Okay, the NaNoWriMo site was down all morning, and besides, I think I’d get a better answer here.
I’m typing along on my NaNo space opera, when a question arises. How frequently (if ever) would one find what we would consider precious stones while mining, say, an asteroid field? Would you expect ever to find things like diamonds and emeralds and rubies and such, or would you have to get those sorts of things from a planet?
It being NaNo, and a space opera to boot, I realize consitency and accuracy isn’t exactly a life or death matter, but since I’ve thought of it, the question has been bugging me.
Unless I’m mistaken, known methods of forming gems (or diamonds, at least) require volcanism. So you wouldn’t find them in asteroids; you need a planet large enough to have volcanic activity.
Some asteroids are suspected of having significant levels of rare metals such as platinum and iridium, or so I’ve heard.
Planetary astronomers believe the average asteroid should have relatively high abundances of the rare platinum and platinum-group precious metals as well as gold.
And a simple explanation: Most of the more valuable minerals (gold, platinum, uranium, etc.) are rather heavy. In a planet, most of the heavy metals sink to the core when the planet is forming. In a typical asteroid, though, this is not significant. In some asteroids, it’s even better: They’re formed from the breakup of a larger (but still not planet-sized) object which may have differentiated some, so you’ll have some asteroids which have higher than typical abundances of heavy (valuable) metals. No doubt, an asteroid prospector would have equipmment or know-how to recognize these richer asteroids, and selectively mine them.
In space finding water (ice) would be more valuable then rubies. Anyway, I heard somewhere that there may be more platinum in a single average sized asteroid then has ever been mined from the earth. Offworld resources are ultimately our only hope, the bottleneck is launch costs. Once that is overcome expect to see tremendous wealth generated from the resources in our own solar system. Energy from the sun and minerals from the asteroids.
I suspect that within a 100 years jewels will be custom made in the lab dirt cheap. By the time we get out there it wouldn’t be a big find is my guess. Reminds me of a TV show (twilight zone maybe?) where a couple guys cryongenically freeze themselves with a ton of stolen gold in the desert (the cryogenics serves as the perfect “on the lam” location and they figure 100 years is plenty time for the investigation to die off. When they wake up they all killl each other trying to take the gold for themselves. When they are found by Johnny futurite his girlfriend remarks “Why would they kill each other over something that we mass produce cheaper then paper?” He responds “I seem to remember reading in History class that this used to be the most valuable thing on the planet.” or some such thing. Point is, the future will probably have manufacturing ability at the atomic level making rare jewells a cheap software problem.