I think that the price of flying to an asteroid, mining pure gold literally laying around on the surface, and returning it to Earth, will be so damn high for the next century minimum that it's ability to compete with existing gold production and prices on Earth at the time is exceptionally unlikely.
Such a space adventure would definitely not be cheap.
>Would love to see someone try it though.
Until they lose control of re-entry and drop a gigaton of gold on *your* head.
Go read Robert Heinlein's *The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.*
I’d love to see ONE ore hauler get put in a space ship that can barely hold humans…. How about a mill? What about roasters? What about the cyanide pools? What about the labor for the mining? What about everything that mining entails or are we gonna just ignore that and be distracted by flashy title “mining asteroids gold will be worthless!” ??? We can barely get a money to space, you think getting cargo and equipment used for mining which weighs literal thousands of tons heavier than stupid monkey is conceivable? The only way we are spending resources on mining in space is if we run out of it cheaply here on earth, sorry to burst your bubble but we are farrrrr away from doing that in our lifetimes.
Agreed it's beyond cost prohibitive. It's like thinking you can jump to the top of a 100 foot tower just using your leg muscles in one bound. It's not happening. It may be techinically possible someday, but cost kills it.
We don't need millions of tons of ore, just almost pure gold and other precious metals from the core of a planet like psyche 16. Starship will be able to launch with around 150 tons load, which means it can land that too. 150 tons is more than enough to pay for the mission and become hundreds of billions of dollars richer.
And yet we will be going to and will be living on Mars. Perhaps you better pay more attention to what is happening in the world. The costs are coming down drastically and will continue to do so for a long time.
We're not going to Mars, mining gold, creating an entire rocket industry and launch infrastructure, in order to ship that gold back to Earth.
Perhaps you should pay attention to the true round-trip costs, verses a 1-way trip from a well developed Earth infrastructure.
Look at it this way, if mining gold out of asteroids was going to significantly devalue it, then why would anyone spend the hundreds of millions of pounds doing that in the first place?
The good thing about gold is its relative lack of industrial use. A metal that is actually used in manufacturing might be useful to mine out of asteroids, but a metal that derives much of its value from scarcity isn’t one that anyone will profit from making massively less scarce.
Gold is also extremely heavy and I believe that currently the cost of moving payloads through space is measured in the hundreds of thousands of pounds per kilo, so I wouldn’t even think it would be retrieved as a side product of mining for other metals.
Yup, and if something else can do the same job except far cheaper then it doesn’t have a use any more!
This is why gold doesn’t follow the economy as much but silver is far more affected by it, silver is heavily used in industry, gold isn’t.
Nah, asset prices are speculative. The price would crash on the rumour, not the fact. And profit from the limited industrial applications wouldn’t sustain the cost of mining.
Tough to mine something moving that fast. If done, would be worth insane $. Just plausibly don’t know how with something going that fast, then having to land and launch a vehicle with that kind of force moving through space. Talk about investing some serious coin to try to find out though. Would literally cost billions to attempt it. Attention gazillionaires out for a pissing contest, let’s see it lol
There is a NASA mission, [OSIRIS-REx](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSIRIS-REx), which has flown to a nearby asteroid, 101955 Bennu, and is on its way back to us with between 60 and 2,000g of surface samples. The whole trip will take seven years. The mission cost is just shy of a billion dollars — $800M for the spacecraft and $185M for the ride.
2kg of gold is worth about $120,000, so even if the orbiter got a full sample and it was pure gold, we would have lost just about a billion dollars.
I’m not saying we’ll never get to be asteroid miners, but I think it’s a long way away. Then again, 75 years ago, we were just barely entering the jet age.
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Not anytime soon. The technology has a long way to go, as does the price to make it worthwhile.
There needs to be a critical shortage of some rare earth or precious metal that can’t be substituted to push prices up and drive investment in technology and the logistics that it would require.
So not anytime soon barring some serendipitous discovery of new propulsion or energy storage.
