NASA Is Planning Mission To An Asteroid Worth $10 Quintillion (usatoday.com) 308
New submitter kugo2006 writes: NASA announced a plan to research 16 Psyche, an asteroid potentially as large as Mars and primarily composed of Iron and Nickel. The rock is unique in that it has an exposed core, likely a result of a series of collisions, according to Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Psyche's principal investigator. The mission's spacecraft would launch in 2023 and arrive in 2030. According to Global News, Elkins-Tanton calculates that the iron in 16 Psyche would be worth $10,000 quadrillion ($10 quintillion).
How large?!? (Score:5, Informative)
"Potentially as large as Mars"? According to Wikipedia: Psyche16: 200km in diameter. Mars: 6800km in diameter
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I read that line and wondered why it wasn't listed as a planet if it was as large as one.
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"Potentially as large as Mars"?
Reminds me of my old football coach, ever the optimist.
Sports Reporter: "Coach, your quarterback just fumbled the ball several times and threw nothing but interceptions."
Coach: "Yeah, but he has POTENTIAL."
John Elway on Trevor Siemian (Score:2)
That reminds me of John Elway on Trevor Siemian. Siemian was the last quarterback drafted that year. He had already lined up a job in real estate because he figured he might not be drafted - he wasn't that good. Fans were surprised and a bit dismayed when Elway drafted him for the Broncos, who were a powerful team -they won the Superbowl that year. Elway said Siemian "has potential".
It turns out that in his first year as a starter Siemian had a an 18-10 touchdown-to-interception ratio and an 84.6 passer
Re:How large?!? (Score:5, Informative)
"Potentially as large as Mars"? According to Wikipedia: Psyche16: 200km in diameter. Mars: 6800km in diameter
That was mangled in the summary, but TFA says that it may be the remaining core of a planet destroyed in a collision, that was potentially as large as Mars.
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"Potentially as large as Mars"? According to Wikipedia: Psyche16: 200km in diameter. Mars: 6800km in diameter
That was mangled in the summary, but TFA says that it may be the remaining core of a planet destroyed in a collision, that was potentially as large as Mars.
Hmm. Wasn't the Earth in its early days hit by a Mars sized object, which also happened to create the Moon?
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Re:How large?!? (Score:4, Informative)
Google: asteroid belt mass
The entirety of the asteroid belt is just over 4% of the moon. There are very few large chunks by any sci-fi standard. Why anyone would go to the very far and dangerous belt, when you can just strip mine the moon (which has caught a very large number of asteroid impacts over the millennia). This is the same as the humans living on Mars nonsense. It's impractical and currently impossible.
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So why would anyone? Because they've thought about it for more than 2 seconds and seem to actually have studied the issue. And the Space Act's legali
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That's stupid. We have been fucking with the planet we LIVE ON for thousands of years. We couldn't make a dent in the mass of the moon if we hammered it with nuclear missiles, let alone mining.
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I guess the moon is still massive enough to have significant gravity. I don't know how he numbers work out, but it's possible that the extra energy needed to boost iron out of the moon's gravity well exceeds the cost to mine the astroid, depending on where the end product is going.
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I think they might mean it is likely a planet core of iron and potentially the same size as Mars' core.
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"Potentially as large as Mars"? According to Wikipedia: Psyche16: 200km in diameter. Mars: 6800km in diameter
The journalism curriculum needs a lot more basic science in it.
economics (Score:4, Insightful)
dumping that much extra iron into the economy would make the "value" close to zero.
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The raw material might be worth very little, but I bet processed ore would be worth quite a bit. Building the first space based smelt would be a bitch, though.
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Raw material or processed ore wouldn't be worth the bother on Earth.
At the top of the gravity well, on the other hand, it could be worth quite a lot, potentially. It's easier to reach Earth orbit from 16 Psyche than from the Earth, looks like. Takes longer, of course, but less deltaV.
And that ignores high Isp options that are available to 16 Psyche that aren't available from the ground....
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a quintillion here, a quintillion there (Score:3)
Shipping and Handling (Score:5, Insightful)
Somebody forgot about shipping and handling.
It's all about location, location, location. You got a buyer for that $10 Quintillion USD worth of iron protoplanet located in the astroid belt? Didn't think so.
Re:Shipping and Handling (Score:5, Funny)
The dinosaurs selected "cheapest delivery method" without reading the fine-print.
