Many of you have asked me to do a video about Constructor Theory, an anti-reductionist idea pioneered by David Deutsch. I don't have time to do a video about this in the near future, but I have a review on Chiara Marletto's recent book on Constructor Theory up on Nautilus: nautil.us/blog/the-end-of-reductionism-could-be-nigh-or-not
This merits more attention, is it possible Constructor theory was alluding to the emergence of life? While cellular metabolism is explained by chemistry, I have difficulty seeing where in chemistry we find the consistuents sexual of reproduction. Edit: to be blunt, even if we take apart a TV, we couldn't explain the show,
I think using a propulsion system to move the trajectory of the asteroid to crash into the surface of a closer more reachable planet like Mars or into our moon... Assuming it's not too big but you could use nuclear weapons to break it up.
In the future there will be nanobots that each group of the bots would pick up a certain type of metal and extract only a certain type of metal and because they're so small they're able to get only the metal that there going after and basically will make a bunch of metal dust... This is the ultimate separation of metals and the ultimate in galactic mining operations... It is the process in which will be done to reclaim everything that we've pulled from this Earth... The problem is the bots need everything to be on the surface can't have dirt... The more dirt the more bots you're wasting on cleaning dirt away to get to the metal...
There seems to be lot of confusion in the comments about the "$10 quintillion" that the asteroid is valued at. It is NOT how much money is suddenly going to be siphoned away if this asteroid ever gets mined. Instead, what it tells you is the *volume* of precious metal worth extracting, which in turn gives you an idea of the mine's *lifespan.* A quintillion dollar mine doesn't mean it dumps a quintillion dollars of metal into the market, it means it will be active for an extremely long time.
Also like the Columbus example (he did not know there was gold and silver rich places that actually after Columbus)Actually taking these things to earth can crash the price of them taking a lot of zeros of their value. With all the gold and silver coming from the New World the price of Gold and Silver in Europe crashed and never fully recovered at least before modern times. I will assume the Asteroid missions will be aware of that and limit what they bring down at once. Question I have what are the cost of taking a land fill and extracting all the stuff we want from one compared to going to space. I assume that higher but maybe not. After all this rare stuff on earth ends up in landfill for the most part.
@@RedRocket4000 Space mining companies won't have to worry about artificially limiting what they take back, since they'll *already* be limited in how much mass they can transfer. Even best case scenario (ie that your expensive extraction method doesn't fail), all you're getting is the volume of a Starship per launch, with the travel time to Psyche between 1-4 years depending on how much fuel you're willing to spend. Compare to a terrestrial mine where you can haul out an earth mover, a convoy of gigantic trucks, and move obnoxious volumes of material per week. It will be multiple decades before space transport gets anywhere close to comparable.
The real money isn't in bringing back ore from space, it's in mining it and smelting it up in space, there is a hole sub category about orbital smelting she never even mentioned in this vid. (although bacteria can do some of it i guess) The thing is gold and other minerals are even more valuable (and useful) in space and cost a fortune to boost up there from earth, even stuff you'd think of as worthless is worth a lot up there, nasa will pay around 10k for a bottle of water on the ISS, if you can mine it in space (anything) it would be foolish to take it back to earth for anything other than research. you find a way to use it up there and you make way more than just the ores value.
@@beverlywhitman303 Well maybe bunt how than someone has to buy your space stations. If the Government is to only counter for things in space that market will be saml
@@stekra3159 living is space is a dream for a whole lot of people, as soon as you can buy places to live there people will buy it. governments are probably not going to be the ones mining and building a lot in space (well maybe china), but as soon as tradable goods are available in space, commodity exchanges here on earth will trade in them, and more investment will go up there to gather more stuff to build and trade. it's big business.
I really appreciate you opening discussion on the innovation/commercial side of these topics and even linking university courses. Thank you for the effort!
Once there is big cash to be made with this stuff, this treaty will be gone really fast. Also using resources from asteroid mining to build cheaper space infrastructure is an interesting point.
@@Sonny_McMacsson as a multi billionaire, just move to the us. bezos payed 0.- the oligarchs decades ago (to the current day) just bought 98% of all federal politicians who had a say over tax laws etc. people who uncover stuff like the panama papers simply get car bombed
Well... We already use bacteria to produce LOTS of stuff here on Earth, mostly medications. For example, they're used to produce human hormones for those (like me) that need to take them. (Long story, but I had a tumor between the 2 most important glands of the human body, under the brain, so I had to do a surgery and so on.) So... Maybe they could not only mine the asteroid, but already produce chemicals we need already in the asteroid. Who knows? Anyway, thanks for the video, Sabine! 😊 Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
Sabine you are so inspiring. I'm currently an engineering student trying to find my first out of college job. But your videos always remind me how much I love science and astrophysics. My school's physics department was terrible, it was my worst subject, and I truly thought I had no hope for pursuing a career in astronomy or astrophysics. But you always remind me how amazing science is, and after your videos, I always feel more encouraged to go back to school and pursue my passion for space!
If you love science, try to get there for whatever it takes. That engineering stuff may turn out just waste of your life in the end. You will be doing some mundane technical business projects along with a crowd of other such engineers, the people mostly without any fantasy and imagination amusing themselves only in retelling each other some plain jokes. Many of those projects will be eventually sold out, closed, abandoned, replaced and so on, with those engineers, who worked on that, just sent to find another job. That's what the modern life is (the rat race)...
Happy to hear! You find this number (with the quintillions) quoted all over the place, but pretty much no one mentions where it came from. I hope I got it right.
