/sci/ - Science & Math

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/james-cameron-launching-asteroid-mining-company-204737338.html

>A new company called Planetary Resources held its official launch today promising a new venture that would merge "space exploration and natural resources," while adding "trillions" of dollars to the global GDP.

I just bought tickets for the presentation next tuesday.
I hope they're serious about this.

>>4590678
If it's some bullshit I'm hunting James Cameron down.

But it's not profitable yet.

And it's going the wrong way for the near future - burning energy to get more raw resources. Our problem is energy, for the next 50 years. Not having more iron or platinum.

>2016
>Footage of a horrible accident at the first off-planet gold mine reaches Earth
>Short glimpses of freaky monsters captured on tape
>Video ends with monsters climbing onto ship and blasting off for the return trip
>Coming this fall: James Cameron presents The Mine

You heard it here first: world's most elaborate viral campaign

>>4590900
But certain rare earths and minerals are dwindling due to there being no efficient way to recycle them or due to people just pissing them away so they literally end up on the bottom of the sea. Still easier to get to than space.

But I doubt they're going at it industrially, but instead doing more of a proof of concept.

Or another reason would be to mine carbon in preparation for the japanese space elevator.

>>4590900
It's inspiring. If they make a serious effort, they can excite and attract the brightest minds of the next generation. Plus, they'll grab all the initial asteroid mining IP.

Really, though, it'll just make a lot of people happy just knowing that a serious effort to do this exists.

JC is my number one nigga

Kate Winslet.
On the nose of the rocket.
With her hands spread.
With music by Celine Dion.

>>4590911
>mine carbon
uhh..what?

JC is mah numbuh one niggah too.

>>4590938
Hey Madsci! Any news on that footage?

>>4590972
What what?

You take a nice carbonaceous chondrite, mine it for carbon, purify it and then turn it into buckytube/graphene.

Continue until space elevator.

I was just checking out the wiki on asteroid mining, and saw this:

> At 1997 prices, a relatively small metallic asteroid with a diameter of 1.6 km (0.99 mi) contains more than 20 trillion US dollars worth of industrial and precious metals

Wow. I seriously question that exact number, but even if it's an order of magnitude off, those asteroids have serious value. The question is whether or not it can be exploited at all. Japan spent $170 million on Hayabusa to bring back a few hundred particles. Assuming such a spacecraft was modified to bring back several tons of ore, would it be cost effective?

Quick calculation:
3 tons of pure platinum (96000 ounces)
price of 1500 USD per ounce
= profit would be 144 million

And 3 tons of pure platinum is pretty damn optimistic. Will be interesting to see how they proceed with this. Moving the asteroid into a near orbit is one option, but moving asteroids is pretty damn hard.

>>4591010

Plus the fact that the public will probably respond with "Hurrrr it's gonna crash into the earth".

>>4591010
The market price would crash. All such estimates are retarded.

>>4591024

>implying people wouldn't pay through the roof for space-platinum

>implying it wouldn't be a good thing anyway because of the practical uses of platinum

>>4590994
Ok, I didn't know such a mineral existed. But why not use Graphite, of which ~1 million tons are mined each year? Certainly gonna be cheaper.

>>4591024
It would crash if you tried to sell all at once, but you can hold on to quantities of it like OPEC and China does with rare earth metals.

>>4591030
>>implying people wouldn't pay through the roof for space-platinum
>IMPLYING THEY WOULD
The fuck, man? It's platinum. Would you pay above market price for a chunk of space platinum? And if you did, would you buy more than a few grams?

>>4591035
This is true. You can become the De Beers of platinum. (Seriously, look that shit up, De Beers has a fucking monopoly going, and they manipulate both supply AND demand. Diamond engagement rings weren't even customary until they started some cultural engineering through marketing campaigns, and then they bumped up the expected cost of such rings)

>>4591047

People already pay good money for platinum jewelry, so of course they'd buy jewelry made from SPACE platinum.

Also, the massive influx of platinum could be used to mass produce filters for removing the harmful gasses from car exhaust.

>>4591071
But... the huge influx. There just isn't *that* much demand.