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I'm sure that the NASA spacecraft that attaches some rockets to the asteroid to change its course, can also attach a parachute or two so it can land gently.
After all, the thing is really just about 200 km diameter. Shouldn't be too hard to find a spot for that. As long as it's not in the sea (global warming is doing enough already to give us wet feet) or NIMBY as I like to keep the view I have now.
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Somebody forgot about shipping and handling
Indeed, it could be even easier to collect some of our own iron from the core of our planet.
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Somebody forgot about shipping and handling.
It's all about location, location, location. You got a buyer for that $10 Quintillion USD worth of iron protoplanet located in the astroid belt? Didn't think so.
Yeah, about this. Let's talk in a future "maybe" no too far away.
I know bringing the whole asteroid into earth's orbit is out of the question, too many people will freak out about the the risk of a collision (and I'm sure the cost of such propulsion system would be insane).
I didn't do the math, but couldn't we simply install a sort of catapult on the asteroid to send big chunk in a trajectory that'll eventually reach earth? Of course, the counter-force of these launch will "eventually" send the whole astero
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couldn't we simply install a sort of catapult on the asteroid to send big chunk in a trajectory that'll eventually reach earth?
No, it would just sling around the Earth and stay in an elongated orbit. Or it would crash to the Earth's surface and be scattered as fine dust.
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Failure to understand the market... (Score:2)
If that much iron and nickel becomes available cheaply, prices will drop extremely. The only way they will not, is if the cost is in the extraction. For an example, see Aluminum, which is very much non-rare, but getting it into an usable form costs a lot. So if every ton of this iron costs $1'000'000 to extract, its value is negative as market-prices are a lot lower. Basically the only value this iron has for the foreseeable future is that it does not need to be lifted out of a gravity well.
Morale: People w
Darned headlines (Score:2)
Here I thought for a moment the mission was worth (or: would cost) 10 quintillion (18 zeroes if using short scale) dollars.
And now that the fourth Zimbabwean dollar [wikipedia.org] has been demonetized, one can't even use that pun any more (from the WP article: "The Zimbabwean government stated that it would credit 5 US dollars to domestic bank accounts with balances of up to 175 quadrillion Zimbabwean dollars and exchange Zimbabwean dollars for US dollars at a rate of 1 USD to 35 quadrillion Zimbabwean dollars to accoun
Some glossed-over points (Score:3)
* "in 2014 a mission to Psyche was proposed to NASA"
* "A team led by Lindy Elkins-Tanton
* "The mission was approved by NASA on January 4, 2017 and is targeted to launch in October of 2023, arriving at the asteroid in 2030, following an Earth gravity assist spacecraft maneuver in 2024 and a Mars flyby in 2025." So mebe I'll get to watch the progress in my retirement.
The Globalnews and Usatoday articles strike me as being tarted up (read: dumbed down) with that gee whizz number of dollars.
Psyche (Score:2)
Person B: What? No way! That doesn't even make sense.
Person A: Seriously! I saw it on Slashdot!
Person B: I don't believe you. Which asteroid is it, wise guy?
Person A: Psyche!
No, not potentially as large as Mars (Score:2)
The largest estimate for the size of Psyche is 253 km across. Mars is about 6800 km in diameter, enormously larger.
Mass & kinetic Energy - Extinction (Score:2)
Ok, people pointed out the complete bullshit number about the actual - inflation corrected worth.
But there is another vector that needs to be taken into consideration, that has a devastating effect on bigger space mining undertakings.
To make it short if done on a big scale space mining could change the earths orbit and rotation period.
And this is what most fly-highs do not take into consideration.
1.) every planetary body in our solar system is there and "does" that because it has a mass, and a certain kinet
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Do you have any idea how much mass would have to be transferred to Earth before this effect even becomes measurable on the homeopathic scale?
of course (Score:2)
Elkins-Tanton calculates that the iron in 16 Psyche would be worth $10,000 quadrillion ($10 quintillion).
Yes, the ten pounds of iron they'll be able to transport back will cost that because of the enormous cost of the space mission to retrieve it. But it will be worth it because of the awful iron shortage we're suffering through.
Re:What complete nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
The $10 Quadrillion figure is total baloney. You can't just take the current value and extrapolate, because the price would fall as the supply rises. A one carat diamond may be worth $10,000, but if there were suddenly a trillion of them, they would be worth next to nothing, and people would use them as gravel in their driveways.
