"The iron found in the asteroid 16 Psyche alone is worth an estimated $10 quintillion, and according to NASA, if we could extract all of the minerals in the asteroids between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the total value would be enough to give every person on Earth about $100 billion."Photo via.
Serious question: presuming we did mine _all_ of that material, it would likely crash the markets/value for those items, meaning the net result wouldn't be $100b / person?
ReplyDeleteI'd guess, at the risk of being cynical, whatever entity tasked with mining that would limit the supply to ensure a healthy return on their investment, no?
But I probably miss the point of your post, which is "there's a lot of precious material floating up there, if we can only get to it"
Your question highlights exactly one of the points I intended to allude to.
DeleteAnd a relevant "entity" might be Elon Musk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX
Your question contains its own answer! The total market for iron is not much larger than the total market for everything iron is made from now plus anything for which other metals or substitute building product are used because the cost is lower.
DeleteSo that's probably at most 2x the current market.
Take 2x the current market and subtract the cost of mining that much iron from it.
That's the most you could make.
You don't have to go that far to find a large quantity of iron. The Wikipedia entry for the Earth's inner core estimates that it has a mass of 10^23 kg and consists primarily of an iron–nickel alloy. No need for rockets just start digging!
ReplyDeleteKelly and Zach Wienersmith's book Soonish has a very accessible chapter on the possibilities of asteroid mining. I recommend it highly.
ReplyDeleteEnough to give everyone 100 billion but if it were actually done, I suspect one quintillion would find its way into the hands of each of 10 already very wealthy people.
ReplyDeleteWhy squander effort and time and treasure bringing it back to Earth or lowering it down to any planet? Send robots out to do the prep work, and then go up and out with people and the life we like to keep around us, to stay up and out and multiply. Self-sustaining man-made worlds in space, built inside hollowed out and spun-up asteroids, that can go anywhere in the belt, or the solar system, for whatever they need.
ReplyDeleteYou might also think of ocean beds here on earth ... Indian ocean for one has tons and tons of manganese and iron in big nodes (fist size) just lying there.
ReplyDeletefurther reading: https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-3/mineral-resources/manganese-nodules/ Manganese nodule treasures
DeleteI-)
With scrap iron now going for about 4 cents a pound, I do not think it qualifies as even semi-precious metal.
ReplyDeleteOops. My bad. I mentally conflated several sentences from the sources and wound up mischaracterizing the metals. The one shown has iron; other have precious metals. Title amended. Tx, NADT.
Deletelaw of economics. if this true the price would collapse and may even become negative. so i would not count my money yet !
ReplyDeleteI honestly see a future where the vast majority of industry is performed off-world and it's for that reason that bodies like this will be among the first places with a semi-permanent human presence. It's utterly impossible to put a monetary value on resources throughout the solar system but adding up all the rocky planets, moons, asteroids etc there is an essentially limitless quantity of metals, energy and fuel relatively easily within reach given adequate infrastructure that isn't beyond even current technology.
ReplyDeleteThe price of metals mined from Psyche could actually be huge initially, remember that for any projects constructed in space the largest expenditure will be getting raw materials INTO space so they really just need to be cheaper than the enormously inefficient current option of launching materials in a rocket to become the dominant source for construction material in the growing space industry that itself will likely become the dominant industry of the future.
We should crash it I to Mars, then send mining robots to feed the material into 3D printers that can build us habitats. Through some glich in the software, due to cosmic rays, the printers start building sentient robots that eventually come back to Earth to mock us for our fleshy outer layers.
ReplyDeleteBreadprice would rise to 200 billion a loaf.
ReplyDelete