
The race to the riches of asteroids - sjcsjc
https://physicsworld.com/a/the-asteroid-trillionaires/
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zeristor
I have been looking into this, and one of the few commodities that has value
at scale is Nickel, there is a large demand for it and the prices have been
generally high.

The Spanish brought back gold and silver from the New World, and crashed the
markets:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution)

Mansa Musa of Mali splashed gold on his trip to Mecca in the 1300s and caused
economies to falter for several years:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_I_of_Mali](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_I_of_Mali)

There would seem to be more danger to the economy by being flooded with rare
metals than from an actual meteorite impact.

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theptip
> There would seem to be more danger to the economy by being flooded with rare
> metals

I think that this case is not directly comparable to the price revolution; in
the cases you've linked, Gold==Money, and so by bringing back gold the Spanish
massively increased the money supply (from the first article, "Prices rose on
average roughly sixfold over 150 years. This level of inflation amounts to
1–1.5% per year, a relatively low inflation rate for modern-day standards, but
rather high given the monetary policy in place in the 16th century").

In the case we're discussing, Metal!=Money. The more metal you bring back, the
lower the price falls, until it reaches a new equilibrium where it's no longer
economical at the margin to bring back more.

This would significantly affect certain markets (i.e. mining, industrial
processes that consume these metals), but it's not the same thing as creating
money; you can't spend nickel, you need to find someone who will buy it from
you in order to turn it into money.

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zeristor
That was the point I was trying to make, seemingly not very well. That Nickel
is a metal commodity that would probably be able to soak up much of the
production.

I need to work out how to deal with too many ideas hitting me at once.

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sammyo
Move the nasty industrial processes out there, factories in space and only
ship high end processed materials.

Once there is rocket fuel in large quantity "boost backwards". Slow a well
designed space plane to a safe entry velocity and fly to a regular airport.
It's and idea that can not even be imagined until there is a filling station
in space but should be standard after the first water asteroid.

~~~
lostmsu
Why would belters send you goods?

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Fjolsvith
Umm, fresh fruit, beef, beer, to name a few reasons.

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lostmsu
What was the last time you exchanged fruits for an iPhone? Even in orbit it
might be easier to grow your own.

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Fjolsvith
Cows don't fly, man.

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2sk21
My first thought was of Seveneves by Neal Stephenson - not perhaps his best
book but it did clarify the value of mining near Earth objects :-)

~~~
TomK32
The first two parts are great. Rip out the third one.

But Seveneves was about using the resources of the broken up moon, which is
pretty much like hopping onto the bus (on the middle lane of a three-lane-
highway) compared to the challenges of getting an asteroid into earth orbit

~~~
koboll
What a great book. I still get chills thinking about the way he describes the
danger of alpha particles.

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TomK32
Sure, but tbh, if he had split it up into three novels and give more time to
the second and third part it might climed up to the hill-top from which, in my
opinion, The Long Earth rules this decade of SciFi writing.

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rwmj
Surely if you flood the market with asteroid-mined minerals, then the price of
those minerals will drop rapidly?

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mac01021
Right now the world's entire mineral supply is worth X dollars.

If I acquire a bunch of asteroids and double the size of that supply, I now
own X/2 dollars worth of minerals, instead of the zero dollars worth that I
did before.

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sokoloff
Maybe not. If the worldwide demand is N tons and the worldwide supply is
estimated at 0.75 * N, then doubling the supply to 1.5 * N is likely to reduce
the unit price by more than half.

For a simple example, consider the case of decorative diamonds today.

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mrfusion
Diamonds aren’t a good example since their price is build on artificial
scarcity and marketing. Dare I call this a straw man?

~~~
ben_w
I think it’s an excellent example and the artificial scarcity is irrelevant to
the point being made: total market value of all $substance _is not constant_
when quantity of $substance changes.

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blendo
We'll need "commerical astronomers" to help find promising asteroids.