Re:What complete nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What complete nonsense (Score:4, Interesting)
What's interesting was that at least 1/3 of the mined Spanish silver was going to China for goods there. That also caused a huge boom there as well, and poor investment. When the silver trade started drying up (due to Westphalia) the boom was over and crashed the Ming economy.
What's also interesting was that there was a huge arbitrage deal going on. In China you could exchange silver to gold 1:7, while in Europe only 1:13, so you had people sailing to China to get in on that deal, since silver was China's reserve currency, while Europe was on the gold standard.
Lastly, when the silver trade imbalance truly started getting out of hand, and Europe couldn't sell any of their products in China, Britain started to sell opium instead, and later blows up China for trying to stop the drug trade.
Sound familiar? Globalization and trade imbalances have been happening for hundreds of years, with boom and bust cycles.
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And conversely, when the Big Honcho In Japan decided to make the biggest ever bronze Buddah to put in in the Todai-ji temple, it used so much bronze that bronze was like gold in Japan afterwards.
Re:What complete nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
" one carat diamond may be worth $10,000, but if there were suddenly a trillion of them"
Between the hoards of diamonds that DeBeers keeps locked up, and the ability to make them in a lab, there are a ~trillion of them. Diamonds have no real value, go sell one "used" and you'll find out much they're worth.
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You're only thinking about trying to get the iron back to Earth to use here. Imagine a market where nations and/or corporations are building things in space. All of a sudden whoever has control of raw materials that are already in space and don't have to be shot of Earth's gravity well are very rich.
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I wonder how you're supposed to smelt it in space. Perhaps space air is flammable?
https://vk.com/video51098255_1... [vk.com]
Plenty of water, so there is fuel (Score:3)
I wonder how you're supposed to smelt it in space. Perhaps space air is flammable?
The space water is flammable after electrolysis. :-)
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You smelt using mirrors and the sun.
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You smelt using mirrors and the sun.
The asteroid belt is 3 AU from the sun, so the sunlight would be 1/9th as bright as the light that reaches earth. You would need a big mirror, but in the vacuum of space, the only heat loss would be radiant.
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"The asteroid belt is 3 AU from the sun, so the sunlight would be 1/9th as bright as the light that reaches earth. You would need a big mirror, but in the vacuum of space, the only heat loss would be radiant."
If you can mine from asteroids, you can build a big anything you want in space.
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I wonder how you're supposed to smelt it in space. Perhaps space air is flammable?
https://vk.com/video51098255_1... [vk.com]
You smelt it with the uranium you mine.
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I wonder how you're supposed to smelt it in space.
You don't smelt it; it's not in an oxidized state.
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You don't need to smelt it: smelting is a purification process. But this particular asteroid is worthless.
The first asteroid of commercial value will be a CHON asteroid very close to Earth . Moved into high orbit and used to make rocket fuel, it's a fundamental missing piece of a space economy. (Plus, the only way to ever get the fuel to move the first asteroid is if that asteroid is made of fuel). Naturally, automated robotics has a way to go first, but automated robotics seems very plausible these da
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Otherwise, yes, file it with a snake with poison strong enough to kill five elephants in a single bite under silly metrics since it's not getting to the ground to be sold.
However journalists li
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Of course it makes a LOT more sense to start with a small one that is closer or on it's way past in the first place, but we are talking seriously way out SF stuff here if we are talking about needing planetoids worth of minerals. By the time we need that much stuff we'll probably be ready to set up processing onsite in the asteroid belt in
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By the time we need that much stuff we'll probably be ready to set up processing onsite in the asteroid belt instead of moving something so huge
What is this "need" that you speak of ? There's nothing in space that would be worth the insane expense of setting up an industry in the asteroid belt.
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What is this "need" that you speak of ? There's nothing in space that would be worth the insane expense of setting up an industry in the asteroid belt.
The only way mining in space makes sense is if we have fully autonomous robots where we can send 4 of them to mars and they can go collect materials, create a forge, and start building stuff. If we ever get to that point, these same robots will have already replaced 95% of the human jobs on earth.
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I think it's in the British Museum.
It's in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
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"Dragging an asteroid into orbit isn't cheap..."
Which is why you want to do the refining and as much of the manufacturing as possible in place. Then you change the orbit of your undersea tunnel tubes or solar array scaffolding as needed.
