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this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2024
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Asklemmy
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Asteroid mining. This may still be too far off and too expensive. But the first person to get this working successfully will be a trillionare.
This plus fusion are the two things most needed to transition humanity to a space based civilization.
Or it'll be a gold rush situation where that guy will break even, but the people selling him rocket fuel will make a modest fortune. It's all dependent on how expensive the shipping method invented is.
And that is something to inspire to? Look at the world right now, with billions of people having almost no money at all.
This seems like it would never be lucrative in any way shape or form.
Asteroid mining is incompatible with current capitalism. Say you harvest an asteroid with 100,000 of platinum in it. You in theory now have trollions of dollars in platinum for the $40 billion you spent harvesting the asteroid, only you have now quadrupled the amount of platinum in the economy, crayering the price and totally ruining your company. It's obviously a net good for humanity as a scarce resource is now abundant, but it is bad for capitalism because the ones who finaced the work are the biggest loser.
No you've got it backward. The mining is a cover. You look for celestial bodies that require only a small delta-v to redirect to a collision event.
It's a proper hostage situation, once you've got the infrastructure to replicate it more cheaply than people can defend against it.
This would be a really cool idea for a novel or mini-series IMO.
Oh yeah. I'd consult on that for sure. Tricking Silicon Valley to invest in something that then holds Earth hostage instead. Fun plot.
...although I bet they'd still invest if you just told them. As long as the financials work.
I did some googling and math. Global platinum market is 8 million oz a year. Current spot price is ~$900. That's $7T per year. They would have a monopoly and be able to shut down all mines by undercutting the price selling at say $800/oz. If it cost $40 Billion to mine the asteroid, that means it would take 7 years to pay back the cost.
7 year payback is short for businesses. Commercial Solar is installed despite having a 10 year payback.
I think if mining economy worked like that, Saudi Arabia would have gone bankrupt by cratering the price of oil.
Oil jas constant demand and the Saudis have so much of it that it costs them very little to drill for it and store it. And digging a new well doesn't immediately flood the market with 4x the annual production of oil.
I'm not arguing against asteroid mining. I am saying that it is fundamentally impossible under our current capitalist system. That's why there has been zero advances in the concept in iver a decade.
They don't have to sell all the platinum immediately. Just like DeBeers has mountains of diamonds they keep locked up in warehouses to keep the price controlled.