I can think of PLENTY of billionaires to send :)
I assume you object to billionaires because they use a disproportionate share of the world's resources? Spending even more resources on them doesn't seem like it would make that better?
Can anyone imagine something concrete?
Even the Soviets didn't say they were dumb and wasteful.
(I tend to be a bit milder, and just say that the moon landings should be thought of as spending on entertainment, not on science. Manned space flight in general is very cost-ineffective, if you care about scientific bang for your buck.)
I don’t think it’s hypocritical to say that the moon landing was worth it but gearing up to go to a distant black hole is not*
* Is also shiny and has movies
* It's cheaper by a good number of orders of magnitude
* It has massive commercial value (bringing home piles of gold. Well, platinum metals)
* It has actual military implications, which is the main motivator for any government progrem
* It gets to call the military research "planetary defense", and there are more cool movies about that.
No government is getting its act together on that. A distant black hole is right out.
But yes, agreed, it's way too expensive. And so we're not even going to make that happen. That was the point - it's more attractive than neighboring black holes along several different axes, and it's still not worth it.
Refine / cut up your asteroid on the lunar surface, then you need a relatively small amount of dV to put your payloads into a decaying orbit around earth (~1/4 the dV to get into low earth orbit from the surface). Enough heat shielding, and you'll be able to crash your payload into the ocean somewhere for recovery.
Frankly, the biggest issue is that you'd end up flooding the market.
Second - humans need to locate this deposit. Remotely. In the asteroid field. We are still finding out deposits in the habitable Earth regions, because that is a hard task, talking about locating deposits in the Belt is an impossible task, and will remain so for a long time.
Third - we need to get there. Excluding flyby's, the best humanity managed is to deliver two 1 ton vehicles to the Mars. And there we had a luxury of aerobraking to save a lot of fuel. Belt is way farther, there is no aerobrake possibility and we will have to deal with other asteroids along the way. We don't have such tech.
Fourth - we will need to strap engines to the asteroid, remotely, with an hour signal lag. Engines which don't exist in any form today. And we need to get fuel to them somehow. Impossible task.
Fifth, we need a Moon colony with robots or humans.
Sixth - high energy tech on the Moon.
Seven - launch facility on the Moon.
And I've probably missed a few other impossible hurdles, writing this. Then IF all of that would exist, you would need it to be at least as cheap as Earth based mining, which is a pipe dream. Any space tech is more expensive by design, sometimes orders of magnitude more expensive. AND finally there need to be an infinitely elastic market on Earth for this new source of materials. Imagine you will sell a billion tons of platinum tomorrow, the price would crash and never ever recover. You see this yourself in your last sentence.
Not if you launch first, and present after ;)
Studying it might allow us to finally unify GR and QM.
1. Humans aren't going to survive in space for 10 years. It's questionable that they'd even survive a trip to Mars without getting riddled with cancer from the cosmic radiation. Sure, if you built a big enough ship to provide some really effective shielding, it's technically possible, but that ship would be enormous and far beyond our current capabilities. I don't think it's feasible at all to launch such a ship from Earth; it would need to be assembled in space.
2. Project Orion is just an idea on paper; it's not within current technology, because no one ever built it. We don't "have the technology" at all. We don't even have the technology to land humans on the Moon. We did decades ago, but we no longer do: all the people who knew how to do that are retired or dead, so we'd have to start over. Of course, we can build powerful rocket motors easier now since we do so regularly now, so building equivalent Moon-landing capability is no longer as difficult as in the 60s, but a lot of things would have to be partially re-invented (e.g., the lander itself, the rover, etc).
3. Does your time estimate include the time needed to decelerate, so the ship doesn't just zip by the black hole with barely any time to collect data? (And if there's people on this ship, they might want to return to Earth...)
You don't just have to get the probe there. (And which probe? You have to design and build it first.) You have to get it there, have it get data, and have the data come back. Otherwise you've just thrown a rock, which, yeah, if we spent a fortune we could certainly throw a rock out vast distances very quickly.
So, you either:
Do a flyby, which requires a slower speed. New Horizon's speed was good for gathering data from Pluto and sending it all back. The hypothesized PBH is small enough to fit in your duffle and probably much darker.
Enter orbit. Easy enough with a 5-10M object. But the orbit has to be a useful orbit. So either you burn a tremendous amount of delta-v to reduce your tremendous speed so you get a compact-enough orbit; which requires even more energy to get out there, or you craft the orbit such that the object itself helps slow you: but that takes time and more speed means more time.
But small black holes with the same mass as the Earth have the same sucking power as the Earth since it's the mass that does the sucking.
We'd all freeze to death in a few days, but the earth would go right on orbiting as if nothing happened.
If our moon turned into a black hole of its same mass tomorrow there would be even less of an effect. We'd notice we could no longer see the moon, but we'd still have tides just like before.