
The Massive Prize Luring Miners to the Stars - samcampbell
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-asteroid-mining/?cmpid=BBD030818_BIZ&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=180308&utm_campaign=bloombergdaily
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samcampbell
Obviously the prices of the commodities would be reduced with an increase in
supply, but these numbers are staggering.

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mkstowegnv
I chased down the wikipedia pages for some of the unimaginably highly valued
meteorites in their pie chart (e.g. 511 Davida - [1]). The high value appears
to be almost entirely a function of the enormous size of the larger ones - and
these are all far from earth. I love the idea of space exploration but if you
look at the elements in meteorite minerals [2] (I followed the links for those
that did not have a formula in the table), apparently most of that value is in
iron and nickel with some chromium, cobalt, manganese, scandium and titanium
thrown in. Iridium is more highly concentrated than in the earth's crust but
it is not clear that it is ever in a commercially viable extractable form. On
first principles the emerging deep sea mining efforts would appear to have
enormous seemingly impossible to beat advantages over mining in space. Not
just in terms of distance etc logistics, but because deep sea vents have done
such a great job of concentrating a much wider range of different more
valuable elements in different places - and someone please correct me if I am
wrong - there is no evidence of comparable processes separating out elements
during the formation of the asteroids. (In this comparison I am admittedly not
considering the hard to gauge environmental impacts of deep sea mining.)

1
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/511_Davida](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/511_Davida)
2
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_meteorite_minerals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_meteorite_minerals)

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mojoe
Bringing back metals to earth is fantastic, but the real prize is
manufacturing in space itself -- less hauling of goods at high prices out of
our huge gravity well.

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hndamien
What is the impact to gravity of bringing all of this to Earth?

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kitsunesoba
Assuming that "bringing it to Earth" means landing it on the surface, it'd
have to be in truly ridiculous quantities to have any measurable effect –
likely far more than the combined mass of everything mankind has and ever will
place on Earth's surface.

If "bringing it to Earth" means placing asteroids in orbit, I'm less certain,
but unless we're placing bodies around a third of the size of the moon or
larger (really huge) in orbit there shouldn't be any notable effect from our
point of view.