At last February's AAAS meeting in Austin, Martin Elvis (quoted in the
article) noted that over the next several years, a number of larger (20 to 30
meter) terrestrial telescopes will be coming on line. That will free up some
the smaller 10-15 meter instruments, some of which could be used to search for
watery and/or metallic asteroids.

~~~
perilunar
> We'll need "commerical astronomers" to help find promising asteroids.

Isn't that what Planetary Resources are doing?

[https://www.planetaryresources.com/](https://www.planetaryresources.com/)

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mrfusion
I’d like to see research in bringing captured small asteroids back to earth
cheaply for processing. Maybe attach a large ballute. Or the bfs payload
version could land one.

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mabbo
The cost to do so would be so prohibitively high that it would never be worth
doing. Whatever gains you got from "cheaply processing" it here would be
completely eclipsed by the cost of bringing it back.

The simple rule of space is that changing the velocity of anything is the most
expensive thing. Getting an asteroid from whatever orbit around the sun it's
currently in and bringing it to earth would cost far more than it would to
instead bring an entire mineral processing plant to the asteroid, and just
sending back the bits worth a lot of money.

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DmenshunlAnlsis
Alternative: crash the asteroids into the moon, have robots recover the
valuable minerals. Use a rail gun system to fire it back to Earth, processed,
while enjoying the low gravity of the moon.

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celticninja
And firing chunks of metal at the earth doesn't seem problematic to you?

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DmenshunlAnlsis
You can fire it relatively slowly because of the low gravity of the moon, and
take plenty of time bleeding v. Ideally there would be a space elevator and
capture system to bring them back, but other methods work. You’re not just
firing “at” Earth. Even if you were, Earth is mostly covered by oceans, and
landing them there would be acceptable.

~~~
ben_w
The low gravity of the moon isn’t the problem, it’s the high gravity of the
earth: it _will_ hit hard even if you had a lunar space elevator and gave it
the minimum possible delta-v to reach Earth from that Lagrange point.

The other problem is that even if you intend to use it safely, you have just
built a massive gun which is too far away to shoot back at and which has the
capability to target specific locations on this planet.

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resu_nimda
"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein involves some of that.

But how difficult would it be to intercept the payload safely outside the
atmosphere? Seems it would be easier than intercepting an ICBM.

~~~
ben_w
I get the impression it would be harder, because ICBM launches are really
obvious (to current equipment) and you can at least make a good guess about
their ballistic path, while anything of that size launched from the moon would
be invisible until it had almost hit you.

While it is often said that stealth is impossible in space, that tends to
assume the appropriate tech has _actually_ been manufactured rather than
sitting in a lab somewhere waiting for a purchase order. Radar, even lidar, is
going to have _awful_ signal-to-noise ratios and almost all of the return
signal will be stuff that bounced off the moon rather than any projectile.
Even the lunar retroreflector turns 10^17 photons out into one photon back,
according to Wikipedia, and that’s about as far from stealth as you can get.

Edit: I suppose one could reasonably argue that any industrialisation of Luna
would, as a result of my own argument, make governments choose to put loads of
effort into appropriate defence technology. On the other hand, I’m told trench
warfare was more accident than deliberate planning in WW1, so perhaps
governments would be as myopic as ever even with a massive space gun on the
moon.

~~~
piannucci
Once it gets within a few tens of megameters, pulsed radar systems could
easily distinguish an incoming projectile thanks to the 2.4 second round-trip-
time to the moon. Metallic objects have ideal visibility. If you are concerned
about solar thermal radio emissions bouncing off the moon and reducing SNR,
that could be an issue -- a phase-of-the-moon bug in the system, if you will.
But based on what I’ve overheard from friends working on 21-cm radar teaching
telescopes, I doubt the luminosity of the continuous background is high enough
to pose a big problem, assuming you have a decently large antenna.

I’m more concerned that there’s nothing much you can do to redirect such an
object in the few hours it takes to fall on your head. By that time it will
have reached 4km/s.

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ben_w
Good to know. In that case, I’m not concerned by the first n (n<5000 ish,
varies by nation), but the _relative_ ease by which an attcker can just keep
going until the target run out of missiles to shoot at the attacker’s
projectiles.

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mabbo
Has anyone made predictions on the implications of "rare-earth" minerals
becoming "not-so-rare-anymore"? What, today, costs a fortune due to the
requirement of certain matter that we don't have much of? Jewelry is obvious,
but what else in my home right now is expensive to replace just because of the
matter it's made of?

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LeifCarrotson
One example of this from the past is aluminum. In the 1850s, it was extremely
rare and difficult to produce - costing more than gold, used as serving
utensils in Napoleon's court, and as the capstone of the Washington monument.
Now it's one of the cheapest metals.

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FrozenVoid
Are there any regulations preventing "asteroid collectors" crashing them in
the middle of sahara or where they own the land?(i.e. only redirecting the
asteroid to the place)

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godelmachine
Neil Degrasse Tyson once said that if you wanna be the first trillionire in
the world, start mining asteroids.

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partycoder
The derivatives market has quadrillions of dollars, more money than asteroid
mining.

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ben_w
The derivatives market only has quadrillions of dollars if you do silly things
such as counting a $1m transaction buy followed by an identical sell, each
performed every hour of the year, as being worth 2x24x365x$1m = $17,520
million. You can’t just cash out a quadrillion dollars from the derivatives
market and buy everything else in the world economy — apart from anything
else, there isn’t enough currency around to do so.

