Why don’t you try clicking on a few of them and look at the sizes? Hint: they are bigger than refrigerators or small buildings.
Ah, so you were not responding to what I said when I said that there were tens of thousands of rocks of that composition that were of small size and you were just making a non-sequitur.
I was responding to your point of psyche not being any more valuable than “hundreds of thousands” of rocks of similar composition. What were you responding to?
To your incorrect assertion that all other metallic asteroids are tiny compared to Psyche (refrigerators to small buildings–there are multiples more than 100 km across, more more than 10 km across) and your seeming to imply that Psyche is unique in being a protoplanet core when we have on Earth samples of up to 120 different cores.
Canada has some interesting tax rules on foreign-derived income 
Despite its size, the expense would be huge. Like offshore drilling or fracking, but several orders of magnitude more expensive. This finding will launch a thousand near-future sci-fi novels.
Ah, that was not an assertion that I made. Not even close.
I was responding to your assertion that there are hundreds of thousands of other asteroids that are as valuable. Out of those hundreds of thousands that you referred to, most of them are not metallic, and most of them are quite tiny in comparison.
You are pretty much only arguing against yourself here. I’m done.
Platinum is useful for a lot of things, but that’s not one of them.
It’s a much, much worse electrical conductor than Aluminum, which is why Aluminum is used for transmission lines (also it’s conductivity to weight to cost ratios).
Silver is the best conductor among the elements, followed closely by copper. You’d need a heck of a lot of platinum (or anything else) to displace copper as the practical conductor of choice. And any asteroid that has that much platinum probably also has even more copper.
Oh, and before anyone mentions satellite phones as a use for iridium, the metal itself isn’t involved at all in the iridium satellites. They’re just named that because there were originally 77 satellites, and someone thought that that made the system resemble an atom with 77 electrons.
And I clearly said “per unit volume.” Since it seems that I need to break that down into smaller words for you, that means that is a big lump of the stuff, but there are lots and lots and lots and lots of lumps of the same stuff.
I’m wondering that–if asteroid mining ever happened–it might be easier to get iron/nickel from S-type asteroids. There is a smaller percentage of metal, but crushing rock for the blobs of pure metal might be easier than cutting it from M-type asteroids. Here are a few old photos of meteorites in my collection. The shiny/silvery areas are elemental nickel-iron. (Including a few armored chondrules.)
The Manhattan Project famously borrowed 14,000 tons of silver from the U.S. Treasury to make coils for the electromagnets in the calutrons used to separate uranium isotopes. (That way copper could be reserved for other vital wartime uses.)
If we towed it back to earth and parked it conveniently, say, at the bottom of an ocean, how much would it raise the sea level?
Pretty high. It would convert the oceans to superheated steam.
Bravo Darren!
If we magically lowered it gently into the water to avoid that unfortunate side effect the answer is roughly 8 meters.
The volume of 16 Psyche is roughly 4M km3. For comparison the volume of the Greenland ice sheet is very roughly 3M km3. Which if melted would raise sea levels ~6m. As sea levels go up, the lateral boundaries of the ocean spread out. So the ~33% greater volume of Psyche vs the ice sheet should produce something less than a 33% larger increase in sea level. I WAG 25%. So 7-8m.
Enough to be enormously disruptive to modern society.
nitpick: In light of that current discussion in GQ about order of ops, we gotta clearly distinguish between (km)3 vs. k(m3).
Good to know. I knew it was used in high end electronics, assumed that meant is was a good conductor. I guess it’s more its mechanical and chemical properties that are useful for electrodes.
You still have not responded to what I have actually said, just to what you want me to have said so that you would have something to argue against. I really don’t get it, and this is stupid. There is no straw in space.
It may find use in superconductors.
I thought you were done? What you actually said was a Cliff Claven scale pile of bloviating misinformation.
Zing!! 
And the big M is itself an implied multiplier. (Mkm)3 are very large units indeed. 4 of those is 4E27 cubic meters is a cube roughly 1.7 lightyears on a side or a sphere roughly 1 LY in radius = 2 LY in diameter.
Now that would make a splash in Earth’s puddles.
You are assuming that it would pancake to the ocean floor? Because if it remained intact, only a small percentage would be submerged n the ocean, with the large majority towering out all the way to LEO. Of course, even if it were to be magically lowered, it would still cause the oceanic plate it was sitting on to sink–and possibly punch right through it and sink to the core.
Yeah, I totally skipped that part. Partly oversight, partly for brevity.
Clearly given geologic time it would sink into the Earth’s core. After all … that’s what the original core did. It’d also bring an awful lot of cooling with it. Probably enough, a la Venus, to stop Earth’s core dynamo & destroy our magnetic field, followed many millennia later by the destruction of our atmosphere.
Actually I wonder if it wouldn’t be much faster than that, like mere minutes to at least make a big dent in the crust. Obviously the Earth is rotating. If we gave Psyche the appropriate angular momentum and just set it gently in the rough center of the floor of the Pacific at, say, 0N180W then what happens next?
For round numbers the Earth out-masses Psyche by 200,000x. So that much mass sitting more or less as a point more or less on the surface will induce some wobble, but not something instantly catastrophic like if we set the Moon or Mars in the same spot.
But it will cause instant massive structural overload of the crust at the small contact patch at the base of Psyche. I’m going to (total mongo-WAG) that it sinks maybe 20-30% of its diameter into the mantle in a matter of hours at most. The resulting insanely powerful earthquakes will destroy everything on the surface and whip the oceans into a froth.
In all this seems like a bad idea. Here are two other competingly bad ideas:
https://what-if.xkcd.com/13/
https://what-if.xkcd.com/35/
I was trying to relate the size of this asteroid to an island, based on the Wikipedia estimate of its volume of 5.8×10^6 cubic kilometers. So assuming the same volume but 12,000 feet high (average ocean depth, according to a Google search), you’d end up with an island roughly the size of Oahu. (Assuming my math is correct.)