Posted on 05/25/2017 10:52:57 AM PDT by Red Badger
We can’t have nice things because we have to spend all our monies paying off the natives down here.
Probably not. Still very cost-prohibitive.
A NASA engineer once said, “If we had a pile of gold bricks on the moon, we couldn’t afford to bring them back.”
Not until we find an efficient and cheap way of accelerating mass into and out of orbit.
The cost to mine, refine, and transport a product to market is not zero. The overall costs to mine and transport an asteroid’s materials have to be less than the value of the end product to achieve profit and justify the venture.
Materials in the ground are not counted as a reserves, unless there is a established economical extraction process allowing at minimum a return on the investment (ROI).
This is the situation shale oil faced in past episodes when price bbl. dropped due to OPEC manipulation. Extraction costs were eventually reduced enough to allow shale oil production to continue with OPEC oil in the $(50-60) bbl. range.
“””That is, if you could successfully tow it into orbit ...””””
And, once it falls into the gravitational pull of the earth, we will all be rich.
We’d need to engineer a space elevator and a lot of other tech before that becomes feasible. The question is how we survive until then.
I thought the same thing 5 years ago, and at the time I was working with a NASA research agency and had contact with a lot of space people. Was supposed to be right around the corner, but still nothing, relatively speaking. They were going to build a spaceport near Houston, nothing seems to have come of that. Something’s holding it up. Maybe it was osamabama.
“We could build a Death Star!”
The ‘asteroid’ already is a hollowed out transport megalopolis for an alien species who were created by yet a different, highly intelligent species. The inhabitants of the ‘asteroid’ are miners, and they’re coming to Earth to gradually replace humans. The human species has been infected with the liberalism virus, which drastically slowed down the process of mining Earth. There was a need for a new species immune to liberalism, in order to get the mineral extraction process of Earth back up to speed. The internetz sez so.
“...had contact with space people...”
Lol
We’d need to engineer a space elevator and a lot of other tech before that becomes feasible. The question is how we survive until then.
But we do not need a space elevator to exploit resources from space. It is easy to place resources from orbit nearly anywhere on earth. We already know how to do that.
The biggest problem is having the space resources cost less than extracting them from the ground on earth.
That may take a while.
If you could get enough parachutes attached to lower it gently onto an unused expanse of junkland or desert somewhere...
What happens to the tides? What happens if the thing fall out of orbit..or breaks up and starts raining tonnes of space debris...when all of its matter (dont forget the antimatter and dark matter) is on earth..doesnt that increase gravitational pull on sun and moon? Could the moon fall out of orbit? Could the earth heat up cuz it is 1 or 2 millimeters closer to sun?....why 10,000 quadrillion...why not 10 quintillion or 10,000,000 trillion..or 0.010 sextillion
It’s not the presence of the materials, but the energy to process them into a usable form. That is the justification behind seeking a sufficiently enriched ore that enables a mining operation—the energy investment of all the processes.
If not for copper mining also producing silver as a by-product, silver would be properly valued at $90 per troy ounce, the cost of a dedicated silver mine’s operation.
I want the carbon core of a white dwarf star. It’s a giant diamond.....Can’t have it. My ex-wife already owns it.
Try and polish that one...
It’s not the presence of the materials, but the energy to process them into a usable form. That is the justification behind seeking a sufficiently enriched ore that enables a mining operation—the energy investment of all the processes.
It also includes taxes, and overall cash flow. There is no point in putting hundreds of millions into a mine if your net return on investment is less than what you can get from a certificate of deposit.
Exactly.
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