Some issues I feel need to be adressed here: - The fact that some bacterial species survive in a vacuum doesn't mean they thrive in a vacuum. Although I am a biochemist and not a microbiologist, I am almost certain that no bacteria whatsoever have any metabolism in vacuum. They would just sit there in a lyophilized state and do nothing until they are repressurized and "watered". - Bacteria are not in general "remarkably resistant (to radiation)" - Deinococcus Radiodurans is one of the few bacterial species that is very radiation-resistant. It's a bit like saying "Dogs are remarkably easy to carry around - a Chihuahua will fit in a purse". - Another issue I stumble upon increasingly often lately is the notion that bacteria would die of low temperatures or that specific ones "survive down to X °C" - neither is true. Once bacteria (and even some animals, e.g. C.elegans) are frozen without taking damage they survive *any temperature down to (almost) absolute zero* . 50 K (-223 °C) is no different than -5° C as far as frozen organisms are concerned. Sure, during slow-freezing, a fraction of the population will die from the piercing of ice-crystals forming right at the freezing point. But a good fraction will take no damage and won't mind being put in e.g. liquid nitrogen. This is actually how many bacterial strains are long-term-stored. In order to reduce the mentionened damage, they are flash-frozen in these cases though.
Thank you professor Hossi, came here just from the news about the astreoid that´s named after you. You and your channel is a treasure for everyone, who wants to understand a bit more of the world.
"We haven't found the perfect bacteria for mining... yet." I feel a cool sci-fi script coming on ;) Spoiler alert, it'll probably go poorly for 'the humans'.
@@KateeAngel - ya, it's the fantasy of most rich woman to marry a man who is *not* rich---what a turn on! please. things that happen 0.01% of the time are what rational people usually consider "negligible." think more.
Great video, as always. Thanks for this. I’m personally skeptical about the bacterial approach because biochemical transformation requires organisms in a medium-high metabolic state. While survival of some organisms in vacuum or low temperature environments can occur, these are not conditions for high metabolic activity, particularly where these conditions are combined (cold plus desiccation plus high radiation) - rather these would be conditions of dormancy. Nonetheless, the opportunity of mining does present potential financial upside if the tech development is funded, as you correctly pointed out.
Yeah its misleading to imply you could just scatter or inject microbes and they would do anything useful. Practically you would need them in reactor vessels held under ideal conditions for them to do any useful work. Its going to be a loooooong time before we are capable of doing that on any thing but an experimental scale.
@@Goldenretriever-k8m Yes! A thermal tarp, and we pump in lots of oxygen and water and carbon and nitrogen sources! To extract billions of tons of valuable metals, ideally we would add at least millions of tons of oxygen, water, etc.
@@eskileriksson4457 Which type of bacterial metabolism do you want? Some sort of chemolithotroph, right? What's your purpose in mining? You want pure metals, separate from their sulfides, phosphates, carbonates, etc? And you need a lot of bacteria to do it. A few million bacteria will take many millions of years to produce very much. Those bacteria are made primarily of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, which will all be in short supply in our metal asteroid. Maybe we can find some carbonates. So won't we want to provide a whole lot of CHON to become the bacteria? If we want to mine many billions of tons of metal, don't we want millions of tons of bacteria plus their medium? They need a lot of water....
There is a kind of historical precedent here. In the 16th Century, the Spanish discovered gold and silver deposits in the new world that easily satisfied the Elvis criteria. While this turned out to be disastrous for the indigenous population, the Spanish, or at least the Habsburg aristocracy got very rich, so much so that they were able to wage ferocious wars throughout Europe, including the enormously destructive 30 years war. By the 19th Century, The golden river had dried up, the Habsburgs were a decadent shadow of their former selves and Spain was overrun by foreign armies. A cautionary tale!
And the price of Gold and Silver cratered. The Spanish did not invest the money in improving education and functioning of their society. 80 percent of the Indigenous population were killed by disease and would have done so no matter how nice Europeans were visiting. Considering the Aztec and Inca were human sacrificing Imperial powers that oppressed all around them they sort of deserved receiving what they had been giving to others for centuries. It still a tragedy those Civilizations were lots. I studied Advance Latin American history the Spanish and Portragal wanted to turn the population into serfs not kill them off like some lies on the left. A form of enslavement not exactly a great thing why this need to exaggerate. It was bad enough. In North America it was Ethnic Cleansing again no desire to kill them all off just to move them off their lands into poor replacement areas. I think that horrible enough. Even small pox spreading was a common tactic in Europe and in example the massive Atrocities by the Spanish to the Dutch in example the sack of Antwerp and the 30 Years war showed at that time the treatment of the natives standard policy towards whites as well. In the Americas tribes committed atrocities and built and crushed Empires all before the White man came. And similar atrocities commited against the White just like the Whites did to them. The only lie about the taking of the Americas is the Whites were civilized all sides were savages (very limited exceptions like the Hopi) Note it a interesting and informative subject how racism developed as the Enlightenment taught White men at first that they had rights and Church and State should not own them. Thus as things like enslaving whites, legal when the Americas were found were made illegal thus an excuse to exempt some humans from this developing realization of modern values. The first centuries of conquest of the Americas was just business as usual but as that started ending racism which had not existed before came into play so Indians that the US founding fathers respected so much they actually used a good deal of Indian treaty and government system in writing the Constitution were stating to think they were inferior around the first Gold Rush in the South that drove the ejection of the Cherokee. Note the Indians in North East were respected did not mean treat them better than in Europe so just like in Europe wars of conquest were done.
