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Comment by adamwong246 | Hacker News Reader

If only there were a decent way to mine the earth's core directly. There's more usable material already on Earth than the entire asteroid belt. It's just all melted together, molten and buried under thousands of miles of dirt.

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In case you're serious, there isn't thousands of miles of dirt, but just metres to tens of metres. Then there's rock, which we do mine.

If we started mining the earth’s core, it would seem infinite at first. Can we be trusted to only take a little bit and not eventually hollow it out?

If we took the entire core to the surface (without collapsing the Earth which is impossible) we would cover the Earth with iron and nickel to a depth of hundreds of km.

If at some point we become anywhere advanced enough to do so, surely we could switch to mining other planets/objects.

Exactly! Plugging this into Wolfram Alpha reveals that Earth's core is worth $3.268×10^19 (US dollars)[1]. For comparison total global wealth is merely US$431T.

1. thirty-two quintillion six hundred eighty quadrillion dollars

I bet it's worth more than that in usable electricity if we ran it through a heat exchanger + steam turbine.

Also, I finally got a workable link. Wolfram really fought me on this one and it shows the dimensionality incorrectly, but the number is correct. 32 trillion trillion dollars (3.2E25). So a hundred times more.

Of course no market would hold a price when flooded with supply, but I bet our appetite for usable energy is higher than iron. That's a harder crystal ball estimation to quantify though.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28specific%20heat%20of...

Hard coded number sanity check:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%280.44%20J%20%2F%20%28...

These calculations are always bogus. Once mining starts, the price of iron will plummet. The exact same reason some reserves are seldom explored, as the decline in price will render the effort pointless.

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