Asteroid Mining: The Future Or the End of the World Economy?
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- čas přidán 26. 03. 2023
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New miners would corner the market and charge whatever they want... like debeers.
Do you suppose that our economy will have to be one like Star Trek's United Federation of Planets? If we engage in this new frontier then you are right the surplus of minerals and resources available will lower the value and price of precious gems and metals (don't know about water, with the current droughts we have and the poisoning of many fresh water sources by pollution may seem that water is profitable [thank you climate change and big business]) but for the surplus of resources could we just use them to build more space stations, advance ships, and colonies, but for free? That's how they did it in the Federation as they have moved beyond the acquisition of wealth and moved to bettering themselves. Basically, resources become so ubiquitous that money becomes obsolete, that maybe sounds too optimistic.
This man was rong the first man to mine the moon will be the richest do to how easy you can get the ore and refine and sand it to earth.
@@thesilentone4024 Do you know how much money it takes to build a ship, launch it into space, set up facilities, processing plants, etc., send people up there, send food and resources to the moon, and then ship it back to Earth? And are there any valuable resources on luna?
I can only imagine a mega corporation slamming an asteroid into Earth while trying to bring it closer to mine because they cut cost somewhere. That sounds like something a business would do.
Just make sure the asteroid is small enough to burn up in the atmosphere.
Fingers crossed it hits Florida!
@@super-kami-guruFingers crossed it hits Hollywood. Lol
And then the government making them pay a 10k fine, while they make 46736728948282626489382626490526254732 dollars from mining it
Weyland Yutani would never do such a thing!
In the section "Too much of a good thing", Simon mentions that if the miners bring back too much of the precious metal, since there will be so much, it will be worthless. That is not true since only one compagny would have it and they will dictate the price, much like the pharmaceutical companies are doing with some products.
And since they hold enough of that resources, they'd own the world markets in not only those resources, but _everything_.
We don't need precious metals anymore. We no longer use it for money anyways. Gold and platinum for example would be a lot more useful in many technological applications if there was a lot more of it and it didn't cost so much.
@@grahamtotte7133 I think you just contradicted your first sentence with your third.
@@rylandrc I assume they meant the "precious" part. In other words the scarcity is not needed. But I get what you're saying. It could've been phrased far better.
I think the DeBeers would be a better analogy in your case. As they control the diamond market (a rock that beyond being shiny and sharp, have little actual rarity or value)
The abundance of such " rare " materials would lead to technology we can't imagine.
Why?
@Nerfherder42 alot of research is expensive and doesn't get tested but imagine if to create life we needed a fuck ton of titanium and well we do have it but it would cost the whole economy to make it as in robots or whatever. Well if we did this it would mean you'd only need to find one astound and then bam we did it
@@nerfherder4284 It's what we do.
Yttrium would be one such material because of how it behaves in low cold and high hot temperatures. In heat it becomes extremely bright, In the cold it floats and spins. It might be possible for use as a reactor for cold climates with enough of it. Its already had use in heat sources because you don't need much to provide light and sees use in lanterns.
@@user-hq1vn1gf9p Titanium isn't that rare its just very energy intensive to produce and hard to work with because of its properties. That's what makes it expensive.
Finding a giant asteroid of Titanium Ore wouldn't do that much to the overall price of finished titanium components.
I used to work in an industry in the 1990's that used %99.99999 Helium, yes, 5 decimal points, in it's equipment. It was crazy expensive back then, I can't even imagine what it going for now. Standard Helium used in children's ballons had way too many impurities for the low temperatures that equipment was used to create.
@Gerald H It will take 50 years to that..
Helium will be the next "gold craze", by 2030 all will be used, and will skyrocket in prize..
Invest now in a helium etf, and you will be rich..
@Gerald H That's one of those fusion Catch-22s. Helium's useful for cooling magnets and other elements in fusion reactor designs. It's also one of those fun politics issues. Much of our current helium is extracted from natural gas production. Politicians seem determined to ban gas production, along with oil. We rely on the petrochemical industries for an enormous range of essential products that can't be produced by the renewables industry.
@Gerald H CO2 isn't a problem. The problem is if neo-luddites force the closure of the oil and gas industry, we won't have any of the products derived from petrochemicals.
@Gerald H So far only a small test was successful, it is still decades away from commercial use..
BUT
New nuclear plants are fully commercial and safe, those ones are key for the energy demand if the world in the next decade..
Please, for the love of all that's holy, make a space channel, you have videos you could upload already, plus the obvious future ones to come.
I second that motion. And would love to write for it 😊
To a pretty large degree Simon has one already. His Geigraphics channel posts many space-related videos.
Amen. Been saying this. But it would leave gaps in a lot of other channels, I mean "space" is a pretty broad subject I suppose.
How many channels does he already have. Are these his channels and he just narrates? Clearly he has people working for him right. Where can I find out more. What is life? Where am I? I should buy a cat...
I third that motion .
Achieving mining and manufacturing solutions will be the goal. Semi-automated, full autonomous and 3D manufacturing machines could be employed to build a large space station en route from the asteroids current position to a safe orbit around our planet.
That's what I was thinking. Self-assembling, autonomous mining facilities. Like a C compiler that compiles itself out of C code starting from a little bit of Assembly code that bootstraps the whole thing - we could send a rocket up with a little machine that begins to manufacture components out of minerals from the asteroid that are used to make the actual plant that mines and manufactures the next gen of space craft that are then sent out to do the same thing with the next asteroid and so on with a certain percentage of the minerals being sent back to Earth.
By the time we can profitably mine asteroids it will only be possible because of AI building and managing everything in space. We are looking at decades before asteroid mining approaches being sensible and computers and AI software will be vastly better by then.
@@DrSpooglemon More likely we will very slowly build a facility(s) that has everything it needs to build more robots. We might still be shipping up certain complicated parts for some time after that just because it is faster than having everything built on site. I do not think we will set up a little robot because building even simple machines requires fairly big facilities and lots of materials. Making a processor alone requires many materials that are extremely pure and a massive, sophisticated facility.
