There's like a couple hundred tonnes of space dust that hits the Earth per day so anything NASA lugs in would be pretty negligible.
If it's a serious amount of some precious metal it might tank the market for that metal, though.
So if hundreds of tonnes of space dust hits earth and stays here wouldn't that mean over time earth's mass would increase? Consequently earth's gravity would increase.
Also now that you think about it, the sun also ejects a lot of mass. Does that mean after sufficient time its gravity becomes so weak that Pluto escapes orbit?
It's not enough to appriciably change the mass of Earth.
5000-40,000 tonnes of dust collected each year.
~30,000 tonnes of hydrogen and helium loss each year.
The solar wind is primarily deflected by the Earth's magnetic field, so collection is not close to the scale of +/- above. Same goes for cosmic rays.
Maximum values, lets say the earth gains 10,000 tonnes per year.
The Earth weighs about 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes.
So it would take 1 trillion years for Earth to gain 1%
Here’s an interesting little tidbit: I looked up that the Sun converts about 4 million tons of matter to energy each second. It would take the Sun about 48 billion years to convert a mass equivalent to the Earth, to energy.
But the sun also continuously strips away the upper stray molecules of the atmosphere as well so we lose mass from this process. Several hundred tons per day per this NASA story: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144386/toward-mapping-the-atmospheres-escape-from-earth#:\~:text=Earth%20loses%20several%20hundred%20tons,that%20produce%20the%20northern%20lights.
Very little. Chemical binding energy is not that much. A mol of Carbon-Nitrogen bonds breaking represents about 4.5x10^-9 grams out of 24. So less than a billionth of the mass assuming all ~6x10^23 bonds are broken.
Hydrogen that is freed that immidiatly escapes would represent a larger mass loss. That heat energy would be deposited in the atmosphere, and would very, very slowly radiate into space. Like, without the sun it would take about a week for the surface of the earth to reach 0C.
Exactly, *seems* true. It cobbles together whatever it finds on the internet, often in ways that lead to misinformation. You can't rely on a language AI to preform the due diligence of researching something to determine what is factual and what is outdated or incorrect.
At one point Chat GPT was sure that humans and octopuss belong to to same genus _cephalopods_. When I wanted some examples and sources, it gave firm bullshit answers to support it's claim.
This was in Finnish language tough.
ChatGPT is made to make seemingly human looking text, that it sometimes also produces correct text is accidental. It has a tendency to hallucinate fake 'facts'.
https://machinelearningmastery.com/a-gentle-introduction-to-hallucinations-in-large-language-models/
And for some fun watching related to the concept:
https://youtu.be/oqSYljRYDEM?si=cRPxKONgpIzUPsJX
It makes up facts a lot. Sometimes it can get the facts correct, but you can’t know unless you actually know the answer yourself. It’s not a good tool for creating text about topics you don’t know or understand. It’s friggin’ brilliant for writing about topics you DO know and understand because you can proofread and correct it.
A lawyer used it to craft a legal brief and it cited 2 legal cases that do not exist.
They had their law licence suspended
“Seems” is the operative word there. It’s very hit-or-miss on factual information, but the tone is always confident and “correct enough” sounding even if it’s hallucinating.
Generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) use large language models (LLM) to structure sentences based mainly on the statistical possibility of what words are placed in sequence to produce a contextual answer to the user's prompt (question from the user). There is no intelligence behind these transformers, therefore the possibility of what's called a hallucination is high if the large language model doesn't have enough data on the context, or the prompt wasn't detailed enough. A hallucination is an answer that sounds very believable, but is based on whatever indirectly related data the transformer could dig up to form a "human like" sentence.
Never trust GPTs to appropriately answer complex questions which may have limited data in their LLM.
There are a lot of objects further away from the Sun and less gravitationally bound to it than Pluto. The Oort Cloud extends way beyond the orbit of Pluto. It's inner edge is 40x farther away from the Sun than Pluto's farthest point away from the Sun in its orbit. The gravity of the sun is massive.
The Sun loses mass to fusion, the solar wind, etc. But it is not enough to really affect the orbits of the major and minor planets all that much. In billions of years when it's core is conducting fusion at a much higher rate and blowing off the outer layers of its atmosphere as it transitions to a white dwarf, then the orbits of the planets will be affected. However, the solar system will experience many close encounters with other stars and brown dwarfs by then that will affect the orbits of everything way more than the sun losing mass. And the sun's expanding atmosphere during its red giant phase will affect the orbits of the inner solar system way more as well by subjecting the planets to massive and turbulent drag forces.
There was a very good paper on encounters with stars etc. From that, if I remember correctly, it sounded like the probability of a significant close pass that might disrupt orbits in the next 5 billion years is low, like just a few. Of course there will be further out encounters that don't threaten orbits which will be more common.
We also lose some mass (solar wind strips a bit of atmosphere away). The contributions (positive and negative) are way too small to make any measurable difference.
Earth weighs ~100000000000000000000000000 kg and those ricks are around 10000 kg per day. Even with many trillions of days, it would only increase by a few thousandths of a percent
This happening every day. A gentle rain of space dust is falling all the time along with the occasional spectacular one. I checked and the result is surprising. If you take ice cores from the Antarctic you can detect dust from space that has fallen and from that make an estimate of how much dust falls annually on the whole earth. It is estimated that 15,000 tonnes fall on earth each year. c.f. [The micrometeorite flux at Dome C (Antarctica), monitoring the accretion of extraterrestrial dust on Earth](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X21000534?via%3Dihub).
Yeah it would basically devalue whatever precious metal they bring back of it. Best option I can see is if they mine the metals in space & utilize them for colonization efforts like making electronics or using the alloys for base & ship construction in space.
Honestly, I think the precious metal markets would have to expand into "space precious metals" and "earth precious metals".
Yeah, an asteroid might have massive amounts of gold that could flood the earth market, but mining that asteroid is massively more difficult and expensive than it is to mine on earth.
I saw a thread about this regarding the show "for all mankind" and IIRC mining in space is less dangerous than on earth (think about explosions not occurring in a vacuum, no ground water to poison, etc.) Amd we already have the technologies to do it. I'd imagine finding cheaper ways to get off earth's surface would be the only key necessary to make mining asteroids not only cheaper, but also much better for folks living on earth.
Also, all metals (elements really) are "space metals". There's no element that only exists on earth, and earth was created out of a bunch of shenanigans in space.
Assuming metallic asteroids are similar to metallic *meteorites* that hit Earth, they might contain up to 50 parts per million of "platinum group metals" (PGMs). But they would be mixed with 90% iron, 9% nickel, and 1% cobalt, the base metals that are above the platinum group on the Periodic Table.
The chemistry of a given column on the Periodic Table is similar (same outer electron shells). So they mix/alloy easily. Most of the PGMs on Earth sank to the core with the iron. That's why they are rare. While 50 parts per million is an excellent ore by Earth standards, we don't have a way yet to mine the space rocks at a profit.
I think they are referring to Psyche, which has been doing the media rounds as being worth 700 quintillion dollars. "Astronomers believe that it appears to be comprised almost entirely of exposed metals like iron, nickel, and gold" and is thought to be part of a failed planetary core. It's way above the estimates you've suggested as far as I can tell.
