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.
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.
The $80 Billion Diamond Market Crash Leaves De Beers