I kinda hate the idea that working together to advance humanity's quality of life for thousands of years isn't viable because it won't make profit 😥
Bruv I had the same feeling
Can get infinite resources to catapult human race forward.... WIIFM?
/shakesdamnhead
At the outset of space exploration/mining any endeavor will be ludicrously risky, expensive, and time consuming. The only projects that are worth starting are those that are WORTH the initial investment. And what we need first is infrastructure in orbit to drive the cost of further missions down. Rare earth metals are incredibly important, but are only needed in very small quantities with current technology. Once we have the infrastructure in place, a single small mining operation will be easy enough and will "solve" our current supply issues with those metals for the foreseeable future.
To put this another way, remember that "profit" is defined by a balance of supply and demand. While the current value of rare earth metals is high, that's only due to low supply. Meanwhile the point of this video was showing how this balance is thrown off once you're starting with a blank slate in orbit. The highest demands we have are the bare essentials of life, food, water, air, and shelter. We will need to solve those MASSIVE demand issues before we even start to think about others.
That's LITERALLY the reason we're still stuck stagnant &rotting with the only "advancements" being geared towards getting more &more eyeballs on a 6 by 3 inch phone
@@o-wolf Truth, bro
@@mukkah yup. this is why when ppl scream about communism this capitalism that like capitalism is the beacon of hope &advancement.. when god knows how many advancements medicines &inventions have either been lost prevented or fell by the wayside because capitalism is predicated on profit margin &waste.. there's no room for anything that doesnt fit into that box nomatter how much it'll potentially benefit humanity, because personal benefit is the only goal
Mining companies would stockpile the elements in the same way that diamonds are held to maintain scarcity. Trickle the goodies out enough to make a profit but not enough to devalue the minerals.
Who is building the only reusable super heavy space launch vehicle? Intends to set-up a colony on Mars & (hint Mars has no IAEC ) mine there. With Nuclear powered spacecraft the asteroid belt is well within reach from Mars & an oopsie flinging ore back to Mars is no huge deal. Demo's & Phobos would make handy Shipyards, refining centres, sky-hook balance. You know one of those orbital hub stations that build, maintain & supply proper Spaceships.
Most of these metals will never come to Earth at all. It will be used to construct extraterrestrial infrastructure. Colonies, space stations, vessels, etc etc.
But can they ask more than Earth mined/recycled materials? I dont think so.
@@juhajuntunen7866 They can sell it in orbit for as much as it would cost to get earth mined up to orbit or to get from Lunar mined to orbit if you could mine it on the moon.
@@jackdbur Musk lost interest in that. He's running twitter now. Imagine if he spent $44 billion on SpaceX instead of Twitter. Now that would be a game changer.
Commercial asteroid mining is definitely viable. Just ask the hard working crew of the Uscss Nostromo.
Sure is, I just hope they don't run into a bonus situation.
They didn’t mine. They did salvage.
I was thinking the same thing.
@@TheBooban The Nostromo was towing a massive refinery - they were miners
Yep. Miners. I'm an ALIEN film nut.
Another potential problem may be that the asteroid is too rich in rare metals. If too many of the right minerals are found in one deposit, it could be impossible to separate them economically. I know of one such deposit here in Oregon; very rich in bismuth, tin, etc. but the minerals can't be processed into concentrates of each metal separately. Since the formation of ore deposits on Earth depends on unique conditions found in geographically separated locations in the Earth's crust, ores of different metals are found separate zones, making the purification of one or a few of these relatively easy. But these conditions are most certainly not the same in asteroids, which are not likely to have experienced the same tectonic processes as occur on Earth.
its not has hard as you think in space, there are orbital mining process that should theoretical work well, heat an asteroid up and spin it, the heavier elements float to the edge.
With the right heat and spin (spin is like artificial gravity) you can separate pretty much any element.
the hard part is capturing the stuff that trys to fly away, especially the stuff that turns to gas, its why a lot of the space minning co's are looking at putting bags around it.
@@robgilmour3147 Interesting idea. If the asteroid spun fast enough, wouldn't the lighter material escape on a wider trajectory than the heavier ores? If the angle of escape depends on the density of the material, then using a device that bins material at different radii from the center of spin would allow one to at least partially purify the molten ores. Just spinning dreams, I suppose. Of course, any method that relies on density for separation will not work if different materials have the same or very close densities.
@@markharder3676 no the heavy stuff 'falls' to the outer edge, lighter stuff floats to the center when spinning where its still 0 G, there are other methods that run on similar lines like having a tube spun up with mesh in side all under pressure and you just toss chunks of asteroids into it, but thats hard to do large scale.
very few elements have the same density and melting points, actually none that i can think of, so you just get the temperature right then one will melt while the other remains solid, or one turns to gas wile the other is still liquid. in space you dont have to worry about making toxic gases that would be deadly to breathe in or that could cause an environmental disasters so there are other advantages to doing this stuff up there.
Nonetheless, with stuff like palladium worthing more than 50 000 dollars a kilos, it is hard to imagine a process that is not economically viable to purify it.
NASA, and only NASA really, is putting effort into developing means of separating elements easier. of course we have the centrifugal method that is mostly used for fissile materiel as the energy gained out is in many magnitude great then what is put in, but their is also laser separation where you just knock the desired atoms out.
7:15 - Hayabusa was not NASA. It was Japan's JAXA.
7:35 - OSIRIS-REx's cost including the launch vehicle is only $985M, not 'at least a billion dollars', which includes the projected cost of the post-return mission to Apophis, OSIRIS-APEX. It's also not 'preparing to return to Earth'. It collected the sample more than 2 years ago, and is now only 5-6 months from the September sample return date. That means it's well on its way.
So 0.985 billion is so far from 1.000 billion.
What kinda nitpicking kerfuffery was this? 😂
@@o-wolf If I watch a video purporting to tell me accurate information, I want... y'know... accurate information.
@@mrbaab5932 0.985 billion is, in fact, pretty far from '*at least* a billion, since 'at least' includes much larger numbers. It's like saying the F-86 Sabre's top speed of 650mph is 'supersonic'. It's not. It's considered transonic, but still below Mach 1.