That is a legitimate concern, but one that's easily solved. Just like with the De Beers diamond cartel, any asteroid mining company could easily limit the supply of its minerals, preventing prices from going down.
Well, remember we're not calculating its *potential* value, we're calculating its *metal* value. ie the value of the metal it contains, disregarding cost-to-acquire or how much it will literally sell for in the real world. This is a calculation done with earth-based mines all the time, since it gives you a sense of the mine's scale and overall lifespan. So what the "quintillions" is REALLY telling you is how long this asteroid mine could be active for (a very very long time) NOT how much money it will bombard the market with.
@@z-beeblebrox Well said. This practically endless quantity over a period of time will enable previously discarded technologies due to a sudden supply of rare earth materials.
Market prices also presume no fundamental restructuring of the economy. Giving humans access to thousands or more times more metallic elements, of all kinds, than it has had in its history is not a problem of supply and demand curves. It is an economic singularity. There aren't any credible theories that can claim to reliably determine the shape of the economy afterwards. But, it is plausible that whomever provides that much useful material ends up near the top of the pecking order in a ridiculously richer civilization.
christopher columbus to the Queen - “but there is Tons of resources to be mined”, and Her Majesty's Treasury asking “but how are you getting this stuff back to Europe?
In the future we will see a vastly different world map than the ones we are used to today. This will guide us to our future riches. The space mining project, is over.
I'm not sure if that was sarcastic and to mock the validity of asking the question of how to get it back? Even back then the question is perfectly legitimate and unavoidable. The answer in the case of Columbus was obvious: cargo ships. Those can get fresh food and resources along with the mined resources and then get back just as easily as they came. With space mining it's way less obvious and way more difficult. You leave with a giant staged rocket, leave several rocket stages behind, so like 90% of the mass, then you have a space ship which is optimized for space and asteroid mining. It cannot refuel on location, so it needs large reserves of return fuel. The more it mines, the more mass needs to be accelerated back to earth, so more fuel would be needed. That makes the starting mass even heavier. Then the way back is fundamentally different from the way there (as opposed to the Columbus example). You don't need to exit any atmosphere or large gravity well, but you need a very capable heat shield for reentry. The more you mine, the more difficult and expensive it will get. The best material for heat a heat shield will set an upper limit on how massive the return trip can be. If it's too heavy, it will just end up as an asteroid impact. The heat shield will also need to be carried along from the very beginning adding even more mass. Columbus didn't have any of those problems. Shipping back and forth is basically the same thing, refueling is possible on both sides, heavy transport via cargo ship was technologically well established and very common. So I'm wondering again: What was that comparison supposed to imply? I'm not sure.
The ships take on bricks they called adoquines as ballast to the New World. Those get dumped in the New World, and exchanged for precious metals and other valuables. The adoquines end up getting used to pave roads. Oh, it wasn't a serious question? Sorry! Never mind.
I'm glad you made this. I have had friends who tell me how profitable that this will be and I have to explain in detail that even with the price of getting into space getting cheaper, there is still the challenge of getting all that stuff back on the surface. I've been making this case for decades and I'm not even a rocket scientist but it's clear that some people are only thinking of tiny parts of the whole process. I wasn't aware that there were only about 10 asteroids worth mining. That makes my calculations that much more accurate.
Well, I don't want to tell you your idea is "dumb", but you are going to have to work on it more to make it plausible up to the point of acceptable by your potential audience. 😟 *By far* no kind of terrestrial life could withstand the heat of an uncontrolled re-entry through Earth's atmosphere. Not even extremophiles who's physiology is based on heavier metals than carbon. I am not saying not to write such a story, but maybe they could return sealed in a special container, only to have the return vehicle go off course and crash somewhere, or the organisms could come from a sample of the Earth's outer core, or inside of volcanic vents on the Atlantic ocean floor, or from the upper atmosphere of Venus. Or something like that. And, also, IDk if you ever watched the show "Stargate SG1" but there was a two part plot line that led from the end of one season into the start of the next, that was a lot like that. Except the invaders were not microorganisms, they were spider like self replicating robots.
@@TheNoiseySpectator they return in a shipment of metals from the mine back to earth, in the centre of the hunk of material it is protected enough to survive reentry. It's just plausible enough to work for sci fi.
Nothing can be worth a quintillion dollars, especially metals. When the New World was discovered, the value of gold plummeted because there was suddenly a lot more of it going around.
If a single supplier controls the massive asteroid resource, it can use that monopoly power to limit the rate at which it's sold, in order to keep the price from crashing. They'd have to be very patient, possibly taking decades or centuries to collect the value of the resource.
@@brothermine2292 My point is there is only about $40 billion dollars in the world. That means that nothing can be worth much more than that. Reminds me of the scene from Austin Powers when he tried to ransom the world for 100 billion dollars in the 60s, and everyone laughed.
Not exactly, inflation was really low at the time and China/India ended up sucking up most of the gold/silver found in the new world because of the silk road and spice trade
Thanks Sabine. Use to make up space mining / trucking stories to tell my baby daughter to help her fall asleep. That was almost 20yrs ago. Glad to see that wasn't so crazy :)
Asteroid mining has been a feature in Elite Dangerous for many years, in this space sim which is a good replica of our complete galaxy mining asteroids and space rings such as those round Saturn has been a get rich route. As this is also in VR it's as close as you can get to being there, I couldn't help sharing this for any of you space lovers out there.