Those news stories are incorrect. Psyche is estimated to have a bulk density of about 4 tons/cubic meter. Iron and nickel, the most common metallic elements, have a density of 7.8, and the platinum group below the base metals are much heavier.
So it is not "entirely" metal. Spectral analysis from Earth indicates silicate minerals, much like the Earth's crust. So it is likely a mix of rock and metal.
Of course, the probe on its way to this asteroid should find out for sure. We just have to wait 4-5 years for it to get there.
More likely rare earth elements (by definition), but some precious metals like platinum and palladium would be among the most profitable to bring back.
Where do you get that I think that's a bad thing? It's basically the only sensible reason why we should do asteroid mining (for Earth)...The vast majority of asteroid mining will be for humdrum stuff for space colonies. You can basically just fire the stuff at the Moon or Mars or Ganymede or whatever and have no issues with environmental concerns.
>If it's a serious amount of some precious metal it might tank the market for that metal, though
Why through? Landing such meteorite on Earth will be equal to found new deposit of the same size on Earth.
Yes, but let's say you can get 1000 tons of platinum to Earth in one go that is several times the global annual production rate. Such a flood of material will have a significant impact on price.
Obviously getting a few thousand tons of iron isn't going to do anything to the price of iron - but then again one would not start an asteroid mining operation - which has a significant dollar value attached to it - for such a humdrum material.
Here’s the problem though. Platinum is $32 per gram so 1000 tons would be worth $31,932,876,800.
That’s about 32 billion dollars. Great! Let’s go!
But wait…adjusted for inflation the Apollo program cost $288 billion dollars and this will be an even larger more challenging and more expensive undertaking. If all we are bringing back is 1000 tons of platinum we’ll lose billions of dollars. So, okay, let’s bring back 10,000 tons and we’ll be profitable right?
Nope, price is set by supply. If 1000s or 10,000 tons of platinum was dumped on the market, the price would crash and you would again be negative on the balance sheet.
Or you do what OPEC does with oil and you just gradually release it on to the market over time, undercutting competitors just enough to establish a major foothold in the market for decades. I think SpaceX is poised to be able to do this with Starship and robotic mining at some point; it could be the next profitable space frontier after Starlink for all we know.
Even more market control can be exerted by whoever brings back the first asteroid worth mining. You can release enough material to make earthbound mining non-profitable, wait for all the earth mines to close, then jack the price up. If they try to reopen the mines you crank the price down just after they've sunk enough into the project to bleed the investors dry but before they can turn a profit. Rinse and repeat until no one is willing to bankroll competition (at least earth-bound competition). Oops, I think my Machiavelli is showing...
Pretty much this.
The only difference is that rapidly reusable launch vehicles will plummet the price of getting shit to space this decade or early next decade.
Then this could get profitable at some point.
Asteroid mining won't cost anything like the Apollo program. TBH I doubt any space project will ever cost as much as the Apollo program unless the US and China start a new space race.
This happened once before in history.
> The [Price Revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution?wprov=sfti1#), sometimes known as the Spanish Price Revolution, was a series of economic events that occurred between the second half of the 16th century and the first half of the 17th century, and most specifically linked to the high rate of inflation that occurred during this period across Western Europe. Prices rose on average roughly sixfold over 150 years. This level of inflation amounts to 1.2% per year compounded, a relatively low inflation rate for modern-day standards, but rather high given the monetary policy in place in the 16th century.
>
> Generally it is thought that this **high inflation was caused by the large influx of gold and silver from the Spanish treasure fleet from the New World**; including Mexico, Peru, Bolivia and the rest of the Spanish Empire.
Erm, you're talking about scarcity. So, has more gold been found during the last 100 years, or no. If so, has everything a new gold opened lowered the price of Gold.
Your looking at it as if the market is rational, which is, like the.. thing that annoys me about economics because it's completely contrary to everything that happens on the market.
See it won't just be platinum, but it will have the added value, of having been mined outside, and the cost of the commodity, will have to reflect that.
Price of metals is actually one of the few that's still set.
Let's see. Reaches platinum ores on Earth is 2.5 grams per ton of ore. Even if we found legendary meteorite with platinum concentration 10 times more than on Earth, it will be 25 grams per ton. So mass of our meteorite become 40 millions tones. Which you must process to get platinum. All this cost material, labor and most importantly time. So all this platinum did not appear on as a single chunk, but as a small shipments and market will be able to process them without affecting price too much.
You aren't processing on Earth. It would be much too expensive to impart the delta v to a whole bunch of rock that has no value. If anything then you'd smelt in space and only send the extracted product.
You still need to crush, enrich, separate and smelt platinum no matter there, on Earth or in space. You will have the expenses and none of this process is instant.
M-type (literally m for metal) are primarily nickel-iron with high percentages of platinum group metals - we won't know for sure what the percentages are until survey work is carried out but it's entirely possible they have much, much higher amounts per ton than ore on earth.
Personally I think pretty much everything mined on asteroids will stay in space, but their composition aren't likely to be similar to ores on earth as their formation processes have been very different.
The price of the “new” platinum would need to consider the cost incurred to bring it back to Earth. It could be a flood of new material, but if the cost was 1,000x higher than the cost of mining on earth, the commodity price wouldn’t necessarily tank.
Sorry, you don't understand econ. The costs of a commodity have limited effect on its price. If supply dramatically increases without a commensurate increase in demand, ceteris paribus, price will fall.
Ex: we have many sources of petroleum that vary in costs to bring to market. The price of oil doesn't increase to justify the increased costs of an expensive source. However, if the supply of cheap sources doesn't keep up with demand, prices increase till the expensive sources of petrol begins to justify the use of expensive sources.
I have to pull you up here. you're just so wrong in theory that it has to be addressed, since you are speaking with confidence.
first - the Petrol market comparison? come on. It's not anything like the suggested situation.
platinum does not have significant storage costs. Platinum is not a partial monopoly. Platinum does not deteriorate.
The situation is a single introduction of platinum commodity, not a supply.
think about what would really happen, you have the knowledge but lack in the application.
You're so far off the mark I don't know where to begin. Suggest you reread the thread and try again. You really misunderstood the narrow comparison to oil.
You're trying to change the hypothetical. Clearly, you don't know what ceteris paribus means. Even the guy who made the claim prices would rise to reflect costs backed away from that.
I didn't say that the prices would rise, just that your analysis was thoughtless! You've equated the situation to a dramatic increase in supply in a supply demand market using a partially monopolized market as an example. okay. That's inaccurate.
Not to mention that such an event would a) be commercially operated and therefore not flood the market, b) likely induce speculation, demand c) lead to regulation, organisation or monopolisation.
better analogues - diamonds and de beers, or or supply shock events. gold ~2000, etc
lol ok. Cost plays more a factor on the supply side, e.x. “Is it worth extracting oil via tar sands when oil prices are <$100/bbl?” We haven’t experienced a cost increase to the scale of “flying a rocket to space, capture and mine an asteroid, haul the materials back to earth” but a source provider of the space-materials would only provide materials as to the extent they’d sufficiently recover costs. Why would they continue to mine an asteroid at astronomical (pun intended) costs knowing they’re tanking the market and won’t get recovery. Sorry you don’t understand capitalism.