It's also misrepresentative to cite the cost of the *combined* OSIRIS-REx *and* OSIRIS-APEX missions as *just* the cost of OSIRIS-REx.
@@billmcdonough3950 its not too late to get a life my guy
1:30 - Chapter 1 - Why asteroids are specials
2:55 - Mid roll ads
4:35 - Chapter 2 - How asteroid mining works
8:55 - Chapter 3 - Too much of a good thing ?
10:25 - Chapter 4 - The real future of space mining
Thanks mate
I just see The Expanse happening, but I'm jaded & cynical.
Or worse Dead Space.
I was thinking about belters myself!
Owkwa beltalowda
When you realise that's probly the BEST case scenario, your brain will start to melt
@@100percentpowerpoint copeng beltalowda 🖐️
The whole heavy metals (lml) crashing the economy thing already happened at a point in history when the silver extracted by the Spanish Empire from the Americas created an economic imbalance that was felt in China in the early 1700s.
I would love to read more about that, got a link? :)
Diamonds still have value. We can even make them in a lab.
@@davidbeppler3032 They have value in their hardness but their immense costs are due to the hording of their supply, not any real rarity.
@@Amadeus8484 If they bring down 200 tons of platinum from an asteroid they will be forced to sell it all as fast as possible? Please explain that.
@@davidbeppler3032 No, Platinum would become worth a lot less because its inflated abundancy if it were much larger, which it would have to be to cover the costs of getting there and back. Just the sale 200 Tons of Platinum, even Metric tons wouldn't cover the costs of energy it would take to get there, mine it and bring it back. We also don't have the wherewithal to put crews into stasis yet, so the food, oxygen, water, heat and sanitation costs would also likely exceed the costs of it too. Plus the training of Astronauts, Engineers, IT Technicians, Medical Staff, we are nowhere near close enough to being able to get all of those various needs met with tiny crews over long distances and large crews to accommodate all of the various professionals we would need would also inflate the costs.
Having done the math roughly, multiplying 852.90 for platinum troy ounce by 32150.75 which is how many troy ounces in a metric ton by 200 the total value of 200 metric tons of platinum is 5,484,274,935
sdbullion.com/blog/how-much-platinum-is-in-the-world according to this website, there has been slightly less than 10,000 tons of platinum mined in the world so admittedly 200 tons wouldn't make as large of a difference but just opening a mine can cost hundreds of millions, granted you can use some of the stuff you use again in other mines but the cost to build it on an asteroid and to get it all home would probably exceed 5.4 billion by an INCREDIBLE metric.
I have yet to find an answer as to how much it would cost to mine an asteroid in particular. But I will look.
Building a space port around the moon that builds space craft with materials found in space is how we will become a space species.
If there's no profit, what will pay to mine it? Chicken and the egg sort of thing.
@@JimP226 If it isn't profitable enough for profit oriented people to want to embark upon it then we need a different kind of system.
Space Communism!!
Building a space craft requires many thousands of parts which often require their own facilities to manufacture and that require refined materials to make. In order to do this in a time effective manner we will need a whole space economy already set up.
It will take a very long time to get the kind of infrastructure for building space craft completely in space.
Always love it when someone does the math on projects like this.
Having more of a scarce resource means we can implement these resources in ways we haven't been able to before because it wasn't economically viable.
That was my thought. Demand could increase due to lack of scarcity. Especially when it comes to fresh water, if it's possible to irrigate deserts and the U.S. turns the West into a giant(-er) golf course
Roads paved in diamond and platinum, anyone?
@@Zeppathy electronics made with far less toxic materials. You can replace a lot of the most toxic components of a computer with precious metals, but it currently doubles the cost.
@@EnkiduShamesh Graphene could do that too if we could figure out how to produce more of it in bulk, and keep purity high.
IMO the biggest benefit would be that we could have all the things, without having to turn our home planet into Terra from Warhammer 40k. Lol
It would be one of the greatest world economical moments ever!! Just imagine, the amount of materials that could be used from space, with so many times the size of our planet compressed together!! Materials in space are goin to be a key thing to use for space exploration and expansion of living in our solar system!!
The most important thing that should be on everyone mind currently should be how to invest in different sources of income that doesn't depend on the government. Especially with the current economic crisis around the world 🌍. This is still a good time to invest in various stocks gold, silver and digital currencies
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If I wanted to mine asteroids, I would skip the small asteroids and go straight to Ceres. It has sufficient gravity that landing is actually easy, but not so much that taking off again is difficult. It has LOADS of water, along with all the other elements one might want. Ceres could be so effective for extra-terrestrial mining that IMO it makes more sense for a first colony location than Mars. While there is little one can profitably do on Mars, an export industry on Ceres could make it the most profitable colony location in the solar system.
And they would become known as Belters.
Helium3 is in abundance in space bodies. It is used in fusion reactors and could lead to faster breakthroughs once a large source is found.
I immediately started imagining space explorers being able to hop on and off asteroids, using its water, hydrogen, and oxygen, riding the asteroid for a while and then hopping onto another nearby asteroid 😄
It will all be ai
Crashing the world market sounds like an alarmist doomsaying sort of idea, given that the other option is highly destructive mining ON the planet, causing tons of other problems.
the problem is people can't look past post scarcity society.
The thing that opens up space mining will likely be robots being controlled by a super intelligence. This is decades away at least. However such computers could drastically improve life on earth and manage resources much better than we do currently. Unless we reverse the trends in birthrates we won't need to expand to space because Earth is out of resources, it will be because we want more and are in competition with others.
As a former roofer, paver, and miner myself, I'd sign up for asteroid mining in a heart beat.
Too bad it’ll most likely used AI and robots
Actually it would probably be better to process them on location.
As the average temperature of the asteroid belt is fairly close
To the temperature at which iron and Nickle become brittle.
The mined chunks could then be transported to mercury for
Refining in solar forges.