Thank you Dr. Hossenfelder! Many perspectives on the Outer Space Treaty(1967), the details on US, Netherlands and Soviets were new to me. Private citizens are different from companies and corporations and nations and the treaty seems to deal exclusively with nations. If I were to become a citizen of a non-signatory nation would the treaty apply to me? If I attempted to mine an asteroid as a non-signatory citizen would I be a space pirate?
IMO, the treaty only applies to citizens of nations that are signatories to this treaty. Your second question has more to do with politics than legality. Just look at today, "conspiracy theorists" can be considered as terrorists.
I just read your book. It was very interesting. I was surprised by how many physicists straight up admitted to primarily caring about beauty in a theory. I was expecting you to have to tease it out of them and their actions. It's like that scene from The Big Short: "Why are they confessing?" "They're not confessing, they're bragging"
As usual, before you start to mine, you have to build the necessary equipment, and then you have to transport it to the mining site, assemble it, and start digging. this usually is the part where people go poor very fast. IF and only IF you find something worth transporting, refine and if necessary condense and purify the commodity, or source material back home, you have a chance of getting something in return. considering transporting distances, and amortisation costs you get about 1 cent profit for 1 kg of diamonds. so yes, if you are immortal, you will somewhen make a profit. But not during your lifetime.
The concept of mining asteroids for riches is based on the scarcity of the materials mined. For example, if you find an asteroid of gold and platinum that has so much of this material, you effectively DEVALUE gold and platinum present in the body mined.
Well no. If a resource like gold or iron becomes very cheap we will just use more of it and build huge structures and projects with it. That will generate enormous economic growth over time worth immeasurable amounts of money by today's standards.
@@solaroid4442 Gold is to soft to use for structures. It good for plating electric contacts we don't need much more than that. Money is relative and just something virtual we have come up with.
Excellent overview but missed one more major hurdle to be overcome: Getting the stuff back to Earth after you've mined it. Getting stuff up into space is hard, but bringing it back down is in some ways even harder, at least if you want to do it safely (ie: not burn up in the atmosphere or cause significant impact damage upon "landing"). We've done it for small payloads - the mass of a few astronauts returning from their missions - but scaling that up to recovering payloads on the order of many tons presents some significant challenges that we've never really had to address before.
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Why to mine asteroids, when we have Moon? All the asteroid mining problems could be solved by crushing some valuable asteroid to the Moon and mine it from there: it is feasible to install the required infrastructure there with current technology (unlike on asteroids).
great idea, and why not just crash the asteroid into earth, whatever asteroid is safe to crash into the moon should be safer to crash into the earth no? hmmm should be. Crash it into the polar ice caps, use the melt water to water some desserts areas around the world, everybody wins by harnessing the power of asteroid crashes which apparenntly thousands of nuclear sized blasts detected by nuclear dectors of asteroids entering the earth have happened over the years, it already happens and we miss more of if then we think.
I like the idea of using the moon as a "landing zone" for incoming asteroids. In fact, there is another way to "mine" out the heavier metals that she missed. And all it would require would be a good understanding of Calculus and some _very precise_ maps of our solar system. We could alter the orbit of a targeted asteroid to get down into the sun's outer corona, traveling at a high enough rate of speed that it will escape after all the lighter elements have burned off. If we have timed the process correctly, its escape orbit could throw it into a collision course with the moon. The incoming product would be more light and pure than the original prospect, and the it would cool down on the way from the sun to the moon. Yes, the process would take weeks or even months from start to fruition, but so what? The cost of fuel and equipment might even be less than the cost of collecting all the data, maintaining a running map of our solar system and paying the experts who would plan out the course.
@@TheNoiseySpectator Yeah and if you're off by a little the asteroid comes crashing down to earth and hopefully... lands in the ocean, hopefully right smack in the middle of the mariana's trench, deep down a giant gold nugget rests where it might be to expensive for the comapny to get so becomes open for would be scubanaughts to salvage. The gold rush to the bottom of the ocean begins!
It's worth keeping in mind that even an asteroid that's mostly iron could be quite valuable in practice, since it's technically off earth already, and if you can build something off earth with it, it's value is quite high. If you are bringing everything back to Earth, that's when lots of them aren't worth bothering with, but getting any iron off earth is shockingly expensive, so a ready supply off earth could enable relatively massive space structures or a significant moon base at surprisingly low cost. I feel like the start up would be staggeringly expensive (and take many, many years to bear fruit), but the long term pay out would be beyond our present day understanding of monetary value.
i would rather ask: is it even ethical to get so obscenely rich just by exploiting a natural resource? to be honest, this sort of money talk is really putting me off
@@MusicEngineeer yeah, I agree. If they are mined it needs to be for the benefit of all humankind. It should be a multistate venture with a chunk freely given to the global south. It should not be monopolized by Elon fucking Musk, or Jeff douchebag Bezos.
@Elias Håkansson i'm not saying that one should not exploit it. the ethical issue is why should a single person (or small group) benefit from that in such a totally disproportionate way
If we start building things in space and use the resources from space, things should get cumulatively cheaper. Time someone built a huge space station with rotational gravity and everything. It would be so much cheaper to build rockets to Mars etc... from there.