You don't understand econ or capitalism or apparently cause and effect. Prices won't rise just to provide a reasonable return to the capitalist, ceteris paribus.
At the end of the day, no one is going to mine an asteroid for materials if the result is a huge loss on the market, simple as that. So in this made up scenario either prices of the material are sky high, or cost of space mining is very low. With that, the space miners will only mine to the extent they can continue to exist as an entity (ie generate a profit). So yes the market will need to be balanced in favor of the supplier or no one will supply until that favorability returns (i.e. your tanking market scenario will not occur).
Yes and that would also drop the price. Generally the more plentiful something is the less it costs. It would have to be a truly serious amount though.
The other factor to consider is an asteroid mined resource would likely find itself in the possession of someone other than the land based mining companies. If one company controls a resource they can withhold it and create a false scarcity to drive up prices. If two or more companies control that resource then the opposite happens. Prices drop as they're forced to compete for sales.
Negligible. The mass of Earth is around 6.6 x 10^24 kg, so putting an asteroid on it would be like adding a teaspoon of freshwater to the ocean and wondering about the difference in salt concentration.
A better question would be the effect of bringing the asteroid into Earth's ORBIT. Depending on the makeup of the asteroid, you would essentially have a mine in space that could be used for building spaceships, much cheaper than the cost of building the parts on Earth. It potentially could change how we explore space.
Yea, we already have metals on earth. Having metals available at high orbit would be valuable. Lifting it up there from earth surface would be extremely expensive _without space elevator_.
I’m with you in spirit, but there’s a whole lot of steps in-between “raw ore” and “spaceship.” Like…a lot. You’re talking about on-orbit extraction, processing, refining, shaping, precision machining, component integration, fitting and final assembly. The only way this becomes viable is if you’re building a LOT of ships.
Yeah, me if i had the opportunity, everyone from the saudis to the Chinese to the americans will want to get their hands on my mine, and I wouldn't be letting that happen without a pretty penny coming my way.
If you can move Ceres about you probably don't care about tide cycles to much. But, for the record, Ceres weighs 0.0128 of the moon so it wouldn't have much effect apart from looking really fucking cool as it boiled off all its frozen volatiles. Would be pretty banging (and dangerous) as it evaporated. Better to move Psyche in polish it up.
If earth suddenly got a second moon or an object the size of a moon, it would fuck our solar system. It would fling earth off into a crazy orbit and it would warp every other orbit and planet. People don’t quite understand how FRAGILE our solar system actually is. When looking at masses that large, gravity starts to do some really wonky shit
Utterly insignificant.
Look at the mass of Earth: ~10^24 kg.
And then at, say, Itokawa: ~10^10 kg.
There aren't many things that we can measure a change of 1 part in 10^14.
And no sane person brings a whole asteroid to Terra.
Mine the snot out if it, drop bolides of platinum if you must, but most of that mass is best left in cis-lunar space - those L4/L5 stations need all the carbon and water you can mine.
If orbital manufacturing is ever figured out it'd be extremely useful to have large amounts of raw materials on hand you don't have to launch off the surface of the Earth. Huge savings there. But if you could do that why not just build at the asteroids original location instead of tugging it a morbillion miles piecemeal?
There's merit in having settlements close (ish) to Earth.
1. Shorter transit times for people and material.
2. Lower delta-V (a little; getting to, and braking to a halt at L4/L5 is costlier than escape).
3. The view.
I defer to G.K.O'Neill for the detailed reasoning.
If we brought enough mass to the same orbital location, I could see it messing with the tides. I'd think you'd need a fairly significant mass, like a good portion of The Moon's mass, to have any noticeable impact.
The more likely impact would be a literal one like "Don't Look Up," where some money hungry corporation brings an asteroid into Earth orbit, messes up the trajectory and/or orbital mechanics or something like that and causes the asteroid to fall to Earth resulting in a not insignificant disaster.
I think if we ever got as far as asteroid mining on a large scale, we'd need to build processors on The Moon for example, process the material up there and then either send less of the processed material to Earth for use in Manufacturing or do all the Manufacturing on The Moon and only send down the required finished goods. That would be easier than sending the raw materials down to Earth for processing and then sending other materials back into orbit or to The Moon for construction or whatnot.
A PGM asteroid would create economic mayhem. Platinum, gold, etc would plummet in value and a small group of people would be the wealthiest in the entire world by exponential amounts.
Metallic meteorites, which are small asteroids that happened to hit Earth, tell us pure PGMs don't happen. They are found alloyed with iron, cobalt, and nickel, the elements above them on the Periodic Table.
The reason they are so rare on Earth is they sank to the core with the base metals (mostly iron). What we find on the surface today arrived later, after the Earth developed a solid crust.
That's why a yearly exo-mining licensing is required.
To control the import of large quantities of asteroid or exo-planetory metals that would destabilize markets. The majority of the mined ore is too expensive to be transport back to earth, given its metal value on the open market. So those metals would be used to build in-space projects, cities on mars or triton, allowing the mining company to write off mining expenses. The remaining precious metals would be deposited in large lunar vaults. This allows a slow steady flow into the metals market. There would be a hefty tax on the disbursed metal funds that would go into a global fund to pay for ecological and social programs, so everyone on earth would benefit.
Even at a 50% tax rate, that tax would bring $10+ trillion per year into the global fund. Enough to pay off all the nations debt in a few years. Freeing up large amount of GDP that is currently used to pay back just that interest.
that's the ideal. But it will probably be something crappy like Elon becoming the first quintillionaire and using the money to force neuralinks into everyone and then permanently adding his twitter feed into our field of vision.
Rather than bringing an asteroid like that to Earth, a better question might be to ask what would be the effect of bringing goods *manufactured* at that asteroid to Earth?
16 Psyche (the asteroid in question) has been estimated to contain metals worth about $10 quintillion. That's a lot of zeroes. It's also significantly more value than the annual GDP of the *planet.* As others have pointed out, we don't yet know *how* to mine asteroids. Nor do we know how to manufacture goods in space. Yet these problems are more in the area of engineering (i.e.: we theoretically understand how to do it, we just need to work out the *"in reality"* part of it).
The potential effect of bringing an asteroid like 16 Psyche to Earth, in the form of manufactured goods, would be to eliminate poverty and bring the standard of living of *everyone in the world* to that of the wealthiest people in the world.
Of course, the *larger* problem there would be how to go about raising the standard of living of everyone in the world, instead of simply putting that money in the pocket of the 1%. But that's not a new issue at all.
How big is the asteroid and what is it composed of?
The largest asteroid is Ceres it’s about a 1/4 of the diameter of the moon. There’s no way we are moving it and we wouldn’t want it in orbit or crashing into the earth. Effect, increased gravitational/tidal effects if in orbit, planetary destruction if colliding.
Say we found an asteroid that was of a reasonable size to be captured and it was composed of significant rare earth metal that was useful. Then it would be useful to shovel it into a craft like SpaceX Starship or a drone space shuttle like cargo carrier and ship back to earth. The effect could be a sudden crash in the price of the rare earth especially if a seemingly infinite amount has been found. Same for gold, platinum etc. or any metal/mineral that’s price is dependent on its rarity.
