Posted on 04/15/2019 9:56:16 PM PDT by Jonty30
If I broke up an asteroid, for its precious metals, is asteroid rock good for anything, compared with earth rock?
Would it make great cement or anything like that?
Some folks smoke them.
Well, as it happens, I have bags of asteroid rocks, they are very light weight and remarkably similar to raked up leaves. I could let these go for a very fair price, say $500 a bag?
I’m talking about the asteroid rock, not the water in the rock. Presumably, once we got every thing we can from the asteroid, we would have a lot of asteroid rock left over.
I’m just wondering if there is any use for it?
Will you take a rubber cheque?
There are lots of uses for asteroid material, but it depends on how much effort you want to spend on it. There are metals in the asteroids which can be mined. Other asteroids have more carbon compounds. Some asteroid rock is about 40% Oxygen by weight, and you can get the Oxygen if you heat it up enough. The least costly thing to do is once you mine the asteroid for metal and have built a space station or something, just pile the left over rock onto the space station to use as a meteorite/radiation shield. This is actually a very good use, because most of what we have sent to space so far does not protect humans enough from radiation.
Well, one could use it to pummel their enemies on Earth...
(I know, I know... I’m just in a bad mood because yesterday was “Tax Day”. I’d like to drop an asteroid on the writers of the tax code!!!)
It does little good to mine something if the cost of getting it to where it will be used is high. One reason we are able to make mining pay is we have extensive means to move meaningful quantities at low cost; barges, trains and trucks. The cost of getting miners, equipment and supplies to an asteroid would pale before the cost of getting the mined material someplace where it would be useful. Unless of course you are living on an asteroid. If so, for what purpose? Living someplace profitably is all about location, location, location.
“Scientists answer first that the asteroids are composed of iron, nickel, platinum, and other metals, as well as sulfur, aluminum oxide, carbon compounds, and other minerals. …”
It is unlikely that a technology that could extract the elements above will have more need for them than can be met right here on Earth.
The technology to do that would make you wealthy....
Portland Cement (the stuff used to make concrete) is made from limestone. Limestone is sedimentary rock formed from the shells of sea creatures. I doubt there is much limestone in asteroids.
I’ve got stuff like that growing on my cheese in the refrigerator.....
I recall a trip to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI)...there was an exhibit of meterioites and along with it was a wrench fashioned from a meterioite.
It was a beautiful metal, somewhat blueish with silver veins in it. It had a wrench on each end...what made it even odder was that there was NO offset — it was just straight.
Must have been made from a rather large meterioite. As I recall it came from somewhere in South America.
Agree - my point was that if he had the technology to crush and get the raw materials from asteroids, he would be rich...no matter what the ore contents are.
Depends on what it is. Some meteors are just light elements and molecules, water, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, … Some are metallic or rocky. Others can be strange combinations.
Consider that all, or nearly all, of the metals on the earth’s surface like iron, gold, silver, platinum, aluminum, etc., were deposited by meteors.
“People pay big money for asteroids.”
Meteors maybe, but not asteroids. Asteroids are the ones still up orbiting in the sky.
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