WHY?? RECYCLING TECH... Zero Waste is the way to go, Liberal Wasters.... BIO-MINING using plants on Earth is real, naturalistic, CO2-absorbing 'GREEN MINING' (literally)... Extracts CO2 form the air and concentrates chemicals from the soil, with much research on which plants are best at mining which chemicals... Prices are linked to DEMAND and demand is set to peak in about 30 years, then rapidly drop off if large scale global depopulation happens as predicted... -- We'll have a mostly elderly population and in general its the youth that want all the mod cons, older folk being more Conservative, as they grow up and realise the true destructive power of Liberalism, in so many, many ways... Only the very poorest countries have more births than deaths... The only reason Western populations have risen in the last 30 or 40 years is mass immigration and an ageing population, but average death age is not rising any more in developed nations... -- Population will peak at between 9 and 10 billion in 20 to 30 years then start dropping by 100s of millions a year, every year (unless uber-Nazti Transinhumanist Life Extension Tech. makes a big leap (PLEASE NOOOOOOO!).. The more Modern the personality, the less likely they are to have a child, and if they do, probably 1, sometimes 2, rarely more).... Space Cadets are lost in space... La La Space!
The tech we have down here on earth is relying on huge suply chains and specialized factories all around the world. We somehow have to change that trend and be able to do everything local again if that should be possible.
@@lubricustheslippery5028 .. It is not possible to do EVERYTHING nationally, let alone locally for most nations... Some countries can... Thing is, fake Greenz pushed the offshoring of as much industry as possible to stupid, greedy Liberals who don't even know how greedy they are, as so much manufacturing is in the Far East... -- Techno-organic vertical farming using pre-existing office blocks, with office workers working from home is really Green.... BIO-MINING here on Earth is green, especially if not using GMO monocrops....Much research has been done on which plants extract and concentrate which chemicals from the soil... Combined with Zero Waste Recycling and an increase in CLEAN local manufacturing in the West we'd be sorted... Mining asteroids is Liberal La La Land bollocks for Space Cadets...
There is still a lot of the Earth inside we can not access that could be as easy. The big problem right now is most of what goes on in space is really ballistic tracks by probes. It is not like it is a space ship and can just go where it wants, there isn't enough conventional fuel. Some things, like ion thrusters can use loads of sunlight to improve the specific impulse. Then there is the issue of re-entering whatever and catching it yourself, which is not impossible.
@@adamabele785 You're saying, create an asteroid mining company with no intention of asteroid mining and get rich that way. Gotcha! Everyone invest in Altairisteroid Mining Co.
@@Altairific Our company applies for public money, because we are creating jobs. As CEO I deserve a generous salary. Unfortunately, we don´t pay taxes. We have engineers that paint nice pictures of our future mining equipment.
The thing is, high availability means low prices. If someone would manage to mine an asteroid with millions of tons of platinum the price would plummet quickly. This is true for all resources, but especially for stuff that has little industrial use. Most profitable would be to have industry in space to avoid pollution on earth and cheap energy (solar power)
The good news is, most of the billionaire's profits will be spent to pay employees and suppliers, whose profits also mainly go to employees. This makes life better for everyone.
@@Bob_Adkins Sorry but no. Most of the profits from high-risk new industries and what no go to the early investors and to dividends to other share holders. The nature of "space mining" is/will be very low manpower intensive because it extensively automated. Even if you are mining "bazzilions" from hundreds of asteroids, It only requires a relative handful of staff to develop, construct, launch and operate the 'bots. From the ground on Earth.
Which is why high value scarce elements like the rare earths make the best initial target if they can be refined and isolated on site. Even the value of a single return mission could be significant.
@@DeclanMBrennan Rare earths are only "rare" because no one specifically mines for them. They're exclusively by-products of mining for other minerals. This is a result of demand and supply and that single return mission would take *years* given today's technology, so it wouldn't just need to offset the initial cost of getting there, but also the opportunity costs. The latter are pretty significant: current sample return missions from NEOs take 6 to 7 years (see Hayabusa 2 and OSIRIS-REx). That's net mission time, too, so no prospecting, no up-front R&D, no mining - just getting there, grab a few grams of material and return safely given a ready-to-go flight hardware. It gets even more questionable if we consider the actual TRL: so far we are at TRL-3, maybe TRL-4 if we're being really generous. It's a long way to get to TRL-9. Companies would first need to demonstrate the ability to even get to a NEO. Next they would have to show that they can actually extract useful material from the target object and return it to Earth. So far, even the first step hasn't been demonstrated and I've yet to see demo missions for finding and extracting high-value resources. I'm very sceptical of this premise. Now in-situ resource usage, such as for building infrastructure in space (fuel production, metal production, basic construction materials for ship- and habitat hulls, etc.), that's a different story entirely and very worth it.
@@totalermist I agree with a lot of this and share some of your sceptism. Having a triving manufacturing industry in Earth's orbit or at a Lagrange Point that only ships high value finished goods down into Earth's gravity well is the ideal but that's not going to happen overnight. Unless we plan to run our development of the inner system as the biggest charity in the history of our species, it has to be made to pay as it goes like telecommunications and earth observation largely funds launches to local orbit. If we can't find a way to make money from asteroids, there's certainly no point in having a colony on Mars. I can't imagine an export valuable enough to fund the colony in the many decades it takes to become self sufficent .
We could drill a small hole (maybe 2) all the way through a solid metal core and attach solar powered mechanics sealed to the surface on either side. We then extract the metals via a continuous electroplating process with a circulating fluid that is reconstituted with the extraction, or have some sort of collection rod/wire scheme. Engineered such that the core dissolves from middle out. Heck, with planning, we might be able to create chambers all through the thing such that it is eventually fit to serve as a monolithic hull for a space ship or habitat. Perhaps carve out the guts needed for a nuclear (or fusion) plant on a remote side for power and/or propulsion.