Any mining company could limit the quantity of metal they put on the market. Multiple commercial mining companies would have similar interests and would likely form cartels.
A nation that wanted to crash their economy and could manage the technology to mine asteroids would be dangerous for them, but that would likely lead to war and defending asteroid mining operations seems like it would be impossible.
This is not something unheard of. Actually, both Nvidia and AMD representatives admitted to the press they are keeping stocks of the newest GPUs in order to NOT bring down the retail prices now that crypto mining isn't a thing anymore (it still is but not so much as it was two years ago).
That sounds exactly the same as the mining business on Earth.
Just like diamonds
DaBeers has entered the chat. Guess what, diamonds aren’t rare.
@@Bob_Smith19what percentage of people who watched this video don’t know this fact by now? I’ve heard it for literally 7+ years now multiple times a year and most young people I see who are married just have the dang band thing( no idea what company sells those or at what prices)
The best way to utilise the resources of asteroid mining would be governments using them as a free resource for major projects
I can see vertical consolidation being a thing. Basically, a single company would do the mining, refining and use 3D Printers to manufacture stuff to send down, that way they can sell processed items rather than the actual material itself, so they don't flood the market with cheap material.
IF (big if) asteroid mining could be done economically, it will move the goal posts. However, Humans being humans, it won't be post scarcity, but the poor will be measurably better off, and the rich will be exponentially richer.
Sound like a deadly philosophical pessimism for the humanity?!? No, I don’t think so. Hope is always there in the end.
@@thetruthsetsyoufree1492 Not really, it's just an extrapolation of 21st century trends. In America, the poorest have softer beds, better food, and more entertainment options than medieval kings. Yet the distance between you and Elon is far greater than the distance between peasants and kings. So if asteroid mining happens, life will be better for all, it just won't be equally distributed.
@@L0stEngineer like always , people love to divide themself don't they...
@@L0stEngineer One big difference though is that it would move mining of those minerals out into space, as value of land on Earth itself (and any disincentives when it comes to environmental destruction) increases. Mars could do with the CO2 produced from iron mining, if anything.
@@Vaeldarg You have an excellent point. Since none of the asteroids or other worlds were ever alive, there's no environment to protect. We could move the mining and the manufacturing out there and better protect our extremely strange, wonderful, paradise world.
The biggest challenge for space travel is creating a system of moving materials from Earth to space so we can then build bigger & better starships that can explore & colonize the solar system on a massive scale.
I think we need to find a way source materials from outside of a large gravity well before we can build anything heavy in space. We could probably make something like project Orion work today, but you have to look at the non monetary cost of sending that much mass off planet.
We have this convenient moon that we've proven we can reach. That moon has not only been protecting the planet for millions of years, but has been acting as an asteroid sponge and concentrator for at least that length of time. If you can get there, you can build interplanetary spacecraft and launch from the smaller gravity field.
@@L0stEngineer that opens up the possibility of sky hooks too. No propellant space travel is a pretty awesome advantage if you want to mine space ore.
@@dhayes907 absolutely, especially for LEO. Also fun fact, the moon's gravity is low enough, we could build a space elevator since the tension is less than the yield strength of material we already know how to build.
I've always liked the idea of constructing manufacturing centres and space-ports for long distance jouneys on the Lunar surface. Use smaller shuttles from Earth to get the people and resources (the resources that can't be mined on Luna in the first place anyway) up there; then take advantange of the weaker gravity and no atmosphere to build bigger ships with more cargo capacity which can then launch with less fuel consumption.
Space is like a 3D ocean, stuff just floats around, relatively easy to move.
Coming back to earth is down hill if you can keep it from burning up.
My idea is to have a refinery in a rotating disk , to make artificial gravity
so to process separating of material. Low grade stuff would be made into ionized dust
that could be expelled like rocket fuel. High grade material could be put in giant plastic bags
and towed home. Giant thrusters could divert the trajectory of the object to stay in orbits closer to earth or mars. By then there will be a space economy and most can be used for outside earth
manufacturing, like on the moon and mars. When building above the surface space ships, they can be built huge.
I'm a big fan of the floating city concept. Could siphon gasses from Venus to fill floatation devices. Then attach a refinery to process fuel. Could be done remotely by robots/ai and would fuel all the random stuff we'd want to do around our system for quite awile.
@@Zeppathy i agree, lots of stuff out there almost ready to use. Venus also, i can see a floating cities there, As space travel improves
Traveling to places in the solar system will become routine.
I never thought about "mining" water in space, great video!
Couldn't companies that mine for precious metal create an artificial scarcity by keeping most of their stock off the market?
Only if a company had a monopoly. Other companies would be able to undercut them.
People will live there. More people = more demand.
There is never going to be "too much" gold or "too much" iron...
No, there won't but it will make the cost of those materials fall drastically.
@@dr4d1s We can build our houses out of solid gold if we wanted to... That stuff is extremely corrosion resistant...
Not to mention the Rockefeller types that have the " I always need just a little more" mentality. That supply will get used somewhere.
It’s not a digital event. When a company opens a copper mine on earth, they don’t dig and dig and then one day deliver a million tons of copper. It starts small, builds to a steady state, then declines. The question is whether the minimum viable asteroid mine is of a size which delivers disruptive amounts of output at a steady state.
Asteroid miners would absolutely make profit, because even in worst case scenario, they would effectively be dictating the price. The world needs rare earth metals. Badly.
These initial asteroid mining colonies can also be gradually developed, engineered and terraformed into O’Neill cylinder city-states, which would be a truly creative expansion of the nation or conglomeration of nations that spearheads this effort.
However, that prospect may lead to a much darker future. If these space colonies start becoming more prosperous than life on Earth, then perhaps the citizens of said colonies may feel a sense of superiority and may not want to listen to their home government. Conversely, if the citizens of an asteroid colony feel exploited in any way, they may grow to resent their home government. Both scenarios lead to one inevitable outcome: war in space. I am not saying that we should stop exploring space or looking into mining in space, but we should proceed with caution.
I'm just here for the conversation about The Helix and the Sword lol
@@NewtypeCommander That kinda happened in the Gundam universe.
