These bodies are thought to be rich in resources that
are increasingly hard to find on Earth: platinum, for instance, and
rare-earth elements such as yttrium and lanthanum.
Lanthanum? Hard to find?
It sells for half its cost of production.
Given that we dont know much about the precise composition of most
asteroids, we have to rely on estimates of their monetary value. The
Asterank database, owned by Planetary Resources since 2013, collates
data from NASAs Jet Propulsion Lab and Harvards Minor Planet Center.
By its reckoning, the five most easily reached asteroids are worth
between $8 billion and $95 billion.
They’re worth nothing.
What’s the cost of mining them? Higher than the revenue you say? They’ve a negative value then, don’t they?
Cosmic cartels could also be a problem: the high costs of entry to the
business plus a lack of regulation could create monopolies on an
unprecedented scale. If you could put a factory in space and have it
print copies of itself, output could grow exponentially until you have
an industry millions of times bigger than any industry on Earth, says
Metzger. So space enterprise could vastly enrich a few at the expense
of the rest, fuelling inequality.
Eh? If you can make a Von Neuman factory then absolutely every single sodding human being is as rich as Croesus about 6 months later. What fucking inequality?
Have you only just noticed that NS has bought into the SJW narrative to the extent that all it produces conforms to that worldview?
Just on pendantry, if they don’t realise that cartel and monopoly are not synonyms, I’m not holding out hope for the accuracy of any of the rest of their analysis.
Also, what is the cost etc. of the High Speed Railway that will be necessary to transport the stuff from the distant galaxies?
“If you can make a Von Neuman factory then absolutely every single sodding human being is as rich as Croesus about 6 months later. ”
Or they and the Earth will have been turned into vN factories six months later. Either way, inequality ends.
‘So space enterprise could vastly enrich a few at the expense of the rest, fuelling inequality.’
People wanting, and therefore, buying their products are left out of the equation. The enriched few succeed only by making a lot of people happy. Lots of people happy has no value to the SJW. The corollary is that people should not be happy when they buy things they like if it helps someone get rich.
Odd thing about scarcity. Should you go to an asteroid and get unobtanium, you will sharply reduce its value by bringing it back.
Most metals mined on earth come from asteroids. Otherwise, being dense, they’d be at the centre and not on the crust.
Some asteroids are so rich you nearly don’t have to refine the stuff. But as Gamecock says, the increase in supply (or even the prospect of increase) will crash the price. Which is nice if you’re a buyer, less so if you’re a miner.
I think the writer fails as a scientist and his economics may be more moronic than Richard Murphy – if that’s even possible…..
If you actually do get zillions of dollarpounds worth of platinum, the price crashes and it’s worthless. But everyone here knows that anyway.
The problem is that too many intellectuals and opinion farmers don’t understand economics at all.
And yes, the Von Neumann factory is effectively infinite luxury. so long as you don’t want intrinsically rare items like the original Mona Lisa, Elvis Presley autographs, Tony Blair admirers etc. Status goods in such a situation would presumably be those items.
It’s not nicknamed “Nude Socialist” for nothing.
I’m a yuge fan of science fiction and pendantry so have been musing on the economics of space exploration/colonisation for a while.
I can’t see how it works, short of an unexpected bouquet of technological miracles that even science fiction has failed to predict.
Star Trek economics don’t work. Lots of people would like to be starship captains, sure. But there is no good reason why you’d risk your life as a Redshirt or do the other tedious stuff like crawling through Jeffries tubes and risking death by warp core malfunction when you can live in apparently infinite luxury on Earth without having to work for it or answer to a boss.
Star Trek is actually a ghastly repressive tyranny, in which advancement can only be achieved through the military (Starfleet). That’s why in all their series there has never been a single mention of elections or representation. Decisions are made by an unelected “council”. Distribution of resources similarly. There is no fair justice system, common (or even statute) law, just regulations.
It’s basically the EU with military leadership.
(Doesn’t really apply to the original series which was just a space adventure show. The ideological Star Trek was invented after that).
It’s weird how journalists don’t understand concepts like scarcity and oversupply and the effects on price. They work in an industry which has young people queuing up to work in it for nothing but the penny hasn’t dropped.
I’m thinking about crowdfunding an idea I have to build a space elevator to go and mine these Bitcoins I’ve heard about. Anyone with me?
“don’t understand concepts like scarcity and oversupply and the effects on price”
Well, one can get easily confused since for example government debt has never been more plentiful and expensive at the same time.
To return to ‘So space enterprise could vastly enrich a few at the expense of the rest, fuelling inequality.’
I own no asteroids.
John Galt heads into space, brings back stuff, sells it for oodles of pounds.
I still own no asteroids.
Where is the expense to me.