By that time, we'd almost certainly find replacement alloys in applications requiring rare metals. For example, boron-infused ultra-high-strength steel alloys and lightweight magnesium alloys are already displacing many rare metals traditionally used in mechanical components. For lithium-ion batteries, sodium- and fluoride-ion replacements will be ready for initial commercial production in a few years, fully ramping up to scale in a decade or so. Furthermore, cobalt-free lithium-ion batteries are already very close to commercial viability, and should start production anytime soon. Even helium might not be required in the long-term future, because new higher-temperature alloys are continuously being discovered. Perhaps liquid nitrogen or even dry ice would be more than enough to cool the superconducting magnets in the future. I think we'd probably never come close to requiring or even making financial sense mining asteroids to get essential materials.
When stuff is expensive because of rarity, you cannot just multiply its value, when it becomes available in an abundance. You cannot predict it's value at all, since time will have to tell how much of it we need (or even care for) if more of it is available. Profitability would be a big gamble.
Or alternatively: 1. get a promising start-up going 2. hire the right marketing team 3. get a multi-billionaire interested 4. sell your start-up 5. play Elite Dangerous for the rest of your life
Asteroid mining will eventually be necessary but of course the financial figures given here are based on current market prices, which are so high because these elements are so rare on earth. If the supply of day platinum were to become effectively unlimited, the price would drop to something roughly equivalent to low quality iron ore, since demand is also quite limited.
Yes, as simple as to go on the Andromeda Galaxy: 1. Make a rocket 2. Go to the Andromeda Galaxy 3. Take some picture to show that you have made it 4. Turn the rocket and come back Very easy indeed. 😂
We could just drop them all into Antarctica. That would also have the benefit of terraforming the area to make it more habitable. I would recommend evacuating all costal cities but think of all the infrastructure projects!
When I got a notification (Sabine's new video), I received this sentence: A Fast Way Too Get Rich. *I'm shocked*, What?? Sabine and this subject?!! Sabine and How To Get Rich??! It's impossible, there's something wrong! ... Finally I opened the RU-vid and discovered the truth ...and now I'm happy!!
In the current Russia, it is only Putin, who is the law. Ask him, what he think about that topic. That's only relevant thing. But I think, Putin doesn't care about any space mining at all. His primary concern is to prolong his regime as long as he is alive himself. After that, everything will change. There will be another 'revolution', complete different judiciary and, perhaps, no Russia at all.
Musk/Bezos: were gonna go to space, mine the asteroids, and be even richer!! It's so practical and worthwhile! Elvis: I'm about to end this man's whole career
If a product becomes abundant, yes, the price will go down, but it doesn't mean that it is going to worth nothing ; it's not the rareness that makes in itself the price go up, it's the demand. If you have a product that you sell cheap because it is abundant, but you can sell it in large quantities because the demand is high, your profit will be high. If you have a rare item that nobody wants, your profit is going to be zero. So if one day we are able to do space mining, its economic relevance would lie on this relationship between supply and demand, which is more complex than the simpe fact that a ressource is rare or not ; and it would also depends on the economic system we would have in the future, because we already know that the dominant one we got today is not viable for the distant future.
The moon has been as asteroid collector for millions (billions?) of years. What about just mining the stuff that’s collected on the surface of the moon?
Mostly the DV requirement to get to and from the surface's gravity well. If your main cost and limitation is propellant, that becomes a serious limitation.
@@jamestheotherone742 - Makes sense. The cost of dealing with the gravity well on the moon then must be weighed against the other costs associated with mining an actual asteroid. If we can figure out a way to more cheaply get stuff onto and off the moon, it might make sense.
Mass drivers. No atmosphere means you can get things up to orbital velocity right from the surface with very little additional propellant to circularize the orbit. And you can reverse mass drivers as a means to land things without propellant. It would be a nail-biting stunt, but arriving packages could be aimed straight down the barrel of a reverse mass driver to be decelerated by magnets. It would demand centimetre precision while moving at around 1.5 km/s. Get it wrong by just a bit and the reverse mass driver gets wiped out. Volatile ices at Shackleton crater should help us boot-strap a cis-lunar economy. If it were up to me I’d send out mining expeditions to retrieve icy bodies from the asteroid belt ASAP. Shackleton ices will probably fall well short of human ambitions.
@@CarFreeSegnitz super cool! I don’t expect I’ll be around to see this stuff come to fruition, however young folks today almost certainly will. Thx for the extra insights.
Might be able to attach to a small asteroid by setting two bands off to either side of a craft. Select a slow rotating asteroid. Slowly expand out bands. The band's would be housed inside a housing that looks sort of like a cassette tape. The craft achieves a geosynchronous orbit. Slowly reals out the bands off to either side of the craft. Angles the bands around the asteroid, yet slightly apart. Then lands the craft and cinches the bands so that the craft is anchored to the asteroid. Then the main craft body flips over so that the main propulsion thruster are then facing so as to propel the asteroid. Depending on the asteroid, the craft might need to be refueled by a different craft. If attached to an icy asteroid it might be able to use the icy for propellant. Might be able to put an asteroid to orbit the moon for processing this way. Or to send an icy asteroid to Mars this way, sort of, sending a covering for a Mars one might be an option.
I think if you have money to invest in shares of a company that does the mining is worth. There are some shares from mining companies that went up over 200% in the last 12 months due to commodities boom...
