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Planetary Resources Confirms Plan To Mine Asteroids
Matching widespread predictions, The Bad Astronomer writes with word that "The private company Planetary Resources has announced that it plans to mine asteroids for water, air, and even precious metals in the next few years. Your initial reaction may be to snicker a bit, but it's headed by Peter Diamandis — who established the X Prize — has several ex-NASA personnel running the engineering, and also has the backing of a half-dozen or so billionaires. So this is no joke — their plan looks solid, and may very well be the first step in establishing a permanent human presence in space."
Hopefully they'll be very careful about bringing asteroids into Earth orbit. But the energy and mining industries are pretty safe and responsible right?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The last article on asteroid mining said it wouldn't be profitable even if the asteroid was 20% gold. That was based on the ludicrous assumption that the material would be brought back to earth. Going to all the effort of capturing and mining an asteroid in space just to get a bunch of air and water seems silly until you look at just how ungodly expensive air and water are *in space*, after launch and storage costs. Producing life support materials in situ is the holy grail of space exploration.
These guys aren't even making excuses, they're throwing money down a hole for the lulz.
The money put forth into space endeavors is NOT packaged up and shot into space. It's spent right here on earth. It employs people here on earth. It uses infrastructure and resources here on earth. It's not being thrown down a hole. Even if they are doing it for lulz, it employs people.
Yeah, throwing money down a hole for the lulz. Just like space travel always was!
Seriously, are you so short-sighted that you cannot see how useful mining asteroids for water, air, and eventually precious minerals is? I'll give you a hint: absolutely, 100% vital to the continued development of the human race. This has nothing to do with doing something "for the lulz." It is all about advancing the state of the human race. Not for profit, but because humanity can and should expand. Asteroid mining is one step forwards in our expansion towards other planets, and if we intend to not go extinct, we need to do that. We may not need to now. We may not need to in a hundred years, but we will in a thousand, or a million, and we are only going to get there if we start at some point. Might as well do it now.
To quote from the article: "[Planetary Resources] want to make sure there are available resources in place to ensure a permanent future in space." Our future, eventually, is in space. Whether from global warming, resource exhaustion, or nuclear war, Earth will eventually not be enough. When that day comes, we will be glad some billionaires chose to spend their money on space expansion, instead of building/buying shiny new toys, or hookers and blow.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Does anyone know what the (plausible) ROI for this is?
Most people are just going to babble nonsense in this article, but I'm going to try to actually give you numbers.
You can orbit a Kg for about "ten grand". However asteroids are already in orbit, and it takes a hell of a lot less fuel to deorbit than to orbit. So to a VERY crude first approximation the delivery expense is perhaps a buck per gram. Precious metals from the ground cost around one to two orders of magnitude more. So the delivery cost seems high in an absolute sense, but its not really a significant fraction of the cost of the metal.
Its kind of like complaining that you can't mine gold in South Africa because a 747 cargo plane costs $50M and $50M is a lot to spend for a little gold. Well, yes $50M is a lot of dough but you'd find that the cargo capacity of a 747 in gold is worth a whole hell of a lot more than $50M, so suddenly the airplane cost doesn't matter much.
The ROI killer is going to be the mysterious and unclear latency from when the $ are spent until the capsules of solid gold hit the earth. I would postulate that you're trading the risks of international and national politics (nationalization of mines, strikes, government delaying regulation, etc) for technology risks.
I think the ROI/risk is about as bad as opening a gold mine in South Africa. Much riskier than a diamond mine in Canada. Not as risky as a rare earth mine anywhere on the African continent. Its a plausible realistic investment.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Platinum has the advantage of being reasonably intrinsically useful(a brilliant catalyst for a variety of applications(certain fuel cell designs, for one), nice and corrosion resistant, in addition to being pretty and rare); but the price would certainly plummet if supply increased dramatically.
There are relatively few elements that are genuinely without practical applications(some of the shorter-lived radioactive ones are probably too hot to handle but fade too quickly to be useful industrial or medical emitters); but some get bumped into the status of 'financial instrument with a few esoteric applications' by their scarcity.
One of the ironies is that many materials are prized for their scarcity, but their scarcity actually makes them less valuable in the real world.
Take gold as an extreme example. There's not enough of it to be useful, so we don't really use it that often. Instead, its rarity is prized by people who value rarity and that's it.
Libertarians might think it's valuable as some post-apocalyptic currency. Me, I think gold's useless. Outside of plating electrical connectors (something silver's pretty good at too), it's only in my house 'cos my wife like wearing the stuff decoratively.
If we had lots of gold, on the other hand, we'd start using it. Copper wire would start being replaced by gold/copper alloys. We'd use it to plate large objects to protect them from rust - car components, train bodies (perhaps even train rails.)
The irony here is that by becoming abundant, gold would become useful. As such it would be valuable. You could build and fuel industries around it. There's not enough of it to build industries around it today.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Shouldn't you be out feeding the poor or something?