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NASA Is Planning Mission To An Asteroid Worth $10 Quintillion (usatoday.com)
New submitter kugo2006 writes: NASA announced a plan to research 16 Psyche, an asteroid potentially as large as Mars and primarily composed of Iron and Nickel. The rock is unique in that it has an exposed core, likely a result of a series of collisions, according to Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Psyche's principal investigator. The mission's spacecraft would launch in 2023 and arrive in 2030. According to Global News, Elkins-Tanton calculates that the iron in 16 Psyche would be worth $10,000 quadrillion ($10 quintillion).
I heard the accompanying video's talking head saying "...an asteroid with so much money, it could easily solve the worlds..." and then I shut it off.
I'd much rather know what the volume of iron is, because that's actually interesting and practical. Let's do the math. Feel free to double-check me as well, as I'm just going to rush through this.
Iron costs about 80 dollars per metric tonne, according to Google. So, $10,000,000,000,000,000,000 converts to 125,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes of iron. Cast iron weighs 7.3 tonnes per cubic meter, so that's ~17,000,000,000,000,000 cubic meters of iron. That number is a bit high to visualize, so let's turn that into cubic kilometers by removing nine zeros. We're looking at 17 million cubic kilometers of iron.
Holy crap. How many Death Stars could we make out of that? According to someone on the internet, a Death Star requires 1,080,000,000,000,000 tonnes of steel. Divide our original tonnage by that and... Hell yeah, we could build a fleet of 115 Death Stars with that asteroid.
See? Now that's way more interesting and easier to visualize at the same time, right?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
What's interesting was that at least 1/3 of the mined Spanish silver was going to China for goods there. That also caused a huge boom there as well, and poor investment. When the silver trade started drying up (due to Westphalia) the boom was over and crashed the Ming economy.
What's also interesting was that there was a huge arbitrage deal going on. In China you could exchange silver to gold 1:7, while in Europe only 1:13, so you had people sailing to China to get in on that deal, since silver was China's reserve currency, while Europe was on the gold standard.
Lastly, when the silver trade imbalance truly started getting out of hand, and Europe couldn't sell any of their products in China, Britain started to sell opium instead, and later blows up China for trying to stop the drug trade.
Sound familiar? Globalization and trade imbalances have been happening for hundreds of years, with boom and bust cycles.