make them valuable ores on Earth. Let me emphasize these are the non-metal asteroids.
I would imagine that asteroids would hold value with rare-earths instead of currency metals.
This is extremely wrong. Gold is the preferred material for a huge variety of industrial applications, it's just not used because it's too expensive.
Silver and platinum are probably even bigger industrial wins though. Platinum is used a lot in industrial chemical reactors, and silver would entirely replace copper in electronics and heat-sinks if it were cheaper.
There is no reason to make this assumption.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...
They folded - asteroid mining is too much of challenge even now.