How many asteroids have been landed on so far? Two?
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I think you’re right to some degree… In the video he does briefly mention that there will be a danger of crashing the market for certain commodities like gold and platinum.
But I think it’s the super rare-earth elements that would be so valuable, assuming they have a transformative potential for earth industry… Consider if a vast supply of some super-rare element suddenly became available and this element happens to become indispensable by enabling technology vastly superior to current technologies… It could create a situation like oil did in the 19th century. Like if they found some element that could make high-capacity batteries cheap and ubiquitous… Or for some kind of new supercondutor on the cheap.
There’s a lot of “what if” in this scenario, but the video makes this enterprise seem like it’s going to happen in the next couple decades… I highly doubt that. I think this kind of enterprise is a century away, especially for the more elaborate stuff.
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Commodities like that crash extra hard with this kind of disruption because value is assigned to them beyond their usefulness in manufacturing or sustaining life.
Same here. Technology is moving fast but not that fast.
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Sigh. Yes, there are valuable metals in asteroids. No, it is not a good idea to go try to mine them.
Here on earth, we mine ores, which are rocks which have higher concentrations of desired minerals. Those higher concentrations exist because the earth has an active geology - ground water dissolves minerals out of rocks and then redeposits them elsewhere, rocks undergo metamorphic processes, etc.
Asteroids are geologically dead and have been since the birth of the solar system. All the minerals we might want to extract from them are going to be evenly distributed throughout the rock (for rare earth elements) or iron-nickel (for platinum/gold/palladium/etc). The only ores in space are on planets or large sized moons that have had an active geology in the past – and there’s no profit margin in lifting bulk minerals out of a gravity well.
WIthout ores, an asteroid mining operation will have vastly higher refining costs than an equivalent mining operation on Earth. There’s no profit in trying to mine an asteroid for minerals to be shipped back to Earth. There never will be.
ETA: From time to time you see people obsessed with how there’s millions of tons of gold, platinum, uranium, etc, dissolved in the world’s oceans. But sea water mining operations never move out of the dream stage into actual pilot projects, because the concentration of the desired metals is too fucking dilute to make it worth while. Mining the asteroids is going to be a lot more difficult and resource intensive than mining the world’s sea water.
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That’s the dream isn’t it? That we find a nice source for something once too rare to use in many applications and it’s new found abundance sets up a situation where new uses are found and new tech invented as a result.
You’re probably right but hope springs eternal as they say
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Without scratching the surface of the mantle there’s a reason that the De Beers cartel has spent the last 15 years diversifying into non-mining enterprises related to diamonds: “Forevermark” (scarcity authentication), grading and valuation, retail boutiques and venture capital.
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The Rockefellers of the 21st century may be less like the internet and tech moguls of the 20th century and more like the old-school oil barons of the 19th century.
This is not comforting. But then, they say that space does not comfort.
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“Peak Phosphorus” is rather in line with the “Peak Oil” concept - it refers only to traditional forms of extraction. You can extract enormous amounts of phosphorus from reprocessing methods and recapture ones (e.g. runoff from farms, from sewage treatment facilities, etc.). However, those are a bit more expensive than just mining high-concentration phosphate rock, so right now there’s no drive to recapture and reuse the stuff.
If phos gets a little more expensive, suddenly we’ll start seeing a drive to adopt alternative tech. Just like how now that oil’s gradually creeping up in price since around 1999 or so, we’re seeing a lot of adoption of things like electric cars and rooftop solar, wind farms, wave energy, and so forth. The freakout about peak oil came a bit before the alternative energy boom, and now suddenly a whole lot fewer people are worried about peak oil, because we can see to a future where expensive oil isn’t really a problem for the average consumer, and that there’s also developing demand for non-fossil biofuels and such.
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Only for nickel-iron. Which we have enough of on Earth. Also, we’ve moved past the bronze age when nickel-iron meteorites constituted a better alloy than anything metallurgists could make. Today’s industry demands steel with very carefully controlled amounts of carbon and other metals, and will not think much of straight up asteroid alloy - too much nickel and other unwanted impurities.
Every other element that we might want that could be found in an asteroid will be there mixed in with a lot of other stuff we don’t want, and will have to be refined. In most cases, it will be a lot harder to refine it out of an asteroid than out of the ores we have here on Earth.
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Yeah, I don’t think it’s a pressing problem. I just found it relevant given that phosphorous came to Earth from meteorites in the first place and also in the context of colonising the solar system without having to pull it out of Earth’s gravity well.
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As I understand it, that’s exactly the case with rare earth mining. The Chinese have a monopoly not of resource itself, but of the cheapness of extraction.
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The redox state of metals mined from an asteroid will be different from what we would mine on earth, agreed?
How so?
If we aren’t going to refine back on earth, there is the enormous energy cost associated with extraction and refinement to consider.
While reading through the comments I had a fun little daydream where someone manages to eliminate the problem of lifting objects out of a gravity well, and instead of using this knowledge to become insanely wealthy, she starts flinging people into the sun.
But mining asteroids for profit is cool too.
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Sounds like a Jonathan Coulton song.
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OK, I agree. What next? 
No. Rocky meterorites are made up of SiO2. Oxygen was pretty common in the space dust that the Solar system formed out of. So apart from the nickel-iron ones, minerals in asteroids will be oxidized.
Ton for ton, ore will contain more of the desired mineral than an asteroid. Therefore it will cost more to refine a ton of asteroid than a ton of ore. See my other comment above for why this is so.
Si is not a metal.
Oxygen was pretty common in the space dust that the Solar system formed out of.
Free oxygen was not.
minerals in asteroids will be oxidized.
citation please.
I am not a know it all, I did study under someone who worked for NASA and predicted perchlorate saturated water under martian poles, 30 years ago.
Doesn’t that assume identical refinement methods? That’s a big assumption if refinement is in space. Lots of SF speculation uses heat from giant solar mirrors.
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