Lab-grown diamonds have helped diamond prices plunge 60%, and former monopolist De Beers is in crisis mode. One day asteroid mining will do the same for gold.
Diamond prices are down 60% since a 2011 high, and they are still falling. It's not all down to lab-grown diamonds, demand is down too, especially in China.
No one can lab-grow gold yet, so its rarity and scarcity protect its value, but that will end too. It's just a question of when. China launched an asteroid touch-down mission this week, which will make it the 4th country/region to do so, after Europe, the US & Japan.
How soon will it be feasible to mine asteroids? Who knows, but a breakthrough in space propulsion might mean the prospect happens quickly when it does. It's possible gold has twenty years or less of being high value left.
Would that really help though? Gold is super soft so I think it would need to get frequently coated/plated again --- and we already have pretty good and resistant marine paint.
Titanium is very corrosion resistant, not to mention plastics/fiberglass/carbon fiber, as I understand.
But yeah, cheap gold would be be great, just seems to me that the market would more be in e.g. electronics, where both corrosion resistance and electrical conductivity are required (something gold is fairly unique at).
Low wear resistance of gold is a significant issue, which definitely limits the number of potential applications, but I guess gold alloys could still be useful. For example, titanium has a bunch of alloys for different purposes, some more corrosion resistant than others, while others were optimized more towards wear resistance.
Titanium can also catch fire, which makes it a very tricky metal to use. Putting out a fire like that is pretty much impossible, so if your titanium cladded reactor catches fire, all you can realistically do is try to prevent the rest of the building from burning down. The reactor itself is gone at that point, so all you can do is wish you had paid for the gold cladding instead.
Also, the electrical conductivity of gold is amazing. If gold was as cheap as iron, we would definitely use lots of it in various electrical appliances.
If you can mine gold from asteroids, you're probably also going to find silver and platinum. Those two have some amazing properties too, so I think asteroid mining has great potential to permanently revolutionize a bunch of industries.
It's good to see diamond mining being replaced by artificial diamond manufacturing, which appears to be better envitonmentally and socially.
But I wouldn't compare diamonds to gold. Because gold is an element that can't be manufactured (without a particule accelerator and an insane amount of energy).
I'm skeptical about the feasibility of transporting heavy metals through space. Also, diamond were never scarce, it was all literally market manipulation.
Eh they are already moving a good clip relative to the earth, nudging them in this direction would be the easier part of the equation. Stopping them when they get here is probably where you want to focus your energy... No pun intended
Drill and blast seems like it should work as normal, or just a bucket if it's the rubble heap kind. Getting noble metals like gold out of a solution is pretty easy with electrowinning.
I find the idea so dumb that we have a high value for a metal that objectively has few worthwhile uses. And because our folklore made up a high value from this. We’re gonna spend hella resources to extract it from fucking asteroids. Even tho it has no objective major value.
(Imagine how many people we could feed with those resources instead)
While I agree it is overvalued, what really put it into perspective for me is that all of the known gold in the world would fit into a cube with a side length of 20-25m.
So a fair price would be lower than what it is now, but it is scarce and its uses (corrosion resistance, conductivity, malleability, reflectivity, etc.) probably would still warrant a relatively high price.
Yeah, I just can't understand why people would pay more money for something that looks objectively nicer.
Fuck shiny polished gold, that is more easily made into jewelry, doesn't react with skin, compliments many gemstones, and doesn't significantly corrode, I want a pig iron wedding ring.
It’s abundant though. We have thousands more times gold in circulation than used as jewellery. So if it were just jewellery then it’s be dirt cheap.
The reason its so expensive is people use it as investment. Like they hold massive amounts of it. It’s like a made up commodity.
Gold has plenty of uses, besides being shiny and easy to work with. Imagine if all your electronics used gold traces because they were so cheap. Imagine if the windows of your car were coated in gold like on an airplane so you could easily defrost them in the winter rather than blowing air at it in the front and potentially distracting lines in the back. Imagine if gold was the filling of choice since it has a similar expansion rate to teeth. Gold has a number of applications in space. Ever wonder why the JWST is that color?
There are plenty of things gold would be excellent for if it wasn't so expensive.
Only 7.16% of gold usage is for technology. The other 92.84% are just for purposes of being shiny. If we dropped gold from jewellery and as a proxy for money, there would be more than enough gold to go around and the price of gold would drop a lot.
There are many many more materials than just gold that could be extracted from asteroids.
But sure, establishing the infrastructure to make it commercially viable is a huge investment and won't be commercially viable for a while. (Think about missions like Hayabusa that cost hundreds of millions to bilLions, but retrieved "just" a couple of gram of material.)
I suspect asteroid mining won't be profitable unless we are able to use the materials to build stuff in space. It costs so much to launch stuff into space that a ton of say iron is going to be worth much more there than on earth. Whether we'll ever reach that stage is anyone's guess but I hope so.
True if used in production. But it's used to store value. If I know gold will be worth 50% next year, I am not willing to pay full price today if I want to resell it then.
Ah, yes, the notoriously accessible and inexpensive field of launching rockets, landing said rocket on a giant sized bullet so a robot can go drill in it for weeks to dig up thousands of pounds of rock, lifting the robot that now weighs significantly more off of the giant bullet, and safely returning it to our larger, slightly slower bullet.
Diamonds are just carbon atoms arranged in a particular repeating structure (a lattice). So you can go from, say, graphite to diamond without touching the atoms themselves.
Gold, on the other hand is not about structure, but the atomic cores themselves, which contain exactly 79 protons. Going from one type of atom to another type requires some form of fission (breaking larger cores into smaller pieces) or fusion (smashing two smaller cores together). I don't think there are (viable) fission "recipes" that yield gold. And fusion requires insanely high temperatures or pressures even for smaller atoms (were talking center of the sun here).
Well, you can make gold atoms (see here), but it takes many times more energy per atom because the energy contained in the bonds between neutrons and protons in the nucleous of atoms is many-fold the energy contained in the bonds between atoms (just see the difference in potency of conventional explosives - which release energy contained in the links between atoms - and fission and fusion bombs - which release the energy contained in the bonds within the atomic nucleous) hence it's not really an economic viable way of making gold.