They’ve also failed to report this as AFAICS.
http://www.sciencealert.com/107-nobel-laureates-just-signed-a-letter-slamming-greenpeace-about-gmos
Copping a deaf one also, at least I can’t find a mention of it, is the BBC. Surprisingly it’s on the Guardian web site.
“enrich a few at the expense of the rest”
*at the expense of*. They’re simultaneously positing we can mine the resources of the solar system *and* that economics is zero sum. Unbelievable.
They don’t understand that it’s the consumption that makes you better off. That’s why they don’t understand tariffs and free trade also. They never get away from the fallacy of autarky (resource hegemony).
A great example of people who consider themselves experts in one field (science*) assuming they are experts in others (economics) and making right twats of themselves.
* fight amongst yourselves if you think they are or are not science experts.
‘Star Trek economics don’t work.’
Perhaps just off camera is a commissar with a pistol making sure they stay on the job.
‘Star Trek is actually a ghastly repressive tyranny’
10-4. I side with the Empire in Star Wars, too. The Rebels are anarchist trash.
Inimitable Steve>
Absent a space elevator or some such, space mining makes absolutely zero sense if you want to use the products at the bottom of Earth’s gravity well. If you’re looking for materials to use in space, though, it makes plenty of sense.
As I think I’ve mentioned before around here, I’m fairly happy to predict that within the next couple of decades we’ll see the start of ‘space mining’ – and it’ll be for common rock, to be crushed and used as shielding around inflatable habitats.
One way or another, though, you can’t have space mining without a space economy to sell the products to – so space tourism and earth-orbiting comms satellite servicing/repair seem the two starting points. When they reach sufficient scale, we’ll get space mining.
rich in resources that are increasingly hard to find on Earth
As I understand it, hard to find is not the issue. It’s getting permission (legal and social) to mine them that is increasingly the problem. Or is this not really a problem either?
Like TIS, I’ve always been a big fan of science fiction. Niven, Pournelle, and Heinlein would love the idea of mining space (probably while pouring scorn over the technical errors in the article). Unfortunately the engineer side of me says it won’t be practical for quite a while yet.
Forget the getting up there, doing the mining, etc. I *really* want to see the plan for landing a couple of thousand tonnes of mixed metals 🙂
Ian B – It’s basically the EU with military leadership.
This. The overbearing moral smugness and suffocating political correctness of the Federation is very EU. By the time period TNG is set in you can’t even get alcohol in a bar.
Gamecock – I always liked the Empire, for aesthetic as well as evil reasons.
Dave – Yarp. That makes sense. Does space colonisation make economic sense though? Who’s ever going to want to pay the huge costs of building space habitats or terraforming other planets – and who will want to live there?
Without some near-extinction level event or fundamental change in human nature or dramatic change in technology (or all these things) it’s hard to imagine people voluntarily living in space.
Ltw – Heinlein solved the problem of “who’s gonna want to live offworld?” in THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS by making the Loonies transported convicts.
But we already have one Australia. I shudder to think about a second one on the Moon.
Inimitable Steve>
“Without some near-extinction level event or fundamental change in human nature or dramatic change in technology (or all these things) it’s hard to imagine people voluntarily living in space.”
It’s hard to imagine anyone voluntarily living in Reading, yet the place exists. Personal tastes aside, though, Las Vegas serves as something of a better counter-example – a century ago, the idea of living in that desert would have been pretty far-fetched.
Similarly, I would love to go into space, but not in current claustrophobic conditions. Make something big enough and open enough to feel ‘outside’, though, and it’s a whole different story.
It’s hard to predict the bigger things, but you can look at the smaller end of things and see how bigger things might get started. There’s certainly demand for space tourism once we have the habitable-volume problem solved, so then you’ll need space-hotel staff. The workers from one space-hotel won’t need much in the way of entertainment etc, but by the time you have a few space-hotels, you’re starting to get demand for all the usual stuff that goes on in tourist places behind the scenes. At that point, if not before, it’ll make sense to have people living in orbit to repair satellites, too. Before you know it, you’ve got a full-on economy going.
I dunno, the problem with space tourism is that other than the low or zero gravity thing, there’s not much to do. There’s no “there”, there.
I was really struck by this once we got the rover pictures from Mars. Interesting looking craters (from above) just look like boring holes in the ground from ground level. A hotel on Mars is stuck in the middle of a desert and you can’t even touch the sand.
In orbit, there isn’t even that. You can look at the stars (same view as Earth) or look at the Earth, which would be initially quite nice but soon wear off. Other than the zero G floating around, what have you got?
I guess the floating sex might be interesting. So maybe that’s it. Orbital knocking shops.
I was thinking specifically of THIAHM, especially the line from Mike after the bombardment of Cheyenne Mountain.
