/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9608368
Mainly the memory of what happened to those Spaniards who came back from the New World, crashed the market with all that gold they brought with them, and died in destitution.

I mean, yeah, you can bring back near limitless amounts of nickel or iron, far in excess of the considerable resource investment to do so, but once you've done that, nickel and iron are worthless. Scarcity is what makes raw materials valuable, so you kill your own investment.

On top of that, when it comes to truly scarce resources that we actually need, there's not a lot to be had out there. I mean, aside from H3, the most common materials up there, are also the most common materials down here. ...and even if abiogenic oil is indeed be a thing, as some suggest, it isn't going to be on the asteroids, as there's not enough pressure there to create it. I suppose radium is more common, but it isn't exactly something we're dependant on. Most of those rocks are full of nickel, iron, ice, and carbon, and while they have some gold and platinum and the like, they have it at about the same frequency as the rocks here do.

I suppose maybe we could find a black dwarf, but De Beers would have to laser inscribe that moon sized diamond to make it valuable. (Also I don't think the universe is old enough to have one of those yet...)

Don't get me wrong, space exploration is critical to mankind's long term survival, and, should we last that long, we'll probably end up mining asteroids at some point for raw materials used in construction in space... But mining asteroids to bring materials back to Earth is a losing proposition.