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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).
"Potentially as large as Mars"? According to Wikipedia: Psyche16: 200km in diameter. Mars: 6800km in diameter
dumping that much extra iron into the economy would make the "value" close to zero.
The $10 Quadrillion figure is total baloney. You can't just take the current value and extrapolate, because the price would fall as the supply rises. A one carat diamond may be worth $10,000, but if there were suddenly a trillion of them, they would be worth next to nothing, and people would use them as gravel in their driveways.
Ten thousand quadrillion. By comparison, the total value of EVERYTHING WE EVER DID as a race amounts to about two quadrillion as per:
https://xkcd.com/980/huge/#x=-... (link looks odd because it's one of his large-scale images, zoomed in on the appropriate area)
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Pretty much what happened in Spain during the 16th century. They brought so much gold/silver back to Europe, it actually caused massive inflation.
and pretty soon, we're talking about real money.
" one carat diamond may be worth $10,000, but if there were suddenly a trillion of them"
Between the hoards of diamonds that DeBeers keeps locked up, and the ability to make them in a lab, there are a ~trillion of them. Diamonds have no real value, go sell one "used" and you'll find out much they're worth.
Somebody forgot about shipping and handling.
It's all about location, location, location. You got a buyer for that $10 Quintillion USD worth of iron protoplanet located in the astroid belt? Didn't think so.
I wonder how you're supposed to smelt it in space. Perhaps space air is flammable?
https://vk.com/video51098255_1...
There is a point where raising the minimum wage continues to be beneficial; we have not reached that point, but I highly doubt it's more than about $15-20/hr at this time.
The reason it continues to be beneficial is that price increases are still slower than wage increases up to a certain point. If we want a viable economy, money needs to change hands - and people at the bottom end of the wage scale are going to spend most of their money pretty much no matter what, which means that money changes hands more often.
Yes, the "rich" (more appropriately, the entrepreneurial class, regardless of the amount of money they have) need an incentive to actually create jobs... but a lot of people at the top end aren't interested in that, they just want to keep their money stagnant because it's safer to do that and keep people from breaking into whatever their pet industry is (which might cause - horrors! - competition) than to, you know, actually put it to active use.
In short: there's a fucking middle ground between "no raises in the minimum wage" and "minimum wage needs to be enough that someone working 20hrs/week can support a whole family" and that's where we really should be aiming for.
I wonder how you're supposed to smelt it in space. Perhaps space air is flammable?
The space water is flammable after electrolysis. :-)
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.
* "in 2014 a mission to Psyche was proposed to NASA"
* "A team led by Lindy Elkins-Tanton
* "The mission was approved by NASA on January 4, 2017 and is targeted to launch in October of 2023, arriving at the asteroid in 2030, following an Earth gravity assist spacecraft maneuver in 2024 and a Mars flyby in 2025." So mebe I'll get to watch the progress in my retirement.
The Globalnews and Usatoday articles strike me as being tarted up (read: dumbed down) with that gee whizz number of dollars.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Person A: NASA is planning a mission to an asteroid worth $10 quintillion!
Person B: What? No way! That doesn't even make sense.
Person A: Seriously! I saw it on Slashdot!
Person B: I don't believe you. Which asteroid is it, wise guy?
Person A: Psyche!
by Cyphase ( 907627 )
A one carat diamond may be worth $10,000, but if there were suddenly a trillion of them, they would be worth next to nothing, and people would use them as gravel in their driveways.
It's funny you should mention that. Suppose that if there was a trillion of them, and suppose they were controlled by one monopoly who could regulate the supply say by hording cut diamonds and trickling them out into the economy. You'd actually be in a very similar position to where we are today.
Diamonds are not rare, we can manufacture them quite easily without imperfection. A 1ct diamond can be made for under $2500 The value comes from the fact that people want the single biggest one, all natural dug out of the ground, and perfect in every way. Where do you find diamonds like that? Horded in De Beers safes, and when they announced a transition to end that 80 year long practice of price manipulation it was accompanied by a marketing campaign that just made your recognise that crappy little 1ct diamond for the crappy little 1ct diamond it is, not worthy of your fiance's love.
Diamond as a material is quite abundant and costs $40/ct. I have a toolbox full of products that contain collectively over 1ct of diamond, but industrial uses aren't manipulated by marketing or supply side market distortion.
Now if I had an asteroid in my back yard worth $10 quadrillion, do you think I'll just sell it on the open market at once?
I have never met anybody that thinks we should give unlimited amounts of money to colleges and health insurance companies. Restoring the ability of people to get a job they can support themselves with via government provided education as it was during the entirety of the 20th century seemed to be very successful. Most people on the left think we should eliminate health insurance companies entirely.
You can't realistically adjust minimum wage for productivity. Productivity measures the output of a system vs. its operational cost. The productivity of a person isn't simply the productivity of that system divided by the nr. of employees in it. Else they'd have to pay the one janitor left in Amazon's fully automatic warehouse a couple of million a year, probably.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
You smelt using mirrors and the sun.
The asteroid belt is 3 AU from the sun, so the sunlight would be 1/9th as bright as the light that reaches earth. You would need a big mirror, but in the vacuum of space, the only heat loss would be radiant.
So, question.......would you really build a death star out of steel?
Yes. Steel is strong, and easy to work with. The only drawback over something like titanium or carbon fiber is that it is HEAVY, but that isn't a big problem in space. The big advantage of steel is that it is cheap and plentiful, and when you need a quadrillion tonnes for just one Death Star, those costs add up.
Of course, heaviness means inertia, but travelling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, and inertia doesn't seem to be an impediment in any of the movies.
just one Death Star
Why make only one when you can have two for twice the price ?