@@jamestheotherone742 Humans are space tourists at best, and even that is extremely dangerous, despite happening in very low Earth orbit. The larger a space station becomes, the more it is at risk of a collision, something that is not the case on the Earth as a result of the atmosphere. Now combine this with the horrible health conditions of just being in zero-g, and the horrible health conditions of just being in a high ionizing radiation environment, and the amount of work they need to do in space just to keep their bodies functioning, and the horrible costs and health risks of just getting into and out of orbit. You could perhaps imagine living on Mars within... 50 years? Living in orbit within the next 100 to 500 years at best. The point is eatirely that humans have been in space for 50 years already, and we can barely even do that. There are benefits to being in space, most of which only include doing science, so actually going in space just to live... hmm, I don't think so.... but I could be wrong.
@@SimonWoodburyForget But you might be right. Humans are probably not a spacefaring species. With great effort and significant health costs humans can survive in near earth orbit for a months a couple of years. But the years required for interplanetary travel would likely be devastating to the crew.
I love Sabine’s videos but that asteroid is worth $0. You miss the economic impact of introducing that much iron into the market and the impact on price. The price of metals is directly correlated to its scarcity. Thus, you could mine the asteroid but you would have to control the refining output to regulate the price.
- So said the South African Dimond miners 150 years ago. And so controlled world wide distribution over the years of diamonds has kept the prices very high.
You could say the same abou Jeff Bezos, he is worth 250B dollars but he doesn't have a penny himself because that is based on atocks' theoretical value
For Iron, you wouldn't be sending it to Earth, it is mined here too cheaply, and its heavy weight is too expensive to be rocketed from Earth to Orbit! Its value is to use it "In Space where It is Found"! Cheaply give it a 'Push' in the direction you want it to go, wait for it to show up, and use 'Solar Reflectors' to melt it and refine it for use 'Up There'. Done properly, it would be very cost effective...
@@mydogbrian4814 That's not a good comparison - natural diamonds have no intrinsic value. Rare earth metals are actually used in industry, whereas diamonds always have been nothing more than status symbol (as easily demonstrated by the non-value of synthetic gemstones, which cannot be distinguished from natural stones by eye alone).
The title of this video made me think she would talk about the economic aspects of space mining. But she didn't. You can't just multiply the price of metals by the quantity you can find in space (eg, at 2:22) to get the total profit. Eg, the more gold you bring back from space, the more gold's price drops. If there was an unlimited supply of gold in space, the value of gold to humans on earth plummets. You can't get ten trillion dollars from gold in space. Gold is valuable largely BECAUSE it's rare. Economics is more difficult for most people to understand than quantum physics, and this video proves it.
Even after getting to the asteroids and mining them, we still need to process them. The metals in the asteroids are unlikely to exist in their elemental form, and are much more likely to exist in combination with oxygen as minerals. Meaning we'll need some kind of refining process to extract the pure metals from the ores. None of the processes we have on earth will work, so we'll have to develop new ones. This could mean significant R&D costs for the companies involved.
The valuable space metals are those with extremely high melting and boiling points; just use large solar concentrating mirrors and heat the portions of ore up to between those two temperature points, all of the lesser elements will boil off into the vacuum of space...
@@stephenkeebler732 That was my first thought too, but I think it would be far too costly. Solar output in the asteroid belt is minuscule compared to that on earth, meaning the the mirrors will have to be absolutely gigantic to achieve the temperatures needed to melt/boil the minerals. And gigantic mirrors have their own set of problems, from manufacturing to operation and maintenance. So I think mining companies won't go through the giant mirrors route. There's most likely a better way to do it.
Some of you may find it useful to have some of the key differences between Newton and Einstein: 1/ General Relativity asserts that the gravity is not a physical force but is a manifestation of the curvature of spacetime. According to Newton’s theory, gravity is a mutually attractive force. 2/ General Relativity is a field theory. Thus, the speed of gravity is finite and is equal to the speed of light in vacuum. Newton’s theory gives rise to an action-at-a-distance law, which Einstein himself derided as ‘spooky’. The speed of Newtonian gravity is infinite. 3/ In General Relativity, time is relative between two observers. In Newtonian mechanics, time is absolute, that is, the passage of time is the same in all coordinates. 4/ General Relativity is predicated on the idea of a non-Euclidean space. Newtonian mechanics considers the space to be Euclidean. In Newtonian mechanics, the Lagrangian includes two terms; one to account for the kinetic energy and the second for the potential energy storage capability of the physical system. The Lagrangian used to determine the geodesic equation of General Relativity does not include a potential energy term. 5/ Newton’s theory solves a binary system by assuming point masses without any internal structure. Using this assumption, the system is reduced to an Effective One Body (EOB) problem. Thus, there is no spin-orbit interaction. But, in General Relativity, material objects are represented by extended bodies with internal structure. For example, black holes are said to vibrate during the ring-down phase of a merger. Moreover, objects experience spin-orbit interaction. 6/ In Newtonian mechanics, coordinate separation is the same as the physical spatial separation. Thus, in the EOB formulation, the radial and angular variables represent physical distances. On the other hand, in General Relativity, coordinates are arbitrary and have no intrinsic (physical) significance. One is free to choose a coordinate system with two timelike dimensions in addition to two spacelike dimensions. For example, the Schwarzschild radial coordinate is not a true measure of the proper radius. This means that the radial and angular velocities determined by the EOB model have nothing to do with their general relativistic counterparts. 7/ In General Relativity, a spacelike coordinate may acquire timelike behavior. For example, the Schwarzschild radial coordinate becomes timelike inside a black hole. 8/ Newtonian mechanics comes with a precise definition of gravitational energy. In General Relativity, the energy contained in a gravitational field cannot be described in a gauge-invariant way. 9/ The ordinary derivative of a vector is not a tensor. Therefore, General Relativity employs the concept of covariant derivative. In Newtonian mechanics, one uses the usual partial derivatives. 10/ Vectors of Newtonian mechanics must always obey the triangle inequality. In General Relativity, spacetime vectors can satisfy the reverse triangle inequality. 11/ General Relativity deals with only conservative systems by demanding that the covariant divergence of the metric tensor must be zero. This particular requirement corresponds to the energy-momentum conservation relation partial derivative(sub)u T(sub)uv = 0. Therefore, the loss of energy due to dissipative effects is anathema to the theory. Moreover, the presence of damping terms destroys the time-reversal invariance property of General Relativity. On the other hand, Newtonian mechanics has no problem dealing with dissipative phenomena.
