Technology

I'm so intrigued by the prospect of mining asteroids! The amounts of metals and other resources, including rarer things like platinum family metals is incredible. There are some serious challenges that would need to be overcome, but the first country or company which pulls it off would open the doors to a future where we don't need to rip up earth to obtain all the rare stuff we need for high tech industry. And with huge amounts of asteroids being in the belts in our solar system, a practically inexhaustible supply too.

Launch costs are coming way down. Once we get enough people into space to get industry going this will be great. Give adventureous people something to do and not destroy our planet. Asteriods are airless lumps of rock and metal just hanging around.

ROCK AND STONE

I sure hope we find a way to do this and spread the increase in wealth and prosperity mostly equally amongst all people.

I would hate it if one guy got super powerful and filthy rich off this and then monopolized the asteroid mining industry.

If the movie Armageddon taught us anything it’s that it’ll be super easy to train miners for space.

Can we just get on with engineering a space elevator already? We're going to want one if we're serious about exploiting resources off planet.

My guess is that we won't be doing any digging on asteroids at first. We will send a Spaceship (with 100tn of cargo capacity) and grab a whole small asteroid. Then the spaceship with the small asteroid Inside the cargo bay will return to earth. It sounds science fiction but don't forget we have already collected material from asteroids twice (the Japanese returned with 5gr and tre US 250gr).

You don't even have to go very far, there are hundreds of small asteroids between the moon and earth. I think we will be able to collect a whole small asteroid in 10 years max.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

For instance, a study by Ian Lange of the Colorado School of Mines considers the potential—and challenges—for a fledgling industry that might reach a significant scale in the next several decades, driven by the demand for critical metals used in electronics, solar and wind power, and electric car components, particularly batteries.

While other companies are exploring the controversial idea of scooping cobalt, nickel, and platinum from the seafloor, some asteroids could harbor the same minerals in abundance—and have no wildlife that could be harmed during their extraction.

Lange’s study, coauthored with a researcher at the International Monetary Fund, models the growth of space mining relative to Earth mining, depending on trends in the clean energy transition, mineral prices, space launch prices, and how much capital investment and R&D grow.

By their assessment, metallic asteroids contain more than a thousand times as much nickel as the Earth’s crust, in terms of grams per metric ton.

Electric vehicles and their batteries need about six times the minerals conventional cars do, and they require both nickel and cobalt in significant quantities.

The Democratic Republic of Congo accounts for 70 percent of cobalt production, for example, while nickel primarily comes from Indonesia and the Philippines, and Russia and South Africa have most of the global supply of platinum-group metals.

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Fantastic ! Well, in the next millenia we could see some real progress in this field (if we are lucky). So, lets look forward to the next million years with joy !