@@ascensionindustries9631
It's exactly what happened in the gundam universe....
The only question left is, are you a Feddie or Zeek?
@@ascensionindustries9631 And in Exo Squad with the Neo Sapiens and the Oort Cloud pirates. The series was just getting started when they canceled it, someone definitely needs to reboot it properly!
I think someone needs to tell simon about the Rockefellers, and oh no everything would be cheaper and easier to improve, man this asteroid mining sounds like a bad idea
Deliver so much gold and platinum that they're as common as iron and aluminum -- and their prices will be about the same as iron and aluminum. Neat wrap up.
This video makes an excellent point. Rare earth materials are so valuable *because* they're so rare. If the supply essentials becomes infinite, they'll become worthless. Great for consumers, but disastrous for folks who make $ off controlling their supply.
Not necessarily. Supply is really low right now, which limits how high demand can get. With a greater supply, more uses can be found for these materials. This, alongside the upscale of preexisting uses, will contribute to a comparative increase in demand. In other words, the price will decrease somewhat, but it will be far from worthless.
That’s all without considering that the companies that mine these resources wouldn’t just toss it all into the market; just look at the diamond industry and how they withhold supply to maintain high prices.
1:28 why asteroids are special
4:29 how asteroid mining works
8:53 to much of a good thing?
10:19 the real future of space mining
Hey Simon, great video! As someone that is studying the very Optical Mining method which you mentioned in this video as part of my Phd, it is very exciting to see a possible tangible effect of my work. One thing I wanted to mention was that due to such high kinetic energy associated with large asteroid impacts a metal core of a hypothetical asteroid would actually vaporize completely leaving a desolate crater- and no metal to mine. There are however chances that the high heat will cause any nearby deposits of iron/other metals to coalesce.
9:45 This is not how the supply-demand curve works. Our use of expensive materials is limited by availability, with the limitation enforcedby the price. As the price of a material decreases, more uses of it become viable, thereby increasing demand.
That's a very valid point that the economics of asteroid mining is not at all straight forward, but the "crashing the market" effect is also not as simple as You mentioned.
While it's fair to say that a quadrillion dollar asteroid won't be that valuable - it's still certain that a mining mission will never sell the mined resources below costs + some reasonable profit margin, and considering the absurd valuation - such endeavor may be profitable even if it was to drop platinum price to like a 100$ per kg. The effect would be that mines on the planet would have a problem with their economics while the world would benefit immensely from abundance of rare/precious metals, because that would unlock lots of use cases that are are currently financially impossible due to extremely high price of those metals.
A simple example would be those catalytic converters - manufacturers skimp on the precious metals, replace them with less effective but cheaper alternatives etc. making them less reliable, but they're still so expensive that it's very common around the world for cats to be cut out and stole from cars - relatively cheap platinum would mitigate this problem.
If it really got cheap then perhaps we would see some new super stainless steel types with high amounts of precious metals.
Perhaps some iridium based extreme heat shields/coatings could become a thing in combustion chambers of various engine types.
It's likely very hard to even imagine how many materials might become economical if precious and rare earth metals would become abundant and reasonably priced.
I just want this to happen so COMMON! COMMON! LETS GO SPACE TRUCKIN'
It’s going to be massive wealth for the select few, an income for a few middle management types, deadly and difficult work for many, and increased poverty for the rest.
poverty is almost universally decreasing . and accessing limitless resources from space will be good for us all
in all likelihood the humans are going to be assisted by artificially intelligent robots and we’re already in the middle of the AI revolution. Most likely it’s going to be an issue of knowledge, training people on complicated engineering and whatever else they’d need to live in these mining colonies. Those who can adapt, a new whole universe of opportunities will be opened up for them. And some of these asteroids can even be developed into O’Neill cylinder city-states, so more opportunities for construction to open up, hence increased economic activity. And, hey, at least these humans are going to do something productive and positive instead of getting thrown into the meat grinder of war.
When we start bringing massive amounts of materials back from space it will tank the cost of those materials. It's simple supply and demand. The more you have to sell of something, the lower the cost is going to fall. If someone tries to corner the market/hoard the materials, others will make companies to do space mining.
@@randomname3109 most of the world poverty decreased in communist china.
Simon's video on top tenz looked into 10 large space station ideas, but only briefly into each one and went into some fanciful SF ideas, so didn't give enough attention to the real-world proposals like the O'Neill "Island One" Bernal sphere or the "Stanford Torus".
The O'Neill proposal or the closely parallel NASA Ames / Stanford space settlement studies covered all of this.
They planned using only Lunar resources but said that if NEAs meet the expectations they'd make it even better (and NEAs do and more).
They didn't even go into returning NEA metals to Earth, only Solar power satellites sending energy down. A large oversight, since before the colony or space manufacturing facility to build it, NEA metals could pay off everything. In his book, O'Neill barely mentions crashing Earth markets in rare metals and backed away, refusing to even consider it.
The manufacturing facility and the first "Stanford Torus" habitat for 10 k workers would be done by ~2008, and the cost would be like many other large infrastructure or industrial developments down here. The Interstate Highway system. Less than the "Ford" class CVNs and their air wings and escorts and the logistics to deploy them to fight over access to oil or minerals.
It is not true, it is irresponsible to say that space mining or large scale efforts is too expensive, or that it can't benefit the Earth as well as vastly enlarge what we can do in space.
The only reason we aren't doing it now is because politicians decided not to. Who pays politicians and who owns the world financial systems which would be de-valued or revolutionized by space mining? Please tell me that this is just a whacky conspiracy theory, that the powers-that-be held the brakes because they wanted to prolong scarcity.
The NASA Ames studies and the suggestions it offers deserves not just an episode, but a miniseries.
A small correction regarding the price of the rear metals and minerals. Retrieving large quanteties back to earth, will make the price drop, but a lower price, wil make them relevant for multiple new techs and uses. This wil then make the new demand stabelize, rather than drop too much
You would only return enough gold and palladium enough to pay for your space mission. Plus it would employ many people thereby generating a large economy around it. This also improves the technology and reducing the cost. The way DeBeers handles the supply of diamonds.