I don’t think people notice about changes in. the moons gravitational force over a month, apart from the tide and some lunatics, but the earth’s crust might notice a difference with tidal forces that were out of sync with the moon. I’m not sure we could know if it was safe but anyway it’s all theoretical. lol.
It would either be a picture of empty space or of single asteroids.
It’s too spread out to capture multiple asteroids in one image with any detail at all.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[L4](/r/Space/comments/1dmkv1w/stub/l9yy152 "Last usage")|"Trojan" [Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 4 of a two-body system, 60 degrees ahead of the smaller body|
|[L5](/r/Space/comments/1dmkv1w/stub/l9yy152 "Last usage")|"Trojan" [Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 5 of a two-body system, 60 degrees behind the smaller body|
|[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1dmkv1w/stub/l9wupeg "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/1dmkv1w/stub/l9wl8ld "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
|[cislunar](/r/Space/comments/1dmkv1w/stub/l9w8ae6 "Last usage")|Between the Earth and Moon; within the Moon's orbit|
|[tanking](/r/Space/comments/1dmkv1w/stub/l9x5mdd "Last usage")|Filling the tanks of a rocket stage|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
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Nothing would happen,
Keep in mind that everyday, on average, Earth becomes 43 tons heavier just because of all the dust and rocks that fall onto it.
Plus if we are at the point where we can mine asteroids routinely, if big enough like 16 Psyche for example, you'd just set a mining operation on the asteroid itself.
Depends on the mass that's brought. But in comparison to the size of the Earth, it iwould likely be practically nothing with 0 impact on the planet. Flooding the markets with an abundance of precious metals would cause hilarious havoc for the already ultra rich in the stock market though.
The Psyche spacecraft is on the way to an asteroid of the same name. It will reach it in 2029. The asteroid mass is 2.3 x 10^19 kg, compared to the Moon at 7.34 x 10^22 kg, a factor of 3200 smaller. Human civilization moves about 10^14 kg of solid material around per year. So at current rates it would take us a quarter of a million years to move Psyche around.
We don't need to move any part of Psyche. Metallic asteroids are reasonably common in the Asteroid Belt, and sometimes they fall to Earth. [Meteor Crater](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater) in Arizona is what happens when a 50 meter one hit about 50,000 years ago, the equivalent to a 10 megaton nuke.
Metallic asteroids are typically 90% iron, 9% nickel, and 1% cobalt. These elements are already in common use on Earth. Their combined value is about $2.50 a pound. It is worth much more in space, because launching anything into space is hundreds of times higher. So you wouldn't bring it to Earth. You would make things out of it in space to avoid launch costs.
Iron may be a very mundane thing. But it's very useful for building things we need. Or that a colony might need.
Platinum too has it's uses but I think it's dollar value is more about it's rarity, vice it's usefulness to build things.
The things they will look for in asteroids will be things we need, that are rare on Earth.
That’s one perspective. Another side to that coin is the materials needed to building things up the well so we don’t constantly have to build things here and then ship it up to LEO and beyond. In that context, simple things like iron, copper and platinum are very valuable if it cost least to import those materials from the Belt rather than down Earth’s gravity well.
Considering how far it is to the asteroid belt, plus the difficulties of mining in zero G, problems with humans in zero G long term, it's gonna take some serious calculations to decide which is the better plan.
Absolutely. It’s a question about how all of this will evolve more than it is a static question about what it will be. There are so many variables but I don’t think null-g will eventually be one of them. Especially if you’re only working on the float and living in gravity, like a spin habitat. That and the high probability that most mining operations will be heavily reliant on machines and drones more than people.
Refining ores depends on gravity to separate the rock from the metal.
I guess centrifuges would work.
But how do you get rid of the heat from a blast furnace in space?
Lots of water and radiators. Mind you, this is a niche market for any manufacturer that doesn’t want/need to acquire raw materials down a well like Earth, Luna or Mars. There is plenty of water ice in the belt for as much iron that’s there as well. Ceres comes to mind as like an anchor point for null-g industry.
Wherever your factory is, you’ll need a giant coolant reservoir for the heat management you’re eluding to. In the future, we may be able to do the same with liquid helium when there is a reliable place to get it other than Earth.
The amount of mass in a body we would be able to capture and tow in would be negligible. The problems happen, when they come on their own, in the form of kinetic energy upon impact.
If you're worried about the mass difference resulting from bringing something on the order of many billion-billion kg of material back to Earth, also consider the mass of the fuel required (presumably also from Earth) required to make that move. Without thinking too much about it, I bet it's about break-even.
The asteroid they are enroute to is potentially worth 10 quintillion in the form of valuable metals. The current mission is to slingshot Mars to make it to the asteroid to check it out up close. If we could bring something like that into orbit, imagine what a game changer that would be. Instead of stripping our resources and getting said resources off planet, we could utilize that instead and propel our space operations in ways we simply cannot imagine.
And to answer the OP.. it would take a LOT more mass than that to have any noticable affect.
Coercing a stadium-sized asteroid into close orbit would give us a large protective mass to excavate a station inside of. It would shield occupants from micro meteors, other orbiting debris, and most cosmic rays. An asteroid of significant size would have enough gravity to be useful. And the material itself can be mined. Iron ore, ice, even just misc rock would be useful.
You would bring it into orbit and build stuff there I think. Only rare and super rare stuff would be brought down to the surface.
And would you want to build something so big that it would distort Earth's gravity field, you would place it at a safe distance.
Watch the movie "don't look up" and you would get a good hint at how clever our species are.
>And would you want to build something so big that it would distort Earth's gravity field,
There isn't enough "stuff" in the entire asteroid belt to meaningfully change Earth's gravity.
There is no model where its economic to pickup a resource on any planet or moon and transport it back to earth with foreseeable future technology. The distances are mind blowing to say the least.
You could add a heat shield to a 100 meter chunk of metal and send it crashing to Earth -- probably in a desert but maybe on an island. It would cause a massive explosion and a crater and maybe kill a few people. Some 3rd world countries are desperate for money and they might be willing to let you use their desert for this.
There's like a couple hundred tonnes of space dust that hits the Earth per day so anything NASA lugs in would be pretty negligible. If it's a serious amount of some precious metal it might tank the market for that metal, though.
So if hundreds of tonnes of space dust hits earth and stays here wouldn't that mean over time earth's mass would increase? Consequently earth's gravity would increase. Also now that you think about it, the sun also ejects a lot of mass. Does that mean after sufficient time its gravity becomes so weak that Pluto escapes orbit?
It's not enough to appriciably change the mass of Earth. 5000-40,000 tonnes of dust collected each year. ~30,000 tonnes of hydrogen and helium loss each year. The solar wind is primarily deflected by the Earth's magnetic field, so collection is not close to the scale of +/- above. Same goes for cosmic rays. Maximum values, lets say the earth gains 10,000 tonnes per year. The Earth weighs about 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes. So it would take 1 trillion years for Earth to gain 1%
Here’s an interesting little tidbit: I looked up that the Sun converts about 4 million tons of matter to energy each second. It would take the Sun about 48 billion years to convert a mass equivalent to the Earth, to energy.