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Re:What complete nonsense (Score:5, Interesting)
I heard the accompanying video's talking head saying "...an asteroid with so much money, it could easily solve the worlds..." and then I shut it off.
I'd much rather know what the volume of iron is, because that's actually interesting and practical. Let's do the math. Feel free to double-check me as well, as I'm just going to rush through this.
Iron costs about 80 dollars per metric tonne, according to Google. So, $10,000,000,000,000,000,000 converts to 125,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes of iron. Cast iron weighs 7.3 tonnes per cubic meter, so that's ~17,000,000,000,000,000 cubic meters of iron. That number is a bit high to visualize, so let's turn that into cubic kilometers by removing nine zeros. We're looking at 17 million cubic kilometers of iron.
Holy crap. How many Death Stars could we make out of that? According to someone on the internet, a Death Star requires 1,080,000,000,000,000 tonnes of steel. Divide our original tonnage by that and... Hell yeah, we could build a fleet of 115 Death Stars with that asteroid.
See? Now that's way more interesting and easier to visualize at the same time, right?
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So, question.......would you really build a death star out of steel?
Yes. Steel is strong, and easy to work with. The only drawback over something like titanium or carbon fiber is that it is HEAVY, but that isn't a big problem in space. The big advantage of steel is that it is cheap and plentiful, and when you need a quadrillion tonnes for just one Death Star, those costs add up.
Of course, heaviness means inertia, but travelling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, and inertia doesn't seem to be an impediment in any of the movies.
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just one Death Star
Why make only one when you can have two for twice the price ?
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If my limited knowledge of nuclear energy is correct, then iron is also the furthest you can go down the periodic table before fusion stops being energy-positive. So if we ever master fusion, we might end up with a lot of leftover iron :)
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It's hard enough to fuse hydrogen that we'll probably never do that, little well fusing neon into iron.
The Sun barely fuses hydrogen (the amount of energy produced in the core per sq. metre is quite low, there's just a lot of sq metres) and even when it reaches end of life and much more compact, it'll barely fuse helium. Iron (and nickel) are only produced in the largest stars due to the heat and pressure required.
With luck,we'll get fusing deuterium and such in a controlled energy positive manner.
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A one carat diamond may be worth $10,000, but if there were suddenly a trillion of them ...
FWIW, there are diamonds in asteroids too.
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FWIW, there are diamonds in asteroids too.
Cool. Instead of buying my GF an engagement ring, I can just buy her the naming rights to a small carbonaceous asteroid.
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FWIW, there are diamonds in asteroids too.
Where did you ever get that idea? Diamonds are only formed under conditions you will find on a planetary body [wikipedia.org]:
Most natural diamonds are formed at high temperature and pressure at depths of 140 to 190 kilometers (87 to 118 mi) in the Earth's mantle. Carbon-containing minerals provide the carbon source, and the growth occurs over periods from 1 billion to 3.3 billion years (25% to 75% of the age of the Earth).
Ain't gonna happen on an asteroid. A basic rule of thumb is that asteroids will only contain igneous materials, never sedimentary or metamorphic.
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Replying to myself with one caveat: there are lots of tiny diamonds [mining.com] in asteroids, formed mostly by pressure in collisions involving carbonaceous objects. Different animals, but still "diamonds" in the crystallographic sense.
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A one carat diamond may be worth $10,000, but if there were suddenly a trillion of them, they would be worth next to nothing, and people would use them as gravel in their driveways.
It's funny you should mention that. Suppose that if there was a trillion of them, and suppose they were controlled by one monopoly who could regulate the supply say by hording cut diamonds and trickling them out into the economy. You'd actually be in a very similar position to where we are today.
Diamonds are not rare, we can manufacture them quite easily without imperfection. A 1ct diamond can be made for under $2500 The value comes from the fact that people want the single biggest one, all natural dug out
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"Now if I had an asteroid in my back yard worth $10 quadrillion, do you think I'll just sell it on the open market at once?"
Yes you would, because as soon as the technology exists to exploit asteroidal materials, any rise in market price of your product will cause other asteroids to be mined. Even if Phyche is the exact best place to mine because of its status as a planetary core, there are plenty of other bodies in the same region of space that are almost as good.
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A one carat diamond may be worth $10,000, but if there were suddenly a trillion of them, they would be worth next to nothing, and people would use them as gravel in their driveways.
