I was thinking the same thing.
Maybe a question for these guys?
I hate to be a nit-picker but does anyone have any idea what 100 million tons of new acquired platinum reserves would do to the PRICE of platinum? Anyone, anyone? Would the combined value of the asteroid still be $5.4 million? Bueller?
Where’s the beef?
I was thinking the same thing. Platinum is valuable because it is rare. introduce a couple thousand tons and the price goes down, Introduce 100 million tons and it will be 10 cents a pound.
They’d be making dust pans out of it....
Because SPACE platinum!
You know that would work somewhere, like QVC overnight infomercials--they'll get Mike Rowe back to plug it...
Heh.
You could end up selling gravel at a higher price than platinum.
People smart enough to figure out a way to get the platinum down to earth and savvy enough to raise the capital to do so, are going to understand the importance of controlling the market. Enough will be released to stimulate new uses for the metal and perpetuate its demand, but not so much as to flood the market. Think De Beers, and count on it.
Outstanding post, ElkGroveDan!
There IS intelligent life on planet earth, after all. Just not in the media.
No doubt the price would go down, but Platinum has real industrial value and a lot of technologies are limited in application because of the cost of Platinum. Remember that Aluminium was once a precious metal until we figured out how to efficiently extract it and now it a common cheap and disposable thing in our lives, Imagine the economic growth if Platinum could realize a similar cost reduction.
If it were to be possible to capture this asteroid in Earth orbit and then redirect it to impact The Mall in Washington D.C., it's value would be worth a lot more than $5.4 million.
What conversion rate are you using? I wouldn't ask if you had wrote $5.4 Trillion.