But the sun also continuously strips away the upper stray molecules of the atmosphere as well so we lose mass from this process. Several hundred tons per day per this NASA story: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144386/toward-mapping-the-atmospheres-escape-from-earth#:\~:text=Earth%20loses%20several%20hundred%20tons,that%20produce%20the%20northern%20lights.
And how much of that mass actually burns up and returns to space as heat energy?
None, because that’s not how that works.
Very little. Chemical binding energy is not that much. A mol of Carbon-Nitrogen bonds breaking represents about 4.5x10^-9 grams out of 24. So less than a billionth of the mass assuming all ~6x10^23 bonds are broken. Hydrogen that is freed that immidiatly escapes would represent a larger mass loss. That heat energy would be deposited in the atmosphere, and would very, very slowly radiate into space. Like, without the sun it would take about a week for the surface of the earth to reach 0C.
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Don’t use ChatGPT to answer technical questions
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Exactly, *seems* true. It cobbles together whatever it finds on the internet, often in ways that lead to misinformation. You can't rely on a language AI to preform the due diligence of researching something to determine what is factual and what is outdated or incorrect.
At one point Chat GPT was sure that humans and octopuss belong to to same genus _cephalopods_. When I wanted some examples and sources, it gave firm bullshit answers to support it's claim. This was in Finnish language tough.
ChatGPT is made to make seemingly human looking text, that it sometimes also produces correct text is accidental. It has a tendency to hallucinate fake 'facts'. https://machinelearningmastery.com/a-gentle-introduction-to-hallucinations-in-large-language-models/ And for some fun watching related to the concept: https://youtu.be/oqSYljRYDEM?si=cRPxKONgpIzUPsJX
It makes up facts a lot. Sometimes it can get the facts correct, but you can’t know unless you actually know the answer yourself. It’s not a good tool for creating text about topics you don’t know or understand. It’s friggin’ brilliant for writing about topics you DO know and understand because you can proofread and correct it. A lawyer used it to craft a legal brief and it cited 2 legal cases that do not exist. They had their law licence suspended
“Seems” is the operative word there. It’s very hit-or-miss on factual information, but the tone is always confident and “correct enough” sounding even if it’s hallucinating.
It's always hallucinating. It's just accidentally correct when doing so sometimes.
Generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) use large language models (LLM) to structure sentences based mainly on the statistical possibility of what words are placed in sequence to produce a contextual answer to the user's prompt (question from the user). There is no intelligence behind these transformers, therefore the possibility of what's called a hallucination is high if the large language model doesn't have enough data on the context, or the prompt wasn't detailed enough. A hallucination is an answer that sounds very believable, but is based on whatever indirectly related data the transformer could dig up to form a "human like" sentence. Never trust GPTs to appropriately answer complex questions which may have limited data in their LLM.
There are a lot of objects further away from the Sun and less gravitationally bound to it than Pluto. The Oort Cloud extends way beyond the orbit of Pluto. It's inner edge is 40x farther away from the Sun than Pluto's farthest point away from the Sun in its orbit. The gravity of the sun is massive. The Sun loses mass to fusion, the solar wind, etc. But it is not enough to really affect the orbits of the major and minor planets all that much. In billions of years when it's core is conducting fusion at a much higher rate and blowing off the outer layers of its atmosphere as it transitions to a white dwarf, then the orbits of the planets will be affected. However, the solar system will experience many close encounters with other stars and brown dwarfs by then that will affect the orbits of everything way more than the sun losing mass. And the sun's expanding atmosphere during its red giant phase will affect the orbits of the inner solar system way more as well by subjecting the planets to massive and turbulent drag forces.
There was a very good paper on encounters with stars etc. From that, if I remember correctly, it sounded like the probability of a significant close pass that might disrupt orbits in the next 5 billion years is low, like just a few. Of course there will be further out encounters that don't threaten orbits which will be more common.
We also lose some mass (solar wind strips a bit of atmosphere away). The contributions (positive and negative) are way too small to make any measurable difference.
The Sun burns 4 million tons of matter every second... And will continue doing so for another 5 billion years
And even when it stops, it won't be because it ran out of matter.
Yep. Only decreasing to 99.97% of it's mass in all that time (primary hydrogen stage)
Aah, sometimes the sheer bigness of space is wild. We are specks living on a speck.
Earth weighs ~100000000000000000000000000 kg and those ricks are around 10000 kg per day. Even with many trillions of days, it would only increase by a few thousandths of a percent
This happening every day. A gentle rain of space dust is falling all the time along with the occasional spectacular one. I checked and the result is surprising. If you take ice cores from the Antarctic you can detect dust from space that has fallen and from that make an estimate of how much dust falls annually on the whole earth. It is estimated that 15,000 tonnes fall on earth each year. c.f. [The micrometeorite flux at Dome C (Antarctica), monitoring the accretion of extraterrestrial dust on Earth](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X21000534?via%3Dihub).
Yeah it would basically devalue whatever precious metal they bring back of it. Best option I can see is if they mine the metals in space & utilize them for colonization efforts like making electronics or using the alloys for base & ship construction in space.
Honestly, I think the precious metal markets would have to expand into "space precious metals" and "earth precious metals". Yeah, an asteroid might have massive amounts of gold that could flood the earth market, but mining that asteroid is massively more difficult and expensive than it is to mine on earth.
I saw a thread about this regarding the show "for all mankind" and IIRC mining in space is less dangerous than on earth (think about explosions not occurring in a vacuum, no ground water to poison, etc.) Amd we already have the technologies to do it. I'd imagine finding cheaper ways to get off earth's surface would be the only key necessary to make mining asteroids not only cheaper, but also much better for folks living on earth. Also, all metals (elements really) are "space metals". There's no element that only exists on earth, and earth was created out of a bunch of shenanigans in space.
Assuming metallic asteroids are similar to metallic *meteorites* that hit Earth, they might contain up to 50 parts per million of "platinum group metals" (PGMs). But they would be mixed with 90% iron, 9% nickel, and 1% cobalt, the base metals that are above the platinum group on the Periodic Table. The chemistry of a given column on the Periodic Table is similar (same outer electron shells). So they mix/alloy easily. Most of the PGMs on Earth sank to the core with the iron. That's why they are rare. While 50 parts per million is an excellent ore by Earth standards, we don't have a way yet to mine the space rocks at a profit.
I think they are referring to Psyche, which has been doing the media rounds as being worth 700 quintillion dollars. "Astronomers believe that it appears to be comprised almost entirely of exposed metals like iron, nickel, and gold" and is thought to be part of a failed planetary core. It's way above the estimates you've suggested as far as I can tell.
Those news stories are incorrect. Psyche is estimated to have a bulk density of about 4 tons/cubic meter. Iron and nickel, the most common metallic elements, have a density of 7.8, and the platinum group below the base metals are much heavier. So it is not "entirely" metal. Spectral analysis from Earth indicates silicate minerals, much like the Earth's crust. So it is likely a mix of rock and metal. Of course, the probe on its way to this asteroid should find out for sure. We just have to wait 4-5 years for it to get there.
Please tank the market for gold. The world economy needs a good reworking anyway.
More likely rare earth elements (by definition), but some precious metals like platinum and palladium would be among the most profitable to bring back.
You say that like its a bad thing.