Unless some company had a total monopoly on diamonds and used it to keep diamond prices artificially high. #debeers
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You misunderstand. The asteroid has bank accounts worth 10 quintillion space bucks, and we're going to go try hacking the asteroid to steal it's money. Obviously bringing all that iron ore back to earth wouldn't give us 10 quadrillion bucks!
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It is true that if you dumped all that metal on the market, its price would plummet. But that doesn't actually reduce the value of that metal.
Price and value are two different things. The value of that metal is described by the stuff that you can build from it: bridges, towers, spacecraft, etc. That value doesn't actually change by having more of the stuff avai
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And avoiding recessions is not necessarily a good thing.
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Re: What complete nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a point where raising the minimum wage continues to be beneficial; we have not reached that point, but I highly doubt it's more than about $15-20/hr at this time.
The reason it continues to be beneficial is that price increases are still slower than wage increases up to a certain point. If we want a viable economy, money needs to change hands - and people at the bottom end of the wage scale are going to spend most of their money pretty much no matter what, which means that money changes hands more often.
Yes, the "rich" (more appropriately, the entrepreneurial class, regardless of the amount of money they have) need an incentive to actually create jobs... but a lot of people at the top end aren't interested in that, they just want to keep their money stagnant because it's safer to do that and keep people from breaking into whatever their pet industry is (which might cause - horrors! - competition) than to, you know, actually put it to active use.
In short: there's a fucking middle ground between "no raises in the minimum wage" and "minimum wage needs to be enough that someone working 20hrs/week can support a whole family" and that's where we really should be aiming for.
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Re: What complete nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
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So the $15/hr target is too high. If you target the poverty level for a family of 4 (assuming it's a single income family), the target is $12.12/hr. Poverty level for a single person is $11,770/yr, which translates into $5.89/hr, which is actually below the current minimum wage of $7.25/hr. So the current minimum wage is in the right
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right now health insurance companies cost you about 30 cents for every dollar of your health care.(obamacare limits it to 20 cents) Adminstration of health care costs you 90 cents for your dollar.
how much more health care could be provided if adminstration costs could be cut back?
The USA has a very top heavy infrastructure and not enough grunts in the fields. everything is that way. businesses government etc.
the finance guys and upper management wont' mention it since it is their salaries at stake, but t
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Certainly higher education is like that.
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"I have never met anybody that thinks we should give unlimited amounts of money to colleges and health insurance companies."
Then you must not work for the government.
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I have never met anybody that thinks we should give unlimited amounts of money to colleges and health insurance companies.
Yes, but arguing with sensible proposals is too hard.
Re:What complete nonsense (Score:4, Interesting)
Ten thousand quadrillion. By comparison, the total value of EVERYTHING WE EVER DID as a race amounts to about two quadrillion as per:
https://xkcd.com/980/huge/#x=-... [xkcd.com] (link looks odd because it's one of his large-scale images, zoomed in on the appropriate area)
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If you compare to the fictional Ringworld in Larry Niven's N-space universe, a strip that's 1,600,000 km wide, fans have estimated the mass to be the mass of Jupiter, which is just over 2/3 of the mass of the Solar System sans the Sun itself, without respect for composition of the Solar System.
To look at something more practical, in David Weber's Honor Harrington uni
Re:There's a lot more iron much closer... (Score:5, Informative)
And there's some twenty million tons of gold dissolved in the Earth's oceans. Jules Verne made it the source of Captain Nemo's incredible wealth.
To put twenty million tons of gold in perspective, all the gold that has ever been mined by humans totals up to about 180 thousand tons. To put in another perspective: sure, it's gold, but at a concentration of thirteen billionths of a gram per liter of seawater it's worthless unless you have unlimited time and energy to extract it.
That's the problem with asteroid mining in general. Until the cost of changing an object's momentum goes down drastically it's not worth doing. If Pysche were a 1000 kg block of pure, refined platinum (market price: $34 million) you'd be hard-pressed to retrieve it and return it to Earth at a profit. Which is not to say asteroid mining is a bad idea; but first things first: you've got to reduce the price of interplanetary propulsion by a couple orders of magnitudes. One thing that never happens in a sci-fi asteroid mining scenario is the hero worrying about running out of gas. Propulsion in stories is always practically limitless and free of charge. Real propulsion will never be that good, but it could get good enough.