"I have never met anybody that thinks we should give unlimited amounts of money to colleges and health insurance companies."
Then you must not work for the government.
"The asteroid belt is 3 AU from the sun, so the sunlight would be 1/9th as bright as the light that reaches earth. You would need a big mirror, but in the vacuum of space, the only heat loss would be radiant."
If you can mine from asteroids, you can build a big anything you want in space.
And there's some twenty million tons of gold dissolved in the Earth's oceans. Jules Verne made it the source of Captain Nemo's incredible wealth.
To put twenty million tons of gold in perspective, all the gold that has ever been mined by humans totals up to about 180 thousand tons. To put in another perspective: sure, it's gold, but at a concentration of thirteen billionths of a gram per liter of seawater it's worthless unless you have unlimited time and energy to extract it.
That's the problem with asteroid mining in general. Until the cost of changing an object's momentum goes down drastically it's not worth doing. If Pysche were a 1000 kg block of pure, refined platinum (market price: $34 million) you'd be hard-pressed to retrieve it and return it to Earth at a profit. Which is not to say asteroid mining is a bad idea; but first things first: you've got to reduce the price of interplanetary propulsion by a couple orders of magnitudes. One thing that never happens in a sci-fi asteroid mining scenario is the hero worrying about running out of gas. Propulsion in stories is always practically limitless and free of charge. Real propulsion will never be that good, but it could get good enough.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
$15/hr * 40 hr/wk * 50 wk/yr (2 weeks vacation) = $30,000/yr. Most people would consider that a living wage. Federal poverty level for a family of 4 is just $24,250/yr.
So the $15/hr target is too high. If you target the poverty level for a family of 4 (assuming it's a single income family), the target is $12.12/hr. Poverty level for a single person is $11,770/yr, which translates into $5.89/hr, which is actually below the current minimum wage of $7.25/hr. So the current minimum wage is in the right ballpark of a compromise between singles and single-income families.
Yes this assumes full employment throughout the year. The minimum wage has to be tied to productivity because wages are tied to productivity. If you try to set the minimum wage based on poverty levels for people not being productive the full year, you end up eliminating jobs of people who are fully employed and productive the full year. Inability to find full employment is an employment problem (number of jobs available), not a wage problem (how much you're paid for a job).
IMHO the problem isn't the minimum wage, it's the capital gains tax is way too high for lower income people. People always complain the 15% capital gains tax is too low without really researching who actually pays a 15% income tax. The tax rate is graduated meaning just because you're in the 25% tax bracket doesn't mean you pay a 15% income tax. The threshold where you actually pay a 15% income tax (single, standard deduction) is about $58,500. The threshold where the average American pays 15% income tax (after credits, exemptions, and itemized deductions) is closer to $90,000 (you can figure this out from the IRS tax stats). So it makes little sense for people making less than this to invest their money when it's going to be taxed more than if they just spent it and increased their income via raises (e.g. raising the minimum wage) rather than investments/savings.
The economy rewards you with income for two things - generating productivity (working), and deciding where productivity is needed (managing/investing). The current flat 15% capital gains tax effectively discourages lower income people from participating in the latter. It needs to be graduated like income tax so lower income people have more incentive to save and invest. (The rationale for the capital gains tax rate being lower than income tax rate at higher incomes is the same. It encourages rich people to invest their money thus re-injecting it into the economy, instead of wasting it on gold toilet seats. Same logic applies to lower income people, except some of them "waste" their money on big screen TVs, iPhones, car leases, etc.)
Why does the poverty level matter? It's an arbitrary number. Go ahead and actually try supporting a family of four on 24k a year. Go ahead and try supporting yourself on 11.8k a year. Rent an apartment, get a car, get a cellphone (how long has it been since you worked a low-end job? Without those two things, you are staying unemployed.), pay for food, account for taxes: local, state, federal, salestax, etc. You would be going to charities for dinner more often than not. The poverty level in many areas of the country is not even one full step up from being working and homeless.
When basing all your reasoning on the arbitrary poverty level, which has been far too low for two generations, the rest of your argument falls apart. The rest isn't even worth reading. Example, "The economy rewards you with income for two things - generating productivity (working), and deciding where productivity is needed (managing/investing)." No the economy only rewards one thing: appearance. That is how hardworking stiffs that keep their head down get no credit while Trump is president.
You don't need to smelt it: smelting is a purification process. But this particular asteroid is worthless.
The first asteroid of commercial value will be a CHON asteroid very close to Earth . Moved into high orbit and used to make rocket fuel, it's a fundamental missing piece of a space economy. (Plus, the only way to ever get the fuel to move the first asteroid is if that asteroid is made of fuel). Naturally, automated robotics has a way to go first, but automated robotics seems very plausible these days.
The you want an aluminum asteroid, not a nickel-iron one. The first ship built mostly in space will be built mostly of aluminum (well, it will be mostly fuel like any rocket, but then the aluminum).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's hard enough to fuse hydrogen that we'll probably never do that, little well fusing neon into iron.
The Sun barely fuses hydrogen (the amount of energy produced in the core per sq. metre is quite low, there's just a lot of sq metres) and even when it reaches end of life and much more compact, it'll barely fuse helium. Iron (and nickel) are only produced in the largest stars due to the heat and pressure required.
With luck,we'll get fusing deuterium and such in a controlled energy positive manner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
And conversely, when the Big Honcho In Japan decided to make the biggest ever bronze Buddah to put in in the Todai-ji temple, it used so much bronze that bronze was like gold in Japan afterwards.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.