You'd have to sit on most of it, and trickle it out. Like is already done for some things right now. (Oil, diamonds, etc.).

>>4591119
Fuck artificial scarcity. Just pump it out like it's water and let the markets dwindle.
Then pump out next resource.
And so on and so forth.

When industries realize that they don't need to skimp on this and that element, you can make up in bulk what you lost in price.

>>4591128
I want to do that, but no one wants to foot the bill. It will be a net financial loss for the person who actually brings the material back and dumps it on the market. You would have to subsidize it, basically just have the government pay for it.

>>4591141
>loss
[citation needed]

You refine the materials in orbit using solar power/solar furnaces.
Make a rough kite-shape of the materials.
Affix basic telemetry and controls,
Fling into Earth's atmosphere.
Drop into coastal waters.
Send a tug to bring it in.

Sell kilotonnes of rare materials simultaneously in several places at half going price.

>>4591154
And all that shit does not exist, and costs a fuckton of energy and resources to make.

Look, this WILL be profitable eventually, but we're at least a century away. The technology and the energy abundance needed are just not here yet. This is essentially a process to convert ungodly amounts of energy into more available raw resources, and that is exactly the wrong direction to go as the energy crisis is about to hit.

>>4591162
Okay, let's amend that.
>use part of the mined resources to build a fleet of solar satellites
>microwave to groundside

Might as well do that after building the mirrors for the solar furnaces.

>>4591169
I share these wet dreams too, but it's not going to happen until after the energy crisis passes.

And don't pretend that solar power satellites are a good way to get power in the near future. The numbers don't work.

>>4591173
>The numbers don't work.
Meaning the power is too expensive in the near-term.

>>4590911
>japanese space elevator.
Which is....

fucking /sci/

ok guiz.
I'm a geologist for mining.
we aren't running short on any metals yet.
we're sitting on vast reserves of most of them.
we just don't mine them because dumping tons of product on the market will sate demand and kill profits.

there's no point to mining asteroids unless they're made of light sweet crude or perhaps phosphates.

which of course they aren't.

>>4591217
A japanese project to build a space elevator.

>>4591173
>>4591177
It could be viable for special purposes.
Power the antarctic base.
Or Mad Scientist's undersea colony (by way of a surface receiver).

Or orbiting satellites, stations, ships...

Though it would be too expensive for grid in the nearterm, there's no reason to not use it if it can be made reasonably cheap.

>>4591247
>A japanese project to build a space elevator.
As in...an elevator that just lifts you up to space? Wouldn't it become unstable near the top, like if you're stacking plastic cups?

There's gotta be somewhere to read about this more in depth. Is there a certain name for this project?

>>4591258
It's a cable under tension leading to a counterweight in orbit, not a tower. But it's also beyond our current ability to create.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator

>>4591258
Yes, google "japanese space elevator".

>Asteroid mining
>In any way profitable

>>4591264
That carbon nanotube idea seemed pretty good.

In any case, just leave it up to the Japanese to decide to legitametely try to build something like this. And by 2050, they say!

So, according to that wiki page, it would be more like a large cable that there would be something docked to, and using this you'd be able to get into orbit and stay for a while?

>>4591290
Yes. Or leave things in orbit, or let them go further out with rockets.

>>4591303
Seems like a good idea, actually. I hope the Japs can get it down.

However, it seems that they'd have to start from something like the equator (according to the wiki article) - wouldn't other countries get pissed that Japan is using other people's land to do something like this?

>>4591324
It might actually be out on an ocean platform. We'll see.

Question /sci/
Lets assume the cost of going to asteroids, mining out the iron (or whatever), and transporting it back to earth was economically viable.
Wouldn't all the iron (or whatever) mined out from the essentially diminish the price of iron (or whatever) to the point where it would where the industry would collapse.
Sort of like flooding the diamond industry.

>>4591342
That's not a bad idea at all.

>>4591345
Eventually it would head towards the cost of actually producing the iron this way. But if they just get a fuckton and suddenly dump it, yeah, iron would crash.

>>4591324
Get pissed? They'd be fucking ecstatic. HUGE amounts of money would flow into the country. If a space elevator was built in some shitty equatorial country, that country would become the center of the world in many respects.