‘Man, I don’t think we had better hit that mountain again’.
‘Why not, Mike?’
‘It’s not there any longer.’
Also, appropriately, there are a few (fairly archaic now) Australian terms such as dinkum and cobber mixed into the Loonies dialect.
Murray Leinster wrote Miners in the Sky in 1967. New Scientist really ought to be called New Environmentalist.
“Absent a space elevator or some such, space mining makes absolutely zero sense if you want to use the products at the bottom of Earth’s gravity well.”
A space elevator is only needed for going up, not down.
To get it down, you just drop it. It does require turning it into a parachute shape or something, so it doesn’t make a hole. (although there are people who would like that capability, too. Then they can be paid money not to.) The space shuttle manages to land without engines, and it’s quite asteroid-like…
“I dunno, the problem with space tourism is that other than the low or zero gravity thing, there’s not much to do. There’s no “there”, there.”
There’s a major industry in people going to the beach, and just sitting there, staring at the sea/sky. There’s nothing there but sand. What can you do with sand?
And in outer space you can sun-bathe 24 hours a day…
Actually, I think there are quite a few useful things in space, the most obvious of which is … space. If you want to build something big, like a million miles long, or something, it’s easy in space. Structural engineering is easier, too, as you can build big things without having to worry about them supporting their own weight. And then of course there’s vacuum – also handy for quite a lot of industrial processes, like anything you don’t want to catch fire because of all this oxygen around. Big volumes of vacuum are expensive to make on Earth. And then there’s cold. Anything shadowed from the sun will cool down to minus quite a lot. That costs money to do on Earth. And then there’s speed. You can get things going very fast by bouncing them around between different gravity wells, and there’s no friction to slow them down. No need for conveyor belts, or trucks in space. Just throw it.
There are lots of things you can do in space – what kills them for industry are the raw materials (i.e. getting them up there) and the workers (they need a lot of care and protection to work in space, and again, getting them and their supplies up there is expensive).
Robots mining asteroids (and gas giants) would be perfect. Get one sufficiently-capable robot up there, and everything else comes free.
Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary! This just gets better and better. The Guardianistas will be absolutely wetting themselves.
Matthew – saw this on Twitter:
David Davis is Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union. Or SOSExE for short
🙂
Sometimes you have to get out of the Earth’s gravity well, like if you’re going to introduce a Kuang Grade Mark Eleven penetration program into the Tessier-Ashpool data cores.
Sex in space, love it! Just make sure you shave carefully first because all that velcro can be a real pain.
If you want some take on science fiction with actual math (and some economy thrown in) try John C. Wright’s Count to Eschaton series that starts with Count to a Trillion.
Evolution of money and wealth starts with antimatter flakes and goes from there to other means of measuring money.
Space tourism would be like Antarctic tourism, not beaches.
After a swim, you can wander off for a good meal, drive to see something new etc.
Antarctic tourism is very much more niche, and that’s with more to see (glaciers, penguins, seals, birds) and minimal cost and risk.
Humans cannot live in zero gravity. Our bodies break down (they’re seeing eye problems because our eyeballs assume gravity, for example). We’ll find growing things will have similar issues, and there’s only so much paste a tourist will eat.
So rotating stations are a minimum. We’ll never live on the Moon for long periods.
Rob
…..it’s weird how journalists don’t understand concepts like scarcity and oversupply and the effects on price. They work in an industry which has young people queuing up to work in it for nothing but the penny hasn’t dropped…….
I often see the dunning-kruger called out alot on these pages but the obvious (to many here) ignorance of the journalist here reminded me of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. I.e. you will constantly spot wrong/ laughably misunderstood articles in the area of your specialist knowledge, but in the next article on a different subject somehow forget all that and are happy to take a journalist as an informed authority.
I always assumed if you looked in a Star Trek creche about half of them would be ugly little buggers in red onesies…
Lanthanum: “it sells for half its cost of production.” Eh? Why does anybody bother then?
And @ChesterDraws: “Antarctic tourism is very much more niche, and that’s with…minimal cost ”
Minimal cost?
I take it you’ve never been on an Antarctic holiday then?
“After a swim, you can wander off for a good meal, drive to see something new etc.”
You could. But a lot of people just lay there.
“Antarctic tourism is very much more niche, and that’s with more to see (glaciers, penguins, seals, birds) and minimal cost and risk.”
Funnily enough, beaches are more popular.
“Humans cannot live in zero gravity. Our bodies break down”
I think I just said that. But lack of gravity isn’t really a problem – you just spin things. It’s not super-complicated technology.
“We’ll never live on the Moon for long periods.”
You think you can’t spin things on the moon?
But like I said, the economic interest in space isn’t in how you get *people* there, it’s how you get robots there that can do the work of people.