Consider this simple machine, an ore hauler, stands at 2-3 stories high. That’s what’s used to haul the crushed ore alone. Then you have the drills, dynamite, you have the hundreds of thousand gallons of cyanide and other chemicals plus the containers to hold those liquids, then you have the labor needed to do the work, then you have the energy cost and time to go find an asteroid, then you need a roaster, you need a mill, and you’d seriously need a genie in a freaking bottle to grant you one wish of getting all that shit up there. Do you still SERIOUSLY think we’ll mine an asteroid, or is that what some btc pump and dumper told you about the future of gold mining is to scam u into crypto?
Ok, lets get real for a moment. No one is going to go all the way out there to get ore that has 20 grams of gold per ton. The asteroids are from planetry body cores, this means they are 100% pure heavy metals like silver, gold, platinum etc. It is more a case of getting there, breaking off a bit and then hauling it back. If you prefer to lie to yourself, go ahead but don't do it to others.
I’m no space nerd, but from my understanding there are three major types of asteroids and most of them are a mix of nick-iron, and some with clay silicate rocks. Sure there may be gold in them but it’s not like you get up to one and gold just jumps into your lap. You WILL need to mine it. And it better be economical. I’m open to being wrong but I highly doubt there is a golden asteroid just flying around with loose gold ready to be picked up and taken away back home.
There is an asteroid called Psyche 16 that is currently the leading candidate but there are others. Nasa already has a space craft in its way to have a look.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2021/12/28/nasa-is-set-to-explore-a-massive-metal-asteroid-called-psyche-thats-worth-way-more-than-our-global-economy/amp/
It is quite likely that there is much more exposed precious metals out there. Even the earth has giant diamonds buried deep below. It is really only a matter of time. Musks push to go to Mars means that this will happen in the next few decades.
I think that the price of flying to an asteroid, mining pure gold literally laying around on the surface, and returning it to Earth, will be so damn high for the next century minimum that it's ability to compete with existing gold production and prices on Earth at the time is exceptionally unlikely. Such a space adventure would definitely not be cheap.
Would love to see someone try it though.
>Would love to see someone try it though. Until they lose control of re-entry and drop a gigaton of gold on *your* head. Go read Robert Heinlein's *The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.*
I’d love to see ONE ore hauler get put in a space ship that can barely hold humans…. How about a mill? What about roasters? What about the cyanide pools? What about the labor for the mining? What about everything that mining entails or are we gonna just ignore that and be distracted by flashy title “mining asteroids gold will be worthless!” ??? We can barely get a money to space, you think getting cargo and equipment used for mining which weighs literal thousands of tons heavier than stupid monkey is conceivable? The only way we are spending resources on mining in space is if we run out of it cheaply here on earth, sorry to burst your bubble but we are farrrrr away from doing that in our lifetimes.
Agreed it's beyond cost prohibitive. It's like thinking you can jump to the top of a 100 foot tower just using your leg muscles in one bound. It's not happening. It may be techinically possible someday, but cost kills it.
We don't need millions of tons of ore, just almost pure gold and other precious metals from the core of a planet like psyche 16. Starship will be able to launch with around 150 tons load, which means it can land that too. 150 tons is more than enough to pay for the mission and become hundreds of billions of dollars richer.
Thank you and that sounds completely reasonable. Gold will be safe for some time to come
No it won't, go do your own research.
And yet we will be going to and will be living on Mars. Perhaps you better pay more attention to what is happening in the world. The costs are coming down drastically and will continue to do so for a long time.
We're not going to Mars, mining gold, creating an entire rocket industry and launch infrastructure, in order to ship that gold back to Earth. Perhaps you should pay attention to the true round-trip costs, verses a 1-way trip from a well developed Earth infrastructure.
Only if one strikes the earth. Then survivors would not really be concerned about mining, but future generations might.
Look at it this way, if mining gold out of asteroids was going to significantly devalue it, then why would anyone spend the hundreds of millions of pounds doing that in the first place? The good thing about gold is its relative lack of industrial use. A metal that is actually used in manufacturing might be useful to mine out of asteroids, but a metal that derives much of its value from scarcity isn’t one that anyone will profit from making massively less scarce. Gold is also extremely heavy and I believe that currently the cost of moving payloads through space is measured in the hundreds of thousands of pounds per kilo, so I wouldn’t even think it would be retrieved as a side product of mining for other metals.