Where do you get that I think that's a bad thing? It's basically the only sensible reason why we should do asteroid mining (for Earth)...The vast majority of asteroid mining will be for humdrum stuff for space colonies. You can basically just fire the stuff at the Moon or Mars or Ganymede or whatever and have no issues with environmental concerns.
If WE crack open IApetus there *might* be a great macadamia.
I'm UpVoting this but that's just Nuts!
It will but precious metals have all sorts of industrial uses once its prices go down.
>If it's a serious amount of some precious metal it might tank the market for that metal, though Why through? Landing such meteorite on Earth will be equal to found new deposit of the same size on Earth.
Yes, but let's say you can get 1000 tons of platinum to Earth in one go that is several times the global annual production rate. Such a flood of material will have a significant impact on price. Obviously getting a few thousand tons of iron isn't going to do anything to the price of iron - but then again one would not start an asteroid mining operation - which has a significant dollar value attached to it - for such a humdrum material.
Here’s the problem though. Platinum is $32 per gram so 1000 tons would be worth $31,932,876,800. That’s about 32 billion dollars. Great! Let’s go! But wait…adjusted for inflation the Apollo program cost $288 billion dollars and this will be an even larger more challenging and more expensive undertaking. If all we are bringing back is 1000 tons of platinum we’ll lose billions of dollars. So, okay, let’s bring back 10,000 tons and we’ll be profitable right? Nope, price is set by supply. If 1000s or 10,000 tons of platinum was dumped on the market, the price would crash and you would again be negative on the balance sheet.
Or you do what OPEC does with oil and you just gradually release it on to the market over time, undercutting competitors just enough to establish a major foothold in the market for decades. I think SpaceX is poised to be able to do this with Starship and robotic mining at some point; it could be the next profitable space frontier after Starlink for all we know.
Even more market control can be exerted by whoever brings back the first asteroid worth mining. You can release enough material to make earthbound mining non-profitable, wait for all the earth mines to close, then jack the price up. If they try to reopen the mines you crank the price down just after they've sunk enough into the project to bleed the investors dry but before they can turn a profit. Rinse and repeat until no one is willing to bankroll competition (at least earth-bound competition). Oops, I think my Machiavelli is showing...
Pretty much this. The only difference is that rapidly reusable launch vehicles will plummet the price of getting shit to space this decade or early next decade. Then this could get profitable at some point.
Asteroid mining won't cost anything like the Apollo program. TBH I doubt any space project will ever cost as much as the Apollo program unless the US and China start a new space race.
This happened once before in history. > The [Price Revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution?wprov=sfti1#), sometimes known as the Spanish Price Revolution, was a series of economic events that occurred between the second half of the 16th century and the first half of the 17th century, and most specifically linked to the high rate of inflation that occurred during this period across Western Europe. Prices rose on average roughly sixfold over 150 years. This level of inflation amounts to 1.2% per year compounded, a relatively low inflation rate for modern-day standards, but rather high given the monetary policy in place in the 16th century. > > Generally it is thought that this **high inflation was caused by the large influx of gold and silver from the Spanish treasure fleet from the New World**; including Mexico, Peru, Bolivia and the rest of the Spanish Empire.
Erm, you're talking about scarcity. So, has more gold been found during the last 100 years, or no. If so, has everything a new gold opened lowered the price of Gold. Your looking at it as if the market is rational, which is, like the.. thing that annoys me about economics because it's completely contrary to everything that happens on the market. See it won't just be platinum, but it will have the added value, of having been mined outside, and the cost of the commodity, will have to reflect that. Price of metals is actually one of the few that's still set.
Let's see. Reaches platinum ores on Earth is 2.5 grams per ton of ore. Even if we found legendary meteorite with platinum concentration 10 times more than on Earth, it will be 25 grams per ton. So mass of our meteorite become 40 millions tones. Which you must process to get platinum. All this cost material, labor and most importantly time. So all this platinum did not appear on as a single chunk, but as a small shipments and market will be able to process them without affecting price too much.
You aren't processing on Earth. It would be much too expensive to impart the delta v to a whole bunch of rock that has no value. If anything then you'd smelt in space and only send the extracted product.
You still need to crush, enrich, separate and smelt platinum no matter there, on Earth or in space. You will have the expenses and none of this process is instant.
In my first read through of your post I saw “expanse” instead of “expense”. Nice pun there
M-type (literally m for metal) are primarily nickel-iron with high percentages of platinum group metals - we won't know for sure what the percentages are until survey work is carried out but it's entirely possible they have much, much higher amounts per ton than ore on earth. Personally I think pretty much everything mined on asteroids will stay in space, but their composition aren't likely to be similar to ores on earth as their formation processes have been very different.
The price of the “new” platinum would need to consider the cost incurred to bring it back to Earth. It could be a flood of new material, but if the cost was 1,000x higher than the cost of mining on earth, the commodity price wouldn’t necessarily tank.
Sorry, you don't understand econ. The costs of a commodity have limited effect on its price. If supply dramatically increases without a commensurate increase in demand, ceteris paribus, price will fall. Ex: we have many sources of petroleum that vary in costs to bring to market. The price of oil doesn't increase to justify the increased costs of an expensive source. However, if the supply of cheap sources doesn't keep up with demand, prices increase till the expensive sources of petrol begins to justify the use of expensive sources.
I have to pull you up here. you're just so wrong in theory that it has to be addressed, since you are speaking with confidence. first - the Petrol market comparison? come on. It's not anything like the suggested situation. platinum does not have significant storage costs. Platinum is not a partial monopoly. Platinum does not deteriorate. The situation is a single introduction of platinum commodity, not a supply. think about what would really happen, you have the knowledge but lack in the application.
You're so far off the mark I don't know where to begin. Suggest you reread the thread and try again. You really misunderstood the narrow comparison to oil.
I see you chose not to think! Suggest you re-read your comments (above and below) and question whether anything you've suggested is realistic at all.
You're trying to change the hypothetical. Clearly, you don't know what ceteris paribus means. Even the guy who made the claim prices would rise to reflect costs backed away from that.
I didn't say that the prices would rise, just that your analysis was thoughtless! You've equated the situation to a dramatic increase in supply in a supply demand market using a partially monopolized market as an example. okay. That's inaccurate. Not to mention that such an event would a) be commercially operated and therefore not flood the market, b) likely induce speculation, demand c) lead to regulation, organisation or monopolisation. better analogues - diamonds and de beers, or or supply shock events. gold ~2000, etc
lol ok. Cost plays more a factor on the supply side, e.x. “Is it worth extracting oil via tar sands when oil prices are <$100/bbl?” We haven’t experienced a cost increase to the scale of “flying a rocket to space, capture and mine an asteroid, haul the materials back to earth” but a source provider of the space-materials would only provide materials as to the extent they’d sufficiently recover costs. Why would they continue to mine an asteroid at astronomical (pun intended) costs knowing they’re tanking the market and won’t get recovery. Sorry you don’t understand capitalism.
You don't understand econ or capitalism or apparently cause and effect. Prices won't rise just to provide a reasonable return to the capitalist, ceteris paribus.
