Worth $10,000 quadrillion almost as much as Jeff Bezos 
I saw that story. It seems to me there’s something pretty off about their economics here–if someone finds an asteroid that contains $10,000,000,000,000,000,000 worth of unobtanium, surely the price of unobtanium would immediately plummet, and your giant asteroid made of unobtanium would no longer be worth anything close to $10,000,000,000,000,000,000. Basic Econ 101: Supply and demand.
Why, if we found that much unobtanium, we’d probably start using unobtanium to make darn near everything–cars, ships, buildings, all sorts of things…Oh, wait, the darned asteroid is made of iron, we already use iron/iron-containing alloys for a million-and-one things, and the typical human-made landscape is just absolutely littered with iron and steel.
I call dibs on it.
Exactly. It would crater the market.
:flees:
now iron ore is $123 per ton. Then it has to be processed so the end cost is higher than that .
It’s not yours until you lick it.
It’s a very misleading article, like many of CNN’s distorted or sensationalized articles on science. It implies that this is an asteroid of exceptionally precious material (it isn’t) that was just recently discovered (it wasn’t). The asteroid 16 Psyche was in fact discovered way back in 1852, because it’s exceptionally large and bright. There’s nothing that warrants any news about it except that there’s an exploratory mission that NASA will launch in 2022 that will arrive there in 2026. It’s scientifically interesting because it’s thought to be the exposed iron-nickel core of a protoplanet.
Yeah. But what’s the street value after the “importers” cut it? $10^23?
The US should slam tariffs on it. That will teach them (ominous voice…) to respect US
I’m just waiting for someone to sell it to somebody, like they used to do with the Brooklyn Bridge.
Perhaps in fifty or a hundred years from now, when people are establishing off-world colonies (or possibly building interstellar manned spacecraft), we’ll want to locate and capture this asteroid as a source of raw materials.
No reason to make any special effort for this one. Another stupid aspect of this story is that most asteroids are enriched in trace elements relative to the Earth’s crust. There is literally nothing about Psyche that makes it any more valuable per unit volume than hundreds of thousands of other asteroids.
A mesosiderite? Well at least we now know how much Sudbury is worth.
??? (Plus two more to reach five characters–??)
I thought the appeal of this asteroid wasn’t the trace elements but the massive amount of iron.
Iron asteroids are a dime a dozen.
It is richer in metals than most asteroids. This likely came from the core of a proto planet. Other asteroids mostly came from either coalescing from dust as they are, or are parts of the upper layers of proto planets that got broken up.
There are thousands or tens of thousands of asteroids that are likely the same composition more or less, but they are going to be sized from refrigerators to small buildings. This one is hundreds of miles.
If we do develop any sort of space mining operations, this will be an excellent location to start gather materials.
Very little, if any, would make its way back to Earth. What needs we have here can be easily filled by those smaller asteroids you speak of.
As far as the economy of it goes, sure, it’s not worth what CNN says, as there isn’t that much money in the world, not be orders of magnitude. However, it would be worth quite a bit, as there are useful materials, and they don’t have to be lifted from the Earth.
OTOH, bringing back some of the platinum from it or from other rocks would damage the price of platinum, but that’s not going to hurt the economy, just people that invest in platinum. What it could do is create all new industries and techniques, as platinum is actually an excellent catalyst for a number of chemical reactions and is also a great conductor.
About half the cost of your catalytic converter is in the few grams of platinum in it. If cost were not a factor, we could probably make more efficient and smaller ones, if we didn’t mind using a couple ounces of it.
We could save quite a bit of electricity if long distance transmission lines were made of platinum. Silly to even think about, when there isn’t enough mined in the history of mankind to go for more than a few dozen miles. Get a good supply though, and it’s not unthinkable.
Iridium is another one. It has pretty much has no industrial or commercial applications, simply because there is not enough of it to do anything. If someone finds a great use for it, it won’t matter, because they can’t get enough to actually use it for that application. Drop down a few thousand tons of it, and that may very well change.
Pretty much everything else is better kept in space, though, as its primary value is its location.
Here are more than 30 m-type asteroids that have a Wikipedia page.
That barely addresses, much less contradicts what I said.
This article is as misleading as saying that if the Moon were to be ground down into industrial gravel, that gravel would be worth a quadrillion on Earth. By that logic, every celestial body is worth a huge sum of mineral materials.
With the headline, I was expecting the asteroid to be made of platinum, gold, or something.