Hubble Telescope Captures a Rare Asteroid Worth 70k Times the Global Economy

So, everyone here has realized how inane this article is given that it doesn&#x27;t account for the price of Fe and Ni plummeting once this much supply is introduced to the market.<p>But what is the actual value of something like this? Surely something comparable has happened in the past where a big reserve of some rare mineral has been found and monopolized, and its price didn&#x27;t go to zero.

Rare materials are valuable because they&#x27;re rare. If we brought Psyche16 home, they wouldn&#x27;t be rare, and wouldn&#x27;t be valuable.<p>Additionally, a lot of the value of Psyche16 is in iron and nickel. Those aren&#x27;t rare on Earth -- most of the cost of iron and nickel is labour and energy in mining &amp; refining them. Yes, Psyche16 is much more pure than currently accessible Earth ores, but that&#x27;s more than offset by the fact that it&#x27;s in outer space.

The true value of it is not on earth but in space itself.<p>If it is used to build mega city sized space station then its value would be multi fold of that on earth.

I wonder if there&#x27;s a way you could calculate it&#x27;s &quot;true&quot; value, which would account for the diminished cost of nickel and iron such an extracted asteroid would surely cause. I&#x27;m thinking how aluminum used to be worth more than gold and an estimate from the mid-late 19th century would say that we should all be rich from abundant aluminum.

&gt; If they could just kindly bring the asteroid back, every person on the planet—all 7.5 billion of us—would get roughly $1.3 billion.<p>As long as you ignore the laws of supply in demand.

Perhaps there’s more value in bringing it home to an Earth orbit rather than landing it. Then using it for space based manufacturing. The cost savings of not having to lift that much metal from the gravity well may be the asteroid’s real value.

&gt; every person on the planet—all 7.5 billion of us—would get roughly $1.3 billion.<p>This is Cunningham&#x27;s Law applied to attract publicity.

The article is a bit sensationalist and free of substance. The asteroid is interesting though. NASA finds it so interesting in fact that they will have a space probe visit it in 2026 (it will launch next year and take 4 years to go there) [1]<p>What&#x27;s the realistic potential profit from this asteroid in terms of space mining? Obviously not trillions. Anything you mine there you need to bring back, and the delta-v from the asteroid belt to low earth orbit is about 5 km&#x2F;s. From the rocket equation it follows that you need about 2 tons of propellant for each ton of cargo. But unfortunately, you&#x27;ll need to bring that fuel with you from the Earth. You end up with many, many tons of propellant for each ton of cargo. So anything that has a price less than about 10 times the cost of the propellant has no chance of ever being profitable, so iron and nickel are out.<p>Gold is not though. Or platinum, or other precious metals.<p>All in all, the wikipedia page on potential space mining projects lists the estimated profit from this asteroid at $1.78 BN. [2]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;solarsystem.nasa.gov&#x2F;asteroids-comets-and-meteors&#x2F;asteroids&#x2F;16-psyche&#x2F;in-depth&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;solarsystem.nasa.gov&#x2F;asteroids-comets-and-meteors&#x2F;as...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Asteroid_mining#Potential_targets" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Asteroid_mining#Potential_targ...</a>

Headlines like this are what keep the average person so far away from understanding money and economics. It&#x27;s so absurd for so many reasons.

Rare metals are nice but I like carbonaceous chondrite asteroids better... the ones that are fikked with gas and coal and have some kind of skin that keeps in the gas.

A Nickel (USA 5-cent coin) weighs almost exactly 5g, which is useful to know.<p>So 200 nickels is a kg.<p>16 Psyche&#x27;s mass is 2.72x10^19 kg. Let&#x27;s say 10^19 kgs of that is nickel.<p>With that you could mint 2x10^21 US-nickels, equivalent to 10^20 US-dollars.<p>The article reports that the asteroid is only worth 10^19 US-dollars, so we could buy 10 more asteroids with all the nickels from 16 Psyche.<p>And thus solve all the world&#x27;s problems.

Could anyone explain how exactly they know an asteroid is made out of certain material?<p>What data are they observing from a telescope that tells them it’s iron and nickel, vs some other metal, vs rock? Especially with such precision around the composition

To put this into context, this is enough to build dozens of Death Stars.

I wonder how much refinement the metals in an asteroid like this might require. Are we’re talking saudi oil, or Canadian oil sands?

Will definitely play a role in the Forbes richest person in the solar system one day.

Does anyone else find it annoying that people have been valuing objects in space?

Beltalowda, walowda ke!