But at the same time the first ones up there to get one would run a deficit even when they bring it back for processing, that alone would take months/years to do.
even if stuff like gold loses all of its value it would just mean that now we have a shit ton of gold to start using on other stuff
aluminium used to be more expensive than gold, people used to make fine cutlery and wedding rings out of aluminium because of how expensive it was, then it became cheaper than dirt suddenly it became posible to use it in other things that werent just jewelry, airplanes were only posible because of this cheap aluminium for example
Me personally, I'm now thinking about what happened to Aluminum: A century or so ago Aluminum was so difficult to refine that it was more expensive than gold and treated like a precious metal.
And when an easy way to refine it was discovered the price dropped drastically. And it became to be used in more and more items.
Gold is a precious metal along with silver and platinum: And many economies are based on gold... Which is why Fort Knox is so important to the U. S. economy. And if by chance an asteroid was discovered with huge amounts of Gold, diamond, etc the price of this material would immediately plummet. Diamond prices could fall without affecting the economy too much, but to a gold- based economy the sudden influx of megatons of gold would make the economy collapse.
Diamonds aren't rare. I can't see how an abundance of gold will help humanity.
@@nerfherder4284 gold has some really special properties that make it extremely good for electronics but we dont use it because of price
Another fantastic and informative episode which got me thinking ……. How about one on OPEC?
I think that the "recent" exponential growth of AI will help *a lot* in the planning/design of future asteroïd mining missions =)
Hi Simon, I love you videos and was wondering if you could cover Mulberry harbour. A temporary structure built in June 1944, it has some amazing eneering tasks during the D-day invasion. 😊
It reminds me of the movie Armageddon, if the surface is as aggressive as in the movie, good luck to the miners.
In Armageddon, it was a comet, not and asteroid.
...by which they mean it's made of ice, not minerals.
@@nerfherder4284 Well, ice contaminated by various minerals.
At 9:56 you say with the mining of Palladium, Gold and other metals we hit the demand for the next 100.000 years.
Don't you think that would be an opportunity for the industrie to use these elements more? And maybe advance henceforth faster. Bringing the price up again?
Like using more gold in electronics and more palladium based cleansing technology?
Reducing the impact of earth mines by outsourcing it?
But interesting would be how everything would come down to earth as well.
Obviously a flood of Raw Materials would affect the global market price of that commodity, but the potential for increased economic impact could be realized in what is done with that resource if it can be utilized in a way that drives the Economy.
If this is possible to achieve then mexico better start developing their own space mining industry
Why would we want the cartels in space too?
@@ryanhamstra49 not now but it can lay the foundation for future mining operations once mexico has stability
Any Nation seriously pushing space mining could become incredible rich.
Mexico is already mineral rich. Mexico should better focus on eliminating cartels out of their government
@@ryanhamstra49 lol
Mining those precious metals might tank the price but smart companies will limit supply to the market anyway. Also, it is impossible to know what kind of products will be made from these metals. Palladium now is really only used to make catalysts and jewellery because its use in anything else is prohibitively expensive. Once it becomes cheap to buy we could see a multitude of products being made from them, but I doubt we will see the price crash to nothing because demand might keep the price to where it could be profitable to mine. And even if it wasnt, governments will subsidise it if it makes money,
There will need to be a massive effort to clean up our relative near space debris before attempting supply lines in, through and out of the solar system… I’m still concerned over radiation and object deflection capacities via electromagnetic and plasma manipulation, but I have more vacuumed experiments to verify models…
"Mining rare materials and boosting it's supply might crash the market and lower it's value"
Laughs in diamond monopoly
Now that's a REAL Megaproject. Nice work, Simon and Team! 👏😃
Another point to asteroid mining would be that, once it matches and further reduces the operational and logistics costs compared to mining on Earth, this would make open-air mining operations less desirable, thus reducing further impact on Earth's ecosystems.
Also, transferring raw materials from an asteroid to Earth's orbit is far more energy efficient than sending them from Earth's surface, thus making orbital factories and construction facilities more feasible. Why sending a single module for a space station from Earth's surface if, with the same amount of fuel (which can also be gathered and produced in space), we can 3D print them by the dozens using materials from a near asteroid?
Supply and demand set the price of a commodity, so if too much of any mineral is brought back, it will depress the price. There are also the high "shipping" costs to bring whatever mineral is being mined back to Earth. That alone will winnow down the list of minerals worth mining and bringing back to Earth, so the key would be to optimize the supply / demand curve so that the miners could make the most money possible. That might mean stockpiling minerals mined so that the market is not flooded, dropping the price.
A drop in price could lead to an increase in demand, so not necessarily a bad thing.
I think one error is thinking is that we're going to be bringing the asteroid's raw minerals back to Earth's surface. Because of the cost of moving materials from the gravity well of Earth, we need to be using the raw materials from the asteroids to build infrastructure in space, starting with ore processing factories to produce materials for orbital structures such as space stations and factories where we could build interplanetary spacecraft and probes, prefab structures for satellite and planetary habitations and exploration, etc. The other potential error in our thinking is that we would tank the world economy. Currently on earth, mining minerals such as gold, palladium, the rare earth minerals, and petroleum is based on the value of the ore once the costs of extraction are factored in. For instance, when petroleum drops past a certain point, it becomes unprofitable to continue extracting it, so oil companies shut down the rigs and reduce exploration. Same happens with ore minerals. I seriously doubt we'd change that way of thinking if we found a treasure trove of minerals on an asteroid. Once the prices start of the minerals start dropping, the extraction and processing robots would be shut down until the price of minerals started to rise again. Or they'd shift to other resource extraction. Water would probably fare better since it would be constantly needed for orbital space stations and spacecraft. It's also proves to be a source of fuel since it can be broken down to hydrogen and oxygen propellants.
A lot of the value of asteroid mining isn't just the material wealth but the fact that all of this material is already in space.
I think directing an asteroid towards Earth is a great idea. What could possibly go wrong?
