Posted on 06/25/2013 7:02:34 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
An asteroid less than a mile in diameter could hold more than $20 trillion in industrial and precious metals
Resources on Earth are limited. Our planet was born with a fixed amount of water, hydrocarbons, nitrogen, and industrial and precious metals.
And we're collecting, processing, and eventually throwing out those resources at an alarming rate: A United Nations report on resource depletion says that between 1980 and 2008 natural resources per capita declined by 20 percent in the United States, 33 percent in South Africa, 25 percent in Brazil, and 17 percent in China.
For now, only protection and better resource management can safeguard the planet. As we burn through Earth's resources, a wealth of physical resources like metals, water, and hydrocarbons are floating around in asteroids, moons, and other planets, ready to be harvested. If human civilization is to continue to grow and expand over the centuries and millennia to come, hunger for resources is likely to drive us to explore and mine what's way, way out there.
And as wild as it may sound, asteroids in particular could be highly profitable. In 1997 scientists speculated that a relatively small metallic asteroid with a diameter of 0.99 miles contains more than $20 trillion worth of industrial and precious metals.....
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Yeah, but just imagine how it would boost muslims' self-esteem if NASA were on board!
all we need is Delos D. Harriman
I'm sure that if someone tossed that idea out there, liberals would actually believe it!
I miss the days when conservatives had the stones to do more than bitch.
Basically true but it depends on the transportation and extraction costs. Some metals like silver, platinum, palladium, etc. are vital for industrial use. Primary silver mines are increasingly depleted and some uses for silver don't allow recycling. No substitute yet exists for some purposes.
Too bad. About 40 tons of stuff falls on earth from space every day. Most of it is dust. That's before WE start importing. ;)
/johnny
Founding Fathers had the stones. The Confederates had the stones. After that, central government was once again king of America. That’s about all I can say.
A United Nations report on resource depletion says that between 1980 and 2008 natural resources per capita declined by 20 percent in the United States, 33 percent in South Africa, 25 percent in Brazil, and 17 percent in China.
PER CAPITA... where South Africa's population went form 29m to 50m (an increase of 73%), the US went from 227m to 313m (37%), Brazil went from 119m to 193m (62%) and China went from 981m to 1.3b (33%)... thus the resources in EVERY case have actually INCREASED since 1980.
everybody familiar with economic history knows about the great tulip speculative bubble of the 1600’s in holland. people bid up the price of tulips to astronomical values. and then prices crashed.
What’s not so well known is the answer to the question...where did all the money to make this speculative boom come from...because...as far as we know this was the first known financial bubble of the modern age—or any age.
The answer to that question is in the spanish silver mines of the new world. There were a couple big ones in Peru and Mexico. Pirates like sir francis drake got only a small percentage of the vast troves of the metal that were shipped to europe from the new world.
Later in this century something similiar will happen with asteroid mining.
The cost and difficulty of space greatly exceeds the cost and difficulty of crossing the Atlantic.
The basic problem is that you never ACTUALLY run out of stuff on Earth - you just start getting ore concentrations that are unprofitable to mine, but that you could get whatever metal you want out of if you wanted to (or out of seawater.)
It’s just always going to be cheaper, if the supply of something gets short, to just go after low-concentration ores on Earth (plus recycling) rather than asteroids.
Asteroid mining is a science fiction writer’s fantasy. It would cost trillion$ to get it using technology we do not have. Hexk, we barely made it to the moon.
...........
True with today’s technology.
But a lot can happen in 30 years. When Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark west in +-1806 ... the railroad wasn’t even science fiction. It was simply inconceivable.
Given the rate of technological change today—its likely there’ll be at least a couple things that will be commonplace in 30 years that are beyond science fiction today.
Just in the last 5 years the fracking revolution has added 50-100 trillion dollars worth of oil/gas reserves to the USA alone.
obama immediately said they could do it, but that he’d tax them out of this world.
All that you say is true with today’s technology. But who knows what the state of the art — in space as well as on earth— will be in 30 years.
As I mentioned before, in just the last five years the fracking revolution has added another 50-100 trillion dollars worth of oil/gas reserves to the USA alone.
And we’ll all have flying cars, too. Just like the ones they promised us 50 years ago. The advances in technology have been mainly in electronics, but the laws of physics are tough to overcome.
It is not a defeatist attitude, it is realism.
Apparently the author forgot about conservation of matter. For most materials the problem isn't whether or not we have them on the earth, it is whether the material is concentrated enough in one location to be worth mining. Someday our trash dumps may well be worth mining. Probably long before grabbing an asteroid is economical.
“a relatively small metallic asteroid with a diameter of 0.99 miles”
I’m horizontal tapping on an iPad or I’d do some calculations on the amount of energy it would take to drop that down to the Earth at a reasonable descent rate. You drop that thing at full speed and i bet it would make the Hiroshima bomb look like a picnic.
How much mass is blasted away by the solar wind?
Maybe crash it onto the moon, mine it and slingshot the finished material to Earth?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.