see my request for a citation for that.
Please science this, not spectulate.
It’s one of those bootstrap problems. Is there significant DEMAND for large amounts of Iron in orbit? Sure if you had a bazillion tons of it in an accessible orbit, you would use it, rather than aluminum for building space stations, and satellites. But the demand for either is actually quite small.
Well we would need to develop completely new methods for refining (and then processing) the metal. At this point we have nothing but a few guesses and speculation on how to do so.
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The whole discussion is pointless - there’s no chance of anybody else being the world’s first trillionaire because there’s already been one: the Emperor Augustus…
I’m waiting on a citation for these very methods that we so clearly already have.
All this extra weight on earth is going to slow its revolution and ruin my sleep pattern.
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Pulling a figure out of my backside, about 8% of asteroids are iron or stony iron, type M; we already have a bead on several. They can be found through spectrographic analysis. OTOH, you may not want the iron or stony iron ones as much as the ones that contain carbon compounds or water if you’re trying to set up shop in the asteroid belt. it’s cheaper to find the elements you need there, rather than shipping them up from Earth. There are any number of speculative sci-fi stories about mining the asteroid belt or comets, and not all of them are just blowing smoke; The Expanse is just the most recent one giving a fairly good idea of what it would be like.
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The Expanse is generally pretty good, but pissed me off depicting a water miner as the size of a Star Destroyer. Larry Niven back in the 70’s was right on with belt mining ships being dead minimal. Even the Expanse’s magic Drive can’t eliminate the logic of this.
Actually, you might like a book from the early 90s, Higher Education by Charles Sheffield and Jerry Pournelle, about teaching kids with little future on the Earth to become asteroid miners. Sheffield and Pournelle are pretty good as far as putting the hard science into science fiction.
The impression I got was that the miner ships in The Expanse were giant frameworks for hauling ore and water chunks; crew quarters were mostly secondary.
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I’ll look for it. I loved early Niven and Pournelle together and separate, but both became mostly unreadable. Footfall was simply awful. I’ve read little Sheffield, but I remember liking a book of his about slowing down people in time to make interstellar travel possible.
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I mean…
https://www.forbes.com/business/lists/2006/10/2MY9.html
EDIT
Generally, owning the exclusive access to the minerals is worth more than liquidating the said minerals.
What methods/techniques did they use to convince the kids they had little future? Did they kill all the firemen and football players or something?
You mean, the first trillionaire may be a capitalist who brutally exploits the labor of asteroid miners, many of whom probably die horribly, and takes no physical risks himself, probably never actually leaving earth.
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The solution!
Tell Trump that if he’s willing to be blasted into space toward an asteroid…!!
I imagine that whoever is the first with wide access will probably suffer a bit of a reduced price, but would release the materials in a very controlled fashion to maintain their market.
If a number of vast sources open up at once…
yeah and block out the sun…
I’m all for it, because spaaace, etc, etc.
But I think that if by then we still live in a society where it is possible or even desirable to become a trillionaire we’ll won’t be that far from where we are now.
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Rare elements are resources such as Cobalt, used to make electric batteries. Given this, like oil is finite and lithium batteries power everything, the ongoing need is present, hence the cited example of Rockefeller is apropos
As I understand it then, The Expanse is actually a documentary.
If so, we need to have clear restrictions on the use and exploitation of protomolecule.