It'll be fine, trust us.
-Shell probably
@@Zeppathy "Shell Astro Mining co. demands South Africa return platinum from asteroid it lost control of and let slam into the outskirts of Johannesburg" Is a news headline I would not surprised to see.
Don’t worry, Skynet will be guiding it
"Dammit, John, you dropped another one."
Bruce Willis might say otherwise tho...
1:44 The core of main sequence stars form nothing heavier than iron. Heavier elements can form in the supernova itself.
Build ships from the mines materials.
Expensive to send materials in to space is very expensive.
Thanks for the great shows. Just wanted to point out that you mentioned NASA with the Hayabusa mission. That was actually JAXA. Though NASA did receive a small portion of that return sample.
So there's still a chance Captain Jean-Luc Picard was (is, will be, dam temporal paradoxes) right after all when saing, "the economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century... The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity."
The people who made that movie certainly didn't do it for free...
@@stevenobrien557 almost as if they didn't have access to the kind of technology that made a post-scarcity economy possible
@@EnkiduShamesh so that meant they were forced to take multimillion dollar fees because they couldn't make caviar and off road vehicles in a replicator yet?
Interesting 🤔 thank you for making this video 👍
What about this:
1. Land on an asteroid and explore, it must be a very small, compact, metal rich one (because of steps 3 and 4),
2. If necessary, blow up surface layers using conventional or nuclear explosives until all that's left is a metal-rich core (yeah, I know it would slowly coalesce back, but not if you apply step 3),
3. attach an ion rocket on the asteroid core that would (very) slowly (over years) put it on a collision course with the Earth (it helps greatly if the asteroid already has a trajectory which passes very close to Earth)
4. deorbit the asteroid so that it impacts a convenient predetermined point somewhere in a large desert, far enough from population (making sure you secured mining rights for that area previously),
5. mine the impact area through conventional means, e.g. open pit mining
Asteroid mining could be a lot more easier if for example , shuttle or a space station, could separate the minerals from rocks/dust, melt them using powerful lasers or magnified sun rays, shape them into ingots and send them to earth using a spaceship ( like the one Elon Musk has). I doubt the weight will be a problem for reentry, after all you don't really need fuel for this purpose.
i think the best investment would not to bring material to earth's gravity well, beside from a few shots of very rare or pure things... i guess the material is better used for building real spaceships or just habitats for earth's orbit or mars or other planets... and of course Water or its ingredients of oxygen and hydrogen what would be cheaper than bring it from earth to somewhere....
@@SirHeinzbond you are right and also wrong. How much money do you think you need to harvest minerals from asteroids? A lot! Without some return to the "seed" money, the investors would lose patience. If the first transport of minerals to earth, double the initial investment, then you would have enough cash to develop the technology necessary to build a space shipyard, and also enough funds to hire people. If your mining operation is a succes, investors would rush to give you money. Everybody likes to invest in something that doubles the money
@@liviusky If your mining operation is a success, you don't need much more money. Just the capability to build the first small factory that can build parts and assemble stuff. After that it's only a question of time until you can produce everything you want in orbit at only the cost of the personal needed down here.
From a children's toy, the next generation of computers to cars, even food from orbital farms, all from the initial investments and the personal cost.
@@Dreamfox-df6bg really now? do you live in the future or what? do you even know how much money you need to send something to the outer space, not in the orbit or to ISS, to the OUTER SPACE? Billions! Is cheaper to send to the earth lower orbit, but to the outer space is a little more expensive! Space X can send cargo to Earth's lower orbit (dragon space ship) but until now, only rockets were used to send something to the outer space (Ariane 5, falcon 9 etc) and is like 100K per Kilogram. To send something that can mine, you need to send few tones equipment and that is a lot of money. they you need to make sure you land and you can mine an asteroid and also be able to send the materials to earth. To build a space factory you need trillions USD, because you need to send every "brick"( not real brick) with a rocket. Lets not forget that not every rocket can launch successfully ( afterall, rockets are "fuel bombs "and a spark can destroy the rocket and its cargo) This is why you need to be able to mine first so your mining can self finance its development. You start with a little space robot that can harvest few kilos and you grow into a space mining empire with hundreds of spaceships
@@liviusky Why not use the asteroid mined material to build anything you want in orbit?
Fascinating, thank you Simon and Team for the thought-provoking information here.
Ancient man used to break up rock by making fires right against it, then suddenly dowsing it with cold water. In space that wide temperature differential between things in sunlight and shadow can be put to this use. Use mirrors to heat up the rock painted with something black, then just pump water.
On a dwarf planet, this could work.
Wouldn't even need the water if the mining is outside an atmosphere.
The "how" is easy. Train to fly a T2 Exhumer like the hulk, avoid gankers, earn bank...
Or get yourself a krait, add seismic charges, avoid gankers, crack space rocks for sweet diamonds or opals...
It’s the way to establish long term habitats in space. We will need fusion power to really make mining operations feasible.
Fission power is enough for belt mining. Don't get my wrong fusion power would be fantastic but it isn't necessary.
@@jackdbur we have fusion now, why downgrade
@@jackdbur
Why settle for the lesser source when, by the time we’re mining asteroids for the resources instead of just to say we can, fusion technology will be far enough for it to be more economical than fission?
@@keladwynsolkas Who can predict when we will solve Fusion tech we could get to the asteroids within this decade if we really want to .
The English are working on it.
The results of mining asteroids (and not just water) should be used for construction of vehicles and habitats in space and on the surface of the Moon and Mars to start with.
Yep. A Dyson Sphere would be our first priority.
A shift in thinking is needed because the problem is this - "Do we want to succeed as a species and grow, or help a few individuals get richer than they already are." We are being challenged to redefine prosperity, economics, and our fundamental values.
The trick would be NOT to flood the market all at once. Make it a steady trickle rather than a flood. Many of the materials of course WOULD stay in space, fueling the economy up there.
I can picture a tech company mining an asteroid or at least hiring a space company to mine an asteroid to mine rare Earth materials from the asteroid for use in electronics. Many metals conduct better than others, which is useful in electronics.