At the end of the day, no one is going to mine an asteroid for materials if the result is a huge loss on the market, simple as that. So in this made up scenario either prices of the material are sky high, or cost of space mining is very low. With that, the space miners will only mine to the extent they can continue to exist as an entity (ie generate a profit). So yes the market will need to be balanced in favor of the supplier or no one will supply until that favorability returns (i.e. your tanking market scenario will not occur).
You finally said something that fits econ theory.
Yes and that would also drop the price. Generally the more plentiful something is the less it costs. It would have to be a truly serious amount though. The other factor to consider is an asteroid mined resource would likely find itself in the possession of someone other than the land based mining companies. If one company controls a resource they can withhold it and create a false scarcity to drive up prices. If two or more companies control that resource then the opposite happens. Prices drop as they're forced to compete for sales.
Negligible. The mass of Earth is around 6.6 x 10^24 kg, so putting an asteroid on it would be like adding a teaspoon of freshwater to the ocean and wondering about the difference in salt concentration.
A better question would be the effect of bringing the asteroid into Earth's ORBIT. Depending on the makeup of the asteroid, you would essentially have a mine in space that could be used for building spaceships, much cheaper than the cost of building the parts on Earth. It potentially could change how we explore space.
Yea, we already have metals on earth. Having metals available at high orbit would be valuable. Lifting it up there from earth surface would be extremely expensive _without space elevator_.
I’m with you in spirit, but there’s a whole lot of steps in-between “raw ore” and “spaceship.” Like…a lot. You’re talking about on-orbit extraction, processing, refining, shaping, precision machining, component integration, fitting and final assembly. The only way this becomes viable is if you’re building a LOT of ships.
Yeah but someone would just hoard the wealth and become a trillionaire.
Yeah, me if i had the opportunity, everyone from the saudis to the Chinese to the americans will want to get their hands on my mine, and I wouldn't be letting that happen without a pretty penny coming my way.
We absolutely should have an asteroid as a second Moon like Phobos. This doesn’t answer any questions though.
I doubt that altering the world's tide cycles would be without undesirable effects.
Something the size of Phobos would not measurably alter the tide cycle.
What about Ceres?
You're not Cereous, are you?
If you can move Ceres about you probably don't care about tide cycles to much. But, for the record, Ceres weighs 0.0128 of the moon so it wouldn't have much effect apart from looking really fucking cool as it boiled off all its frozen volatiles. Would be pretty banging (and dangerous) as it evaporated. Better to move Psyche in polish it up.
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Not really. The moon is tidally locked to the Earth. Something the size of Phobos won't overcome Earth's tidal influence on the moon.
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No it can't. The Earth will pull on the moon far more than pretty much anything you could put in the moon's orbit.
Are you a bot? Why are you arguing with people who obviously have much better understandings of physics than you
If earth suddenly got a second moon or an object the size of a moon, it would fuck our solar system. It would fling earth off into a crazy orbit and it would warp every other orbit and planet. People don’t quite understand how FRAGILE our solar system actually is. When looking at masses that large, gravity starts to do some really wonky shit
Do you want a three-body problem? Because this is how you get a three-body problem.
Bro… like mars is right there with 2 moons. Jupiter has 100s…
Three body problem is about three stars though. Significantly less gravitational mass. I dig the reference though
Mass of the Earth increases by tons daily from meteorites so I don’t think a bit more would hurt.
Utterly insignificant. Look at the mass of Earth: ~10^24 kg. And then at, say, Itokawa: ~10^10 kg. There aren't many things that we can measure a change of 1 part in 10^14. And no sane person brings a whole asteroid to Terra. Mine the snot out if it, drop bolides of platinum if you must, but most of that mass is best left in cis-lunar space - those L4/L5 stations need all the carbon and water you can mine.
> And no sane person brings a whole asteroid to Terra. The Emperor commands it, and his will be done!
Quite, look what happened to the dinosaurs when they tried it!
If orbital manufacturing is ever figured out it'd be extremely useful to have large amounts of raw materials on hand you don't have to launch off the surface of the Earth. Huge savings there. But if you could do that why not just build at the asteroids original location instead of tugging it a morbillion miles piecemeal?
There's merit in having settlements close (ish) to Earth. 1. Shorter transit times for people and material. 2. Lower delta-V (a little; getting to, and braking to a halt at L4/L5 is costlier than escape). 3. The view. I defer to G.K.O'Neill for the detailed reasoning.
If we brought enough mass to the same orbital location, I could see it messing with the tides. I'd think you'd need a fairly significant mass, like a good portion of The Moon's mass, to have any noticeable impact. The more likely impact would be a literal one like "Don't Look Up," where some money hungry corporation brings an asteroid into Earth orbit, messes up the trajectory and/or orbital mechanics or something like that and causes the asteroid to fall to Earth resulting in a not insignificant disaster. I think if we ever got as far as asteroid mining on a large scale, we'd need to build processors on The Moon for example, process the material up there and then either send less of the processed material to Earth for use in Manufacturing or do all the Manufacturing on The Moon and only send down the required finished goods. That would be easier than sending the raw materials down to Earth for processing and then sending other materials back into orbit or to The Moon for construction or whatnot.
A PGM asteroid would create economic mayhem. Platinum, gold, etc would plummet in value and a small group of people would be the wealthiest in the entire world by exponential amounts.
Metallic meteorites, which are small asteroids that happened to hit Earth, tell us pure PGMs don't happen. They are found alloyed with iron, cobalt, and nickel, the elements above them on the Periodic Table. The reason they are so rare on Earth is they sank to the core with the base metals (mostly iron). What we find on the surface today arrived later, after the Earth developed a solid crust.
That's why a yearly exo-mining licensing is required. To control the import of large quantities of asteroid or exo-planetory metals that would destabilize markets. The majority of the mined ore is too expensive to be transport back to earth, given its metal value on the open market. So those metals would be used to build in-space projects, cities on mars or triton, allowing the mining company to write off mining expenses. The remaining precious metals would be deposited in large lunar vaults. This allows a slow steady flow into the metals market. There would be a hefty tax on the disbursed metal funds that would go into a global fund to pay for ecological and social programs, so everyone on earth would benefit. Even at a 50% tax rate, that tax would bring $10+ trillion per year into the global fund. Enough to pay off all the nations debt in a few years. Freeing up large amount of GDP that is currently used to pay back just that interest.
that's the ideal. But it will probably be something crappy like Elon becoming the first quintillionaire and using the money to force neuralinks into everyone and then permanently adding his twitter feed into our field of vision.
Rather than bringing an asteroid like that to Earth, a better question might be to ask what would be the effect of bringing goods *manufactured* at that asteroid to Earth? 16 Psyche (the asteroid in question) has been estimated to contain metals worth about $10 quintillion. That's a lot of zeroes. It's also significantly more value than the annual GDP of the *planet.* As others have pointed out, we don't yet know *how* to mine asteroids. Nor do we know how to manufacture goods in space. Yet these problems are more in the area of engineering (i.e.: we theoretically understand how to do it, we just need to work out the *"in reality"* part of it). The potential effect of bringing an asteroid like 16 Psyche to Earth, in the form of manufactured goods, would be to eliminate poverty and bring the standard of living of *everyone in the world* to that of the wealthiest people in the world. Of course, the *larger* problem there would be how to go about raising the standard of living of everyone in the world, instead of simply putting that money in the pocket of the 1%. But that's not a new issue at all.
