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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Rare materials are valuable because they're rare. If we brought Psyche16 home, they wouldn't be rare, and wouldn't be valuable.

Additionally, a lot of the value of Psyche16 is in iron and nickel. Those aren't rare on Earth -- most of the cost of iron and nickel is labour and energy in mining & refining them. Yes, Psyche16 is much more pure than currently accessible Earth ores, but that's more than offset by the fact that it's in outer space.

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Increased material availability would lead to economic growth and increasing demand. Consequently, although not all of the metal would sell for market value on the first day (in any case, it wouldn't even all arrive on the first day), you might get closer to the posted value than you're supposing.

No it wouldn't, especially if energy to convert it skyrocket.

> Increased material availability would lead to economic growth and increasing demand.

Not for iron and nickel. Iron is the most abundant element on earth and the 4th most abundant in the crust. It's practically everywhere. Almost all of the cost comes from processing and transporting it. Even if there ever were a shortage, it'd almost certainly be more economical to mine it from the mantle or crust than fly to the asteroid belt and bring it back. Iron is really far down the list of elements we need to worry about running out of.

The article's kind of silly, TBH.

You hit the nail on the head there. As you say, the value is in it's location (specifically the cost of transportation of iron to that bit of space). We could use it in situ to manufacture spacecraft.

The material, when you sell it next year, has a lower net present value than when you sell it today. If you spread out bringing the stuff to market for decades or centuries, that will have a marked effect on the posted value.

Then the solution is simple, spread out the mining operation.

This may sound like a paradox, but it's true:

Making nickel so easily obtainable that it's almost worthless, would be incredibly valuable to society.

The best value adds are the worst value captures.

Value and price are only loosely connected. Apart from resent history where we've made lots of it dirty, everyone has pretty much always had this highly valuable commodity delivered to them at no price.

Where people here are criticizing the article for its hyperbolic "everyone would be a billionaire!" rhetoric, it's not because we don't believe the metals are valuable, it's because the article conflates price with value.

This is the premise of Jules Verne's The Chase of the Golden Meteor.

Don’t have to bring it to earth then. Might mining and using it in space to build a space station be cheaper than flying metal to the orbit from Earth?

if one brought it back in secret, it could be rationed and slowly brought to market for generations and bring in great wealth before disrupting the rarity.

Yes, bring it back in secret. Hide it behind the moon.

I guess? It would take a lot of manpower, the probability of it staying a secret is very small. It would probably be easier to set up an illicit currency printing operation without anyone knowing :D

Iron and nickel are not that attractive. But if you could nab a gold one... I think there'll be a huge market for gold-titanium alloys.

Is a gold titanium alloy any good? Few materials become more useful when alloyed with gold...

I have never heard of any use for a titanium-gold alloy.

On the other hand, titanium-palladium alloys are very useful because they have better corrosion resistance in various chemical media.

Palladium can be found in the iron-nickel alloys from meteorites and asteroids in relatively large concentrations, together with the other platinum-group elements.

It's a fairly new material but it already has some uses.

https://phys.org/news/2016-07-lab-titanium-gold-alloy-harder...

According to that description, that titanium-gold mixture appears to be an inter-metallic compound, not an alloy.

While the hardness and corrosion resistance should be excellent, as described there, inter-metallic compounds are brittle and it is unlikely that a Ti-Au compound will have better properties than usual and cheaper tough ceramics, like silicon nitride or zirconia.

The most important advantage of metallic alloys over alternatives for structural applications is their much higher toughness, an inter-metallic Ti-Au compound does not have this advantage, so I doubt that it can find an application.

Are you perhaps thinking of TiN, which has a nice golden hue and properties that are excellent for certain applications? It’s even marketed as “gold”, especially on pans.

Titanium is quite literally dirt cheap (if you don’t need it refined anyway), and nitrogen is the majority component of air.

Rather that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanium_gold

TiN is a ceramic.

We can sell it to a resource hungry galactic civilization. :)

heh, anyone who could use it would just claim it. Nothing we could do.

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