>>4591358
It would be like owning the new Panama Canal.

>>4591357
So lets hope they are careful and and try to make a lot of money really fast.

>>4591366
*So lets hope they are careful and don't try to make a lot of money really fast.

>>4591358
True.

Guess I'm just used to every little thing breaking out into a war nowadays.

>>4591010
I don't think there would be a spacecraft that actually brings the ore down to earth and then goes out into space and mines. It'd probably be some kind of special aero brake craft designed to bring down the largest amount of ore possible at once.

I love watching /sci/tards trying to play economist. You people are stunningly ignorant about economics. Stop trying.

As soon as you bring fucktonnage of platinum back to the Earth, the price will crash. Why? Because markets work on INFORMATION, not just material scarcity. Everyone will know you're sitting on all that platinum up there, so a lot of the market will balk at your now-absurd prices and just WAIT. Why pay $1500/oz now when they know you're going to have to dump more tons of platinum later?

Without that many buyers, you're forced to bring more down to recoup costs. Eventually you'll have to end up flooding the market, just like you didn't want, and the price WILL collapse. The buyers will be giggling with glee with platinum selling for $50/oz; YOU, however, will be crying, that your $10 billion in platinum sales falls to $300 million.

Don't even bother responding to this post if you disagree; you are simply wrong and will only embarrass yourself as well as waste my time. None of you motherfuckers are actual industrialists and producers, so you really have no idea how such economics works. Most academics don't; they are pretty much like autistics, and they just get worse due to being so highly institutionalized in universities and corporations.

>>4591709
see
>>4591024
>>4591119
>>4591141
>>4591242

>>4591709
>Eventually you'll have to end up flooding the market, just like you didn't want, and the price WILL collapse.

no

you suck at econ brah

>>4591743
nope, he's right.

I work for the largest gold mining company in the world.
we pay millions a year to store gold in wharehouses around the country.
we sell a bit at a time when the price goes up high enough.
if we dump our inventory all at once the price will collapse for years.

same is true of aluminum, copper, moly, lead, pretty much anything we get from the ground in whatever quantities we feel like producing.

>>4591731
>>4591743

I told you fucking economic morons to not even bother. I couldn't have made my English any fucking clearer. I know economics and you /sci/tards don't. You make it a point of techie pride NOT to understand. So stop pretending that you DO understand. You don't. Leave economics to people like me who DO understand, and I promise that we'll leave the techie stuff to you, you pasty-white virgin-nerds. You know the science, so that's what you should stick to.

(Of course, I know the science too, but you're always too emotionally butthurt to accept that anyone can be this roundly educated AND RIGHT at the same time.)

>>4591757
>if we dump our inventory all at once the price will collapse for years.

don't do that

I realize it's not worth as much as market price obviously, but it's up to the producers whether the market crashes. This guy is angry and autistic as fuck

>>4591760
>repeat an often-expressed point in the thread
>claim nobody else understands

Go, tiger.

>>4591760
lol

>>4591765
there are strict laws on what we can produce and sell.

governments control the metals markets, not mining companies.

haul all the platinum asteroids you like into LEO, the governments of Canada and Russia aren't going to let you do shit with them until local deposits are gone.

>>4591776
>carefully rain down platinum kites all over the world
>regular citizens pick them up and sell them
It's not like there's some kind of customs between space and groundside.

>>4591760
>Be stupid and incomprehensible
>keep posting
Drooling_trollface.jpg successfully uploaded!

And so it begins, the cancer of humanity, lays its seeds to leave what will then be a once life rich planet.

Hopefully this actually does work out. They probably have launch plans for after the next many decades, unless they get heavy funding.

Space sex with miners.
The catholic church are launching.

>>4592115
catholics have sex with miners?
sign me up!

>>4590882

>yfw you'll have to chase him down to the bottom of the oceans and out into space

>>4591709

You are not /sci/ related, get out.

>>4592125
While Cameron is filming him and making another blockbuster from it.
>The Hunt

>>4592115
That was a pretty good one. Bravo.

So...wait. He's actually making a mining company? Why?

>>4592414
it's not a mining company, it's a fleecing-investors-while-not-mining company