Mining Asteroids

[gingerjedi]

BBC News - Mining asteroids for gold and platinum

This is daft, whatever you mine and bring back to earth will devalue what we already have seeing as a precious metal is valuable because of it's scarcity.

Surely China will go tits up sooner or later?

[MarillionFan]

BBC News - Mining asteroids for gold and platinum

This is daft, whatever you mine and bring back to earth will devalue what we already have seeing as a precious metal is valuable because of it's scarcity.

Surely China will go tits up sooner or later?

Unless they find something rarer than Gold!

Surely a Wim braincell must be worth something?

[Diver]

Unless they find something rarer than Gold!

Surely a Wim braincell must be worth something?

Nowt

[amcdonald]

It's a bit ironic Cameron is involved after that tulip environmental film Avatar.

[AtW]

It's a bit ironic Cameron is involved after that tulip environmental film Avatar.

Big tax breaks on money losing movies, innit?

[NickFitz]

It'll be several decades before they get to the stage of doing any reasonable amount of mining. They're starting by creating the interplanetary infrastructure necessary to support that, which also leads to cool stuff like moonbases and space stations

Anyway, they aren't thinking in terms of finding a load of gold nuggets and flogging them like some Californian prospector in 1849. From the point of view of making stuff, turning currently-rare materials like gold or platinum into commodity goods makes sense, because you can then cheaply manufacture stuff (e.g. electronics) in huge quantities at a reasonable cost that can currently only be manufactured in relatively limited quantities due to supply and cost constraints, together with the constraints imposed on the size of the market due to having to pass those high materials costs down the line to the end consumer.

In other words: if we're to get to the point where phones as powerful as all the current computational capacity of the world can be given away free with corn flakes, we'll need to get the materials cheaply from somewhere, and there ain't enough of them here to ever make them that cheap. This is why Bill Gates has invested: it's the only way there'll ever be computers people can afford that are able to function as basic word processors despite the burden of all the unused features in Office 2100.

[EternalOptimist]

It's not rarity that matters.
Whats rarer than a space turd ?
there are millions of gold/diamond rings around, but how many people would buy a genuine Neil Armstrong space -turd ring ?

[AtW]

They're starting by creating the interplanetary infrastructure necessary to support that

WHS



This will make the proles vote Labour!

[NotAllThere]

Scarcity makes useful/pretty things expensive - but the value of something comes from what you can do with it. If space mining can generate a decent roi, then there will be more of it, and we'll be able to get off this planet before a dinosaur killer asteroid makes global warming irrelevant for a few tens of thousands of years..

[Old Greg]

Do I get a ining laser?