I have an idea for a megaproject's video! Sprint missile was designed by the US during the Cold War, it accelerated so quickly that the exterior glowed incandescently due to air friction
Thank you for sharing this valuable information. I'm simple person but big dreamer. Future Plans.....hee hee hee hee 😉😀
What I see in this at our current level of technology is much to do with and in relation to the "Rocket Formula" in that at what point does it become financially feasible to accomplish from a cost to profit ratio.
One of my favorite random questions to ask is if people think astroid mining or a one world government is more important for the furthering of human civilization.
There's probably never going to be a one world government, at least not here on Earth. We're too dumb and greedy for that to ever happen, especially in the near future. Considering that greediness (as well as an urge to just go to space) Commercial Asteroid-mining seems like it'll happen relatively soon. Although I admit some naiveness here.
@@Rocksidion Most people don't actually want a one world government telling them how to live, all they really want is a common framework where everyone has access to opportunity. We will see groups moving to space and declaring independence the moment space habitat construction becomes a viable option.
I'm casting my vote for Simon to make a space theme channel.
Good vídeo thank you
Excellent stuff bro
Damn it Simon and Co. Now all of your big brain viewers know our plans to become quadrillionairs. You were supposed to keep it on the dl until you accumulate enough CZcams channels to fund our venture.
Fun fact: The total mass of the Asteroid belt is estimated to be about 4% of the mass of the Moon. That mass is spread in an orbit between Mars and Jupiter. The density of mass in the Asteroid is around a few tens of kilograms per cubic kilometer. The average distance between asteroids in the Asteroid belt is about 1 million kilometers, which means that the average volume of space occupied by each asteroid is enormous. As a result, the density of mass in the Asteroid belt ranges from less than 1 g/cm^3 to more than 5 g/cm^3.
OTOH, we know of 10k+ Apollo group NEAs. The one that hit near Chelyabinsk was denser with metals than Earth's crust 10km deep.
Some meteorites are density 8+, greater than pure iron. King Tut's rust-proof meteoritic steel dagger is 6% cobalt.
We know of 1400 NEAs which are easier to get to/from than Mars, 400 which are easier than the Moon, 40 or so easier than Lunar orbit.
Asteroid mining could supply a heavily automated future society. A society with new science and advanced AI, making such a process possible. Asteroid Mining today is a source of optimism, not raw materials. It shows that there are avenues for us to continue to grow in a limitless way while continuing to improve our stewardship over Earth. It seems unrealistic today, because it is. But, the future isn't found in an unchanging view of today. The future is built by aiming for things we do not have yet, and then working towards those things. Optimism isn't about ignoring the bad things in life - that's a misunderstanding. Optimism is about taking into account those bad things and working towards solutions and in positive directions, such as this.
We can build so much "bigger" if we can bring industry to space. So while mining will return huge amounts of rare earth metals, we can just as equally expand what we are building. You know, massive space stations and such.
To make space stations you need STEEL and ALUMINIUM not ore. To turn ore into steel and aluminium, you need to smelt it. To smelt metal, you are talking 10,000+ tons of plant and machinery MINIMUM for a small scale refinery.
The biggest planned or operational payload capacity is currently the disposable variant of SpaceX's Starship, at 250 tons.
So you are talking something 40 times larger than Starship..... just for BASIC refining capabilities.......
In addition, you have to think about power. Solar aint gonna cut it when you are talking refineries. You are going to need a nuclear reactor. Now rockets need to be able to abort and EXPLODE if there is a malfunction of the rocket during launch for safety reasons ..... imaging exploding a nuclear reactor just after launch......
CORRECTION: Hayabusa was not a NASA mission. It was JAXA - Japan.
Some of the most sought-after metal in the world is pre-nuclear steel. Nickel-iron asteroids would be a handy source of this type of metal.
Slight snag with that. Those asteroids don't have an atmosphere or magnetosphere, so would have spent their very long lives being bombarded with cosmic rays. This could be both a good, or a bad thing. Good thing is it may include useful isotopes that are hard to find or produce down here in the gravity welll, bad thing is refining and seperating unwanted or harmful isotopes adds to the cost. One of the earliest meterorites to be analysed was the Allende, which was found to contain (relatively) high amounts of Cobalt-60, which is one of the reasons why pre-nuclear steel is in demand.
@@brolohalflemming7042 Good point on all those activated materials out there! They would have to tunnel deep into an asteroid just to get to the stuff that was maybe shielded by the upper layers.
@@anydaynow01 Yeh, it's fun stuff to think about. Like asteroids that are effectively lumps of gravel held together by weak gravitational forces.. But what's in the core? Or using tunnels or that material to make radiation shielding for your asteroid miner's habitats. There's also the prospect of new materials. Some meteorites contain 'alien' or primordial material that don't exist or are extremely rare on Earth due to us having an atmosphere, weathering etc. Some of those might prove useful.
Outstanding watch..............
@All - That really depends on how its done.
Those asteroids would just cause whatever commodity it's made of to plummet in value. But it'll be hard to get it down here so it'll still be expensive. Unless you're planning on crashing it. They you could clear cut and mine at the same moment
The Apollo capsules came straight in on interplanetary trajectories without entering orbit or trying to slow down.
An aero-entry barge of asteoidal steel holding coffers of previously rare metals doesn't even need to stay afloat, or even particularly intact on the seafloor in the shallows off an industrial port city.
The stuff is literally raining down on us all the time. It's silly to say that its difficult or impossible or not economical to bring it down.
As for crashing the value of gold etc; for that moment, they'd own more "wealth:" than all the empires in history, combined.
@@JFrazer4303that doesnt make any sense
@@o-wolf which part?
If the US people and government can turn a blind eye to the trillions that went missing when a specific building was demolished, then I doubt they would even blink at wasting a fraction of that on a project that could pioneer the first steps to securing our immortality as a species.
supply and command will adjust the market. Also, artificial scarcity can be used to hold prices until profits are reached. it'll be fine