I haven’t seen any evidence that Doctor Lindy Elkins-Tanton was giving the number in the long scale, but given that she was speaking to an American audience and appartently giving the number in USD, I’d lean toward short scale. As a planetary scientist I’m sure she does use scientific notation, but even if she did so in media interviews the journalists are likely to translate it.
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Long scale = wrong scale.
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So, if you manage to earn 10 quintillion dollars by dismantling this asteroid, but spend 40 quintillion dollars doing so, would it all be worth it? It’s probably a lot less expensive to mine than scaling up the Psyche mission (eexplained in Scott Manley’s video), but then there are the deflationary effects of introducing that much gold/.nickel into the economy.
The article seems to imply that SSSB took over in 2006 to describe such objects as this asteroid? This is more confusing than USB 3.x! 
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Yes. The metal in the asteroid is worth something, but not the x .
I thought it a bit too spectacular to be a photo. Still a pretty amazing asteroid, though!
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My astronomical observations have discovered a body with iron deposits worth 200,000,000 quadrillion. dollars. Just step outside and look down.
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Sorry, but my first reaction was … Rango.
A minor planet is one that isn’t allowed to drink yet, or vote in the who-gets-to-be-called-a-planet elections
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On the other hand, if you can harness that energy, it is carbon free!
Here’s another:
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This right here. It probably is ridiculous to mine asteroids and send the materials to Earth with or current understandings of physics.
But mining asteroids and using those materials to build spacecraft? Having a good supply of metal in a area that doesn’t have as large of local gravity well to use propellent to get out of might be quite handy, on the assumption that there is also fuel available nearby. (Also, building a spacecraft in the middle of an asteroid belt also poses some… issues. 
)
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Thank you for that response. I ran the numbers (assume spherical, assume same Fe/Ni ratio as Earth, crust) and got “47,000 quadrillion.” It’s within the same order of magnitude, so safe to say CNN didn’t get their figure from a boffin.
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Unusual asteroid could be worth $10,000 quadrillion
…which, it turns out, is exactly the same as for any of the others.
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I think it would be acceptable to send some of the swag down the well, subject to a very heavy tax, or tithe, or tribute… whatever you want to call it. Say, 95% to stay up there where it can do the most good, and 5% down the gravity well for groundpounders to trade with each other.
We could revisit those percentages once the first children born outside the gravity well start to have kids of their own.
Yeah. Not every asteroid is going to have all the materials you need. But the asteroid belt is so sparse that getting to that secondary source of resources is still going to be a pain.
(Or were you thinking of this?)
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I heard a proposal somewhere that there are multiple mountain-sized diamonds floating in the thick atmosphere of Jupiter. And they could be worth $10,000 quadrillion, too.
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10,000 quadrillion? Why not 10 quintillion? (ETA: Which I guess was already asked…)
Wolfram|Alpha disagrees:
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