Bacteria are not _"engineered"_ they're _"stitched together"_ like plants, with genetic information from other bacteria. You don't and can't and wouldn't just start from scratch, but instead find genes that work well and find ways of incorporating them, by using the organisms ability to inject information into itself. Whatever genes and species you'd use to get to space is likely already pre-existing.
I'm skeptical about the ability of bacteria to do this job. Bacteria in such extreme environments might have a very slow metabolism, so the rate at which they mine the asteroid would be too slow to be of economic value.
@@SabineHossenfelder No one thinks of using natural bacteria these days. But as a Biochemist, I feel like it will be very hard to engineer such bacteria that meets all these goals. Instead, why not use some trampoline like structure to cover the Bactria gel and mitigate the harsh condition?
The biggest problem is getting tons of ores back on Earth safely. STS-83 was the heaviest craft ever landed on Earth at a mere 235,000 pounds total. idk what the math is, but losing control of a couple thousand tons of ores coming in at around 14,000 mph would leave quite the mark when that hit.
As with all things related to space, they wont progress much until we have an 'alternative' method of getting to orbit! THAT is where all the money and resources should be poured...
Eine sehr relevante Nebensache (oder gar Hauptsache) ist, das in solchen Objekten im All nicht nur teure und seltene Metalle enthalten sind, sondern auch seltene Isotope, die es auf der Erde nicht gibt, weil sie beim Eintritt auf die Erde zerfallen. Diese hätten sogar relevante Eigenschaften für die Enegerieerzeugung. Allerdings: Eigendlich nur in der Schwerelosigkeit - man bekommt sie ja nicht unverändert/stabil genug auf die Erde. Iridium etwa, das aus Platin191 entstanden sein wird, als das Objekt auf die Erde fiel (über Elekroneneinfang durch Gravitation oder Ladungspotentialen in/zwischen den Atmosphärenschichten induziert, woraufhin es eine Art "natürliche Atombombe" darstellt, die haufenweise monoatomares Metall hinterlässt, wie eine Atombombe auch). Man findet oft signifikant erhöhte Iridiumspuren in Erdschichten, die im geologisch in zeitlichem Zusammenhang mit einem Großeinschlagseregnis stehen. Ansonsten ist Asteroiden-Metall für großindustrielle Anwendung kaum umsetzbar, wenn man das Metall erst auf die Erde bringen muß. Aber wenn mans direkt im Orbit verarbeiten würde, und damit Raumstationen baute, wäre das schon eine andere Rechnung. Die Idee aber, erstmal ein Verhüttungskraftwerk im Orbit zu bauen, klingt irgendwie absurd, oder? Allerdings: Wie man hört, liegen die Metalle in Asteroiden nicht wie auf der Erde in "Erzgestein" vor, sondern gediegen. woraufhin man keine klassische Verhüttung braucht, sondern nur eine Schmelze und ein Walzwerk. Und die Schmelze kann sogar direkt im Vakuum statfinden? Wie bekommt man sie denn dann in Form gegossen? Aber vielleicht braucht es keine Verhüttung, sondern nur Erhitzung und Walzen?
As a geologist I'm comfortable to say this is completely absurd now and it will be for millenniums or, more likely, forever. It is billion of times cheaper and more recoverable to remove 300 - 500 meters of soil and waste cover and rocks and mine the same metal grades here in Earth itself.
A millennium is too long, 1000 years ago we were discovering that dividing a field in 3 parts increases it's efficiency and we couldn't get past Gibraltar from the Mediterranean
@@pedrolmlkzk The evolution is not like that. Look at the Moore's law. The growing of CPUs power is not even close of predicted anymore. You have a ramp-up and a plateau.
"That's a nice spaceship you've got there. It would be a shame if something happened to it." The mining industry isn't open or honest. Large deposits are bought up by large cartels and left undeveloped to increase prices. Supply is matched to demand. In this way it is much like the oil industry. New players in the industry are not welcome. Economic analysis that assumes some sort of free market supply and demand or cost vs. profit aren't going to be accurate.
One main environmental concern not mentioned here is that adding any material to earth that wasn't there before, has a way of upsetting the delicate balance of nature, and thus causing environmental destruction. We've seen this with climate change, for example, where we added carbon to the carbon cycle that wasn't there in the recent past. There is also the case of plastics in the ocean, CFCs in the ozone layer, and mercury in waterways. Asteroid mining would be fine, as long as the products are flung back into space once they enter the waste stream. The major issue is that, if past experience is anything to go by, it will be cheaper to just dump it on earth, where the toxic waste products will enter the land, air and sea.
Another option, probably a better one, would be to mine Mercury. One big advantage of Mercury is that there's a bigger energy source nearby to use to help melting and processing the minerals