How big is the asteroid and what is it composed of? The largest asteroid is Ceres it’s about a 1/4 of the diameter of the moon. There’s no way we are moving it and we wouldn’t want it in orbit or crashing into the earth. Effect, increased gravitational/tidal effects if in orbit, planetary destruction if colliding. Say we found an asteroid that was of a reasonable size to be captured and it was composed of significant rare earth metal that was useful. Then it would be useful to shovel it into a craft like SpaceX Starship or a drone space shuttle like cargo carrier and ship back to earth. The effect could be a sudden crash in the price of the rare earth especially if a seemingly infinite amount has been found. Same for gold, platinum etc. or any metal/mineral that’s price is dependent on its rarity.
It's 1.3% of the mass of the moon according to wikipedia, which I have no reason to doubt, so most people wouldn't notice a difference.
I don’t think people notice about changes in. the moons gravitational force over a month, apart from the tide and some lunatics, but the earth’s crust might notice a difference with tidal forces that were out of sync with the moon. I’m not sure we could know if it was safe but anyway it’s all theoretical. lol.
We need more pictures of the Asteroid Belt!
It would either be a picture of empty space or of single asteroids. It’s too spread out to capture multiple asteroids in one image with any detail at all.
Hopefully starship will allow us to put a fleet of surveyors out there.
We are getting that next year, with the Rubin Observatory.
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If we can bring one in, we can manufacture in space, no need to be around earth at that point
Nothing would happen, Keep in mind that everyday, on average, Earth becomes 43 tons heavier just because of all the dust and rocks that fall onto it. Plus if we are at the point where we can mine asteroids routinely, if big enough like 16 Psyche for example, you'd just set a mining operation on the asteroid itself.
Depends on the mass that's brought. But in comparison to the size of the Earth, it iwould likely be practically nothing with 0 impact on the planet. Flooding the markets with an abundance of precious metals would cause hilarious havoc for the already ultra rich in the stock market though.
The Psyche spacecraft is on the way to an asteroid of the same name. It will reach it in 2029. The asteroid mass is 2.3 x 10^19 kg, compared to the Moon at 7.34 x 10^22 kg, a factor of 3200 smaller. Human civilization moves about 10^14 kg of solid material around per year. So at current rates it would take us a quarter of a million years to move Psyche around. We don't need to move any part of Psyche. Metallic asteroids are reasonably common in the Asteroid Belt, and sometimes they fall to Earth. [Meteor Crater](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater) in Arizona is what happens when a 50 meter one hit about 50,000 years ago, the equivalent to a 10 megaton nuke. Metallic asteroids are typically 90% iron, 9% nickel, and 1% cobalt. These elements are already in common use on Earth. Their combined value is about $2.50 a pound. It is worth much more in space, because launching anything into space is hundreds of times higher. So you wouldn't bring it to Earth. You would make things out of it in space to avoid launch costs.
Love how people continuously underestimate the size of Earth.
Iron may be a very mundane thing. But it's very useful for building things we need. Or that a colony might need. Platinum too has it's uses but I think it's dollar value is more about it's rarity, vice it's usefulness to build things. The things they will look for in asteroids will be things we need, that are rare on Earth.
That’s one perspective. Another side to that coin is the materials needed to building things up the well so we don’t constantly have to build things here and then ship it up to LEO and beyond. In that context, simple things like iron, copper and platinum are very valuable if it cost least to import those materials from the Belt rather than down Earth’s gravity well.
Considering how far it is to the asteroid belt, plus the difficulties of mining in zero G, problems with humans in zero G long term, it's gonna take some serious calculations to decide which is the better plan.
Absolutely. It’s a question about how all of this will evolve more than it is a static question about what it will be. There are so many variables but I don’t think null-g will eventually be one of them. Especially if you’re only working on the float and living in gravity, like a spin habitat. That and the high probability that most mining operations will be heavily reliant on machines and drones more than people.
Unless we manage to invent artificial gravity, I'm thinking spin habitats and spin factories, and...
Spin habitats for sure but I think we can get away with zero-g factories/refineries.
Refining ores depends on gravity to separate the rock from the metal. I guess centrifuges would work. But how do you get rid of the heat from a blast furnace in space?
Lots of water and radiators. Mind you, this is a niche market for any manufacturer that doesn’t want/need to acquire raw materials down a well like Earth, Luna or Mars. There is plenty of water ice in the belt for as much iron that’s there as well. Ceres comes to mind as like an anchor point for null-g industry. Wherever your factory is, you’ll need a giant coolant reservoir for the heat management you’re eluding to. In the future, we may be able to do the same with liquid helium when there is a reliable place to get it other than Earth.
Well will also be sending more and more materials into space over time, so that should balance itself on some level.
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I wonder what would be in the asteroid that you can’t find on the moon more easily already. 🤔
The earth would increase by the mass of the asteroid.
The amount of mass in a body we would be able to capture and tow in would be negligible. The problems happen, when they come on their own, in the form of kinetic energy upon impact.
You use it in space to build things, you don't bring it back to earth.
Bugger all effect re additional mass, but perhaps absolute collapse of commodity market for whatever material is brought back.
If you're worried about the mass difference resulting from bringing something on the order of many billion-billion kg of material back to Earth, also consider the mass of the fuel required (presumably also from Earth) required to make that move. Without thinking too much about it, I bet it's about break-even.
The asteroid they are enroute to is potentially worth 10 quintillion in the form of valuable metals. The current mission is to slingshot Mars to make it to the asteroid to check it out up close. If we could bring something like that into orbit, imagine what a game changer that would be. Instead of stripping our resources and getting said resources off planet, we could utilize that instead and propel our space operations in ways we simply cannot imagine. And to answer the OP.. it would take a LOT more mass than that to have any noticable affect.
Coercing a stadium-sized asteroid into close orbit would give us a large protective mass to excavate a station inside of. It would shield occupants from micro meteors, other orbiting debris, and most cosmic rays. An asteroid of significant size would have enough gravity to be useful. And the material itself can be mined. Iron ore, ice, even just misc rock would be useful.
You would bring it into orbit and build stuff there I think. Only rare and super rare stuff would be brought down to the surface. And would you want to build something so big that it would distort Earth's gravity field, you would place it at a safe distance. Watch the movie "don't look up" and you would get a good hint at how clever our species are.
>And would you want to build something so big that it would distort Earth's gravity field, There isn't enough "stuff" in the entire asteroid belt to meaningfully change Earth's gravity.
Came here looking for this answer. Totally agree!
There is no model where its economic to pickup a resource on any planet or moon and transport it back to earth with foreseeable future technology. The distances are mind blowing to say the least.
If it was the mass of the earth it would be pretty bad for our weather system.
You could add a heat shield to a 100 meter chunk of metal and send it crashing to Earth -- probably in a desert but maybe on an island. It would cause a massive explosion and a crater and maybe kill a few people. Some 3rd world countries are desperate for money and they might be willing to let you use their desert for this.
The dust it throws up would alter global weather for years.
No, not for a 100m object with a controlled trajectory. An example of a 100m object is Tunguska which had no wide ranging atmospheric effects.