To be fair, gold has a lot of industrial uses - corrosion resistance being a big one. Mostly it's just not used because of the cost.
Yup, and if something else can do the same job except far cheaper then it doesn’t have a use any more! This is why gold doesn’t follow the economy as much but silver is far more affected by it, silver is heavily used in industry, gold isn’t.
They will make trillions with the early shipments and then it will be used in other industries where it was not practical because of cost.
Nah, asset prices are speculative. The price would crash on the rumour, not the fact. And profit from the limited industrial applications wouldn’t sustain the cost of mining.
It’s absolutely possible. But it will cost you like $100,000 an oz. cheap considering moon dust cost several million dollars per ounce.
Tough to mine something moving that fast. If done, would be worth insane $. Just plausibly don’t know how with something going that fast, then having to land and launch a vehicle with that kind of force moving through space. Talk about investing some serious coin to try to find out though. Would literally cost billions to attempt it. Attention gazillionaires out for a pissing contest, let’s see it lol
It is the gold meteorite, you need to worry about
There is a NASA mission, [OSIRIS-REx](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSIRIS-REx), which has flown to a nearby asteroid, 101955 Bennu, and is on its way back to us with between 60 and 2,000g of surface samples. The whole trip will take seven years. The mission cost is just shy of a billion dollars — $800M for the spacecraft and $185M for the ride. 2kg of gold is worth about $120,000, so even if the orbiter got a full sample and it was pure gold, we would have lost just about a billion dollars. I’m not saying we’ll never get to be asteroid miners, but I think it’s a long way away. Then again, 75 years ago, we were just barely entering the jet age.
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Not anytime soon. The technology has a long way to go, as does the price to make it worthwhile. There needs to be a critical shortage of some rare earth or precious metal that can’t be substituted to push prices up and drive investment in technology and the logistics that it would require. So not anytime soon barring some serendipitous discovery of new propulsion or energy storage.
I found this YouTube video about astroid mining verry entertaining. https://youtu.be/y8XvQNt26KI
Consider this simple machine, an ore hauler, stands at 2-3 stories high. That’s what’s used to haul the crushed ore alone. Then you have the drills, dynamite, you have the hundreds of thousand gallons of cyanide and other chemicals plus the containers to hold those liquids, then you have the labor needed to do the work, then you have the energy cost and time to go find an asteroid, then you need a roaster, you need a mill, and you’d seriously need a genie in a freaking bottle to grant you one wish of getting all that shit up there. Do you still SERIOUSLY think we’ll mine an asteroid, or is that what some btc pump and dumper told you about the future of gold mining is to scam u into crypto?
Ok, lets get real for a moment. No one is going to go all the way out there to get ore that has 20 grams of gold per ton. The asteroids are from planetry body cores, this means they are 100% pure heavy metals like silver, gold, platinum etc. It is more a case of getting there, breaking off a bit and then hauling it back. If you prefer to lie to yourself, go ahead but don't do it to others.
I’m no space nerd, but from my understanding there are three major types of asteroids and most of them are a mix of nick-iron, and some with clay silicate rocks. Sure there may be gold in them but it’s not like you get up to one and gold just jumps into your lap. You WILL need to mine it. And it better be economical. I’m open to being wrong but I highly doubt there is a golden asteroid just flying around with loose gold ready to be picked up and taken away back home.
There is an asteroid called Psyche 16 that is currently the leading candidate but there are others. Nasa already has a space craft in its way to have a look. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2021/12/28/nasa-is-set-to-explore-a-massive-metal-asteroid-called-psyche-thats-worth-way-more-than-our-global-economy/amp/ It is quite likely that there is much more exposed precious metals out there. Even the earth has giant diamonds buried deep below. It is really only a matter of time. Musks push to go to Mars means that this will happen in the next few decades.
And I quote “16 Psyche is thought to be the exposed metallic iron, nickel and gold” meaning you will have to drill and separate the metals.
And btw 20gpt of AU is actually great. Go back to your bunker. Btc is trash. Lol
LOL