Space Mining
- Thread starter Scottty
- Start date
While you are technically correct in the issue, in reality...
If we immediately started mining the moon as the same rate we current mine iron ore (2.5 billion tons/year), we would completely remove all mass of the moon in... 29 trillion years. Long after we had to deal with that whole 'sun going red giant' on us problem.
Not really. Orders of magnitude are at play here such that the piddly amount we humans are moving around is lost in rounding errors.
Gravity is caused by mass. Every body has gravity, it just takes an enormous amount of mass for gravity to be significant.
That said, you're not wrong in your idea. One of the advantages of space mining is the gravity of asteroids is so low it makes it a lot easier to get material where you want them in comparison to launching from earth. Getting off earth is hard - getting places after that is much easier, if you didn't have to bring everything with you from earth (see prior point).
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Meteors and asteroid dust increase the Earth's mass by between 37,000 and 78,000 tons a year, so the actual figure's even worse since the moon's also going to be slowly increasing it's mass across those megacenturies.
One issue with asteroid mining currently is, ironically, there are too many resources in an asteroid for it to be worthwhile. No really.
Suppose you brought back an asteroid to orbit and it had half a million tons of platinum in it. Platinum is actually way down in the market right now but even so at current spot prices that's (rounded off) $24,000,000 a ton, or $120,000,000,000,000 for your platinum. Joy! Right? Right? No, you've glutted the market so hard platinum's now trading at a few cents a ton and your platinum's not even worth getting down from orbit anymore. And of course the same is true for all the other elements in the asteroid, the market's not prepared to absorb eight hundred million tons of cobalt or more gold than has been mined in all of human history. All you do is make the metal worthless. Sure, for society as a whole it would be a massive benefit, industry would get a kick in the pants beyond belief as things previous too expensive to work with would suddenly become cheap.
Unfortunately that does no good for the poor sap who spent fourteen billion dollars grabbing the asteroid and now has to sell his platinum for less per ton than the price of a hamburger. It leads to a weird reverse prisoner's dilemma where the first person to actually go get the resources for mankind is going to be hosed even though it's better for everybody that way.
One issue with asteroid mining currently is, ironically, there are too many resources in an asteroid for it to be worthwhile. No really.
Suppose you brought back an asteroid to orbit and it had half a million tons of platinum in it. Platinum is actually way down in the market right now but even so at current spot prices that's (rounded off) $24,000,000 a ton, or $120,000,000,000,000 for your platinum. Joy! Right? Right? No, you've glutted the market so hard platinum's now trading at a few cents a ton and your platinum's not even worth getting down from orbit anymore. And of course the same is true for all the other elements in the asteroid, the market's not prepared to absorb eight hundred million tons of cobalt or more gold than has been mined in all of human history. All you do is make the metal worthless. Sure, for society as a whole it would be a massive benefit, industry would get a kick in the pants beyond belief as things previous too expensive to work with would suddenly become cheap.
Unfortunately that does no good for the poor sap who spent fourteen billion dollars grabbing the asteroid and now has to sell his platinum for less per ton than the price of a hamburger. It leads to a weird reverse prisoner's dilemma where the first person to actually go get the resources for mankind is going to be hosed even though it's better for everybody that way.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
...No.
Getting an asteroid into Earth orbit does not suddenly extract, refine, and ship all the metal on it down to Earth. That takes time, and that has a cost. All the Gold, Platinum, Cobalt, & etc sitting in the Earth's crust right now isn't what determines a material's market cost, the amount effectively delivered to the market does.
Yes, showing up with enormous masses of metal will change market values, but if the investors spent 14 billion dollars getting that asteroid into orbit? You can damned well bet that 14 billion is going to be added to the price being paid by everyone who buys metals from them. Buys from them at limited rates, because it takes time to cut into the asteroid, extract, refine, and ship.
A few decades after such a mega-asteroid arrived, prices for what can easily be extracted from it would probably have steadily declined into rates that drove more expensive domestic producers out of business, but it wouldn't instantly crash overnight.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Okay you do realize you said no, then your last, italicized line in that quote completely agrees with me? Showing up with an asteroid is delivering an ungodly amount of material to the market.
The problem with your reasoning here is that commodity prices aren't just determined by how much is available today. Speculators look to how much will be available in the future as well and seeing the asteroid will cause them to predict lower prices because they can see an obvious half a million tons of platinum is now in relatively easy reach.
The investors who moved the asteroid into orbit can't avoid it, can't parcel out their metal an eyedropperful at a time because they need to recoup their 14 billion dollar investment and if they don't pour metals into the market, they go broke, declare bankruptcy, and some other investor buys the asteroid for pennies on the dollar and then gluts the market anyway. You don't grab a five-kilometer-wide asteroid with half a million tons of platinum in it so you can sell two tons of platinum a year for the next quarter million years.
Further the investors cannot simply "add on" the 14 billion to prices. As you yourself pointed out above, price is determined by the market. The investors can refuse to sell without the added price tag but if they do, again, down 14 billion dollars that isn't paying anything on their investment because the market doesn't care, you only get to charge more if somebody's willing to pay more, and when you show up with a massive amount of metal, nobody's willing to pay more, they all demand to pay less.
Floridaman
Well-known member
The problem is getting the asteroid into orbit is the first step, you have to move the material earth side, preferably without causing another Tunguska. for the foreseeable future, until we can figure out how to solve that problem any space resources will be confined to space, this means the main uses for such resources would be building infrastructure in space itself. So even hauling a gold asteroid wouldn’t have an effect until we can solve the transport issue.
CarlManvers2019
Writers Blocked Douchebag
In-Regards to Space Mining, how much of it will be automated? Robots over people
And if it’s got people, will there be mini-arcologies or they’ll have to live on shipments
And if it’s got people, will there be mini-arcologies or they’ll have to live on shipments
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
That's completely irrelevant to my point though. I'm pointing out that actually harvesting an asteroid will glut the market with metals and said glut is unavoidable, quibbling about how much effort it takes or which stage the mining is at in a given scenario is pointless.
Doomsought
Well-known member
Not as much as speculators like to believe. Maintenance is a thing, especially in something physically active. We can barely automate the diagnostic process, and even then actually fixing things is far more unpredictable. If a structural bar you think was over-engineered breaks because it was unexpectedly blasted with sand every time grinder #4 ran, you better have Joe the Technician on board, because there is no robot that is going to fix it.
You can only automate things you can predict, and even if you can predict heuristics are a bitch to get right.
Floridaman
Well-known member
Simply harvesting it is meaningless if you don’t actually have a way to get it to the market. Effectively you are saying, what if they dig up tons of oil in a place that we can’t actually go to easily, the cost of transport has an effect, commodities are priced in the short term, not the long.
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Terthna
Professional Lurker
This is not a new problem. If oil companies were producing at full speed, barrels of the stuff would go for pennies; that's why they band together to restrict supply. Same thing goes for the diamond industry; so I suspect there would be an initial race for control of the new resources, quickly followed by mere trickles being shipped back to Earth at a time, to be sold at a premium.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
No, you're ignoring the actual point to quibble about mechanics again. What I'm effectively saying is that if you bring half a million tons of platinum to market you kill the price of platinum and lose money, and if you go harvest an asteroid at great expense but don't bring the metals to the market, you also lose money. Exactly how you get it to market is completely beside the point of my question.
Duke Nukem
Hail to the king baby
There's a lot use to platinum other than profit.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Actually there isn't, rather the reverse; if platinum had no uses there would be no value to it and thus no profit. Platinum is valuable because it is rare and people want to use it for things, thus they are willing to pay for it, and pay well because it is rare. If people did not want to use it for things they would not be willing to pay for it and it would be worth less. Their paying is what generates the profit. If it quit being rare people would still use it but not be willing to pay as much, basic supply and demand. A theoretical massive increase in demand would put the price back up, but I can't foresee any demand that could conceivably absorb an asteroid's insane amount of resources, hence my original point that asteroid mining is ironically not very profitable because asteroids actually contain too many resources to be worthwhile due to inevitably glutting the market.
Nor am I only considering platinum in my conclusions, all commodities in the market will have the same behavior. I merely used platinum because it was a good example.
Floridaman
Well-known member
It would have to be mere trickles anyway, unless of course you want to ram an asteroid into the planet.
That's actually really easy.
You just put the commodity into an ablative shell of whatever waste material you get from the asteroid and then drop it into a pool or other landing zone. Basically, deliver dirt side via orbital bombardment.
Targeting a relatively small area really isn't that hard (its essentially simply physics), putting on the right about of ablative dross so that when it hits the water it is practically all burned off, and then pulling it out of the water it dropped in is easy.
If you want a less kinetic delivery method, you can create cheap, crude, parachutes out of that same dross but I don't really see the point for delivering platinum or the like to Earth.
There probably won't be people in space-suits swinging picks or digging with shoves, if that's what you're asking. No, the actual mining will be done by machines, with humans there to direct things, troubleshoot, etc.
And that mostly because speed-of-light delay will be a problem for remote-controlling it all from Earth.
As to the second question - recycling and food-production in a space habitat will obviously make more sense than bringing groceries up out of Earth's gravity well all the time.
There are some problems with sustainable self-contained biospheres though - but probably nothing insurmountable.
Duke Nukem
Hail to the king baby
Food wouldn't be too much of a problem vegetables could be grown and meat could be produced from animal cells.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Well let's see. We have plenty of probes that fly through space on their own. Space travel is easily defined by complex math problems, exactly the kind of job robots do best. Spaceships will be flown by robots, I'd say. Obviously physical labor too, robotic drills or what have you will extract the metals with probably a human telling the space!tractor where to go and drill next.
As Doomsought pointed out, robots need maintenance. That takes problem solving, and especially when you're ten AUs away* from home and have to figure out how to fix this without the right parts, creative thinking; exactly the kind of job robots suck at. So human techs.
The first human techs, especially, will be the cream of humanity. Top marks in both physical and mental scores, in the prime of life, with an outlook on life that works well with living in space. Qualified applicants will be incredibly rare, and irreplaceable. Consequently these workers need to be cared for to avoid burnout, so services. They need food, entertainment, socialization, and medical care. A robot can microwave a TV dinner and throw it on a tray but a great chef is an artist, another job robots can't pull off, and a human medic or entertainer can provide social interaction by talking sports, news, or politics, another thing robots can't. So probably human services supporting the human miners, with, again, robotic aids to them.
*This assumes you don't move an asteroid into orbit instead, although even then you want some top people working on your expensive space!tractor. Ultimately it's impossible to guess if it will be cheaper to move the whole asteroid to earth and then mine it, or mine it and then move only the refined metals back. I lean towards the orbital option but I could easily be wrong.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
You are fundamentally failing to understand the steps of the process here.
For the Platinum futures market, yes the arrival of an asteroid like that would probably crash the hell out of it. Futures markets are literally a mixture of confidence game and gambling anyways, which is why investing in them is called 'speculating.'
What Platinum costs right now is dependent on how much is actually on the market, with some limited influence based on what people think iis going to be on the mark.
The people who control that asteroid, control how much they bring to market. Unless a massive ground-based Platinum strike is found, or some amazing new technology for refining it happens, the market without their interference is going to be largely stable. A new highly-profitable use for Platinum could also drive the price on Earth up, so that's a factor as well.
So now you have the continuing trade in Platinum on Earth, and an Asteroid with tons of Platinum sitting in orbit. Until that Platinum starts to actually come down from orbit, the supply doesn't change. There will be some limited influence on the market because of the expectation of an increase in supply, but until they start landing the product, the actual supply does not change.
They could park that asteroid in orbit for a year at basically no cost, and it wouldn't make a damned difference to the actual supply of Platinum available.
Once they do decide to start selling their Platinum, who decides how much gets landed at once? They do. Are they going to deliberately sell so much of it so fast that they can't make back their investment.
Of course they aren't. That would be idiotic, and if they were idiots, they wouldn't have managed to get the thing and drag it into orbit in the first place.
They will be able to undercut market prices though, so they can sell at a moderately lower price, that still nets them a huge amount of money. The current list price I found for Platinum is ~761.80 US$ per ounce. Converting to kilos, that gets us 26,815 US $ per kilo, or 26.8 million US$ per ton. A quick search gets us a little over 300 tons of Platinum production per year on Earth, though the number is old so that might have changed somewhat substantially.
If they sell too much Platinum at once, that will collapse the market value. If they sell, say 30 tons, upping the supply by 10%, at a reduced cost getting them 20,000 US$ per kilo instead so they can guarantee sales, that gets them 600 million US $ a year.
If your investment cost to get the asteroid in is 14 billion dollars, probably not worth it, not unless Platinum is a secondary money-maker from what you're harvesting out of that rock. If the investment cost is more like 1.4 billion?
Selling 30 tons of Platinum per year is probably worth that.
Now, to stress something, assuming that the company that goes out to fetch this rock is American, and thus has the US defense apparatus protecting their investment in space, nobody can force them to sell it any faster than they want to. It's their rock. They found it, claimed it, paid the costs, and unless there's a national emergency that suddenly needs a butt-load of Platinum, nobody's taking it from them. Even if there is such an emergency, they'd probably just be compelled to supply the fed, not the world markets as a whole.
The company owning that rock chooses how fast to bring its resources down. And it is entirely in their power to choose to do so at a rate that doesn't ruin them financially.