# The practicalities of mining asteroids **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 11, 2017, 9:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-practicalities-of-mining-asteroids/786397 "2017-05-11T21:40:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 15
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2017, 6:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-practicalities-of-mining-asteroids/786397/15 "2017-05-12T18:10:28Z")
> [@Francis\_Vaughan](#): > > Worst of all, asteroids are very unlikely to have undergone any of the geological processes that lead concentrations of minerals. Even if your asteroid contains thousands of tons of gold, it is all likely to be evenly distributed throughout at concentrations that even on the Earth would be considered uneconomic. For many of the elements that are rare on Earth’s surface, those geological processes that concentrated them concentrated them down to the Earth’s core. In a differentiated asteroid, those same elements would be concentrated into the asteroid’s core. Luckily, most of the asteroids large enough to have differentiated into a core and mantle/crust have been blasted to bits and those pieces of core are floating around naked. According to [this](http://www.periodictable.com/Properties/A/CrustAbundance.al.log.html) chart the average concentration of gold in the Earth’s crust is 0.0031ppm. According to [this](https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1968/0603/report.pdf) PDF, the concentration of gold in meteorites varies, but certain iron meteorites (called “siderites” in the old study) contain up to 10ppm gold. In undifferentiated meteorites, the gold percentage is still much higher than the average for Earth’s depleted crust, with chondrites having from .1 to .37ppm. According to [this](http://www.mining.com/the-worlds-highest-grade-gold-mines/) page, the highest grade gold mines are at around 1 to 3ppm gold. So asteroids range from “lower concentration than a rich mine but higher than a random handful of Earth’s crust” for stony meteorites to “similar to or greater than the gold concentration for the highest-yield mines” for iron asteroids. Plus [other precious metals](http://authors.library.caltech.edu/51511/1/jgr4710.pdf). Whether or not it would be possible in the short or long term to mine asteroids is questionable, but there _is_ gold in them there floating hills. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-practicalities-of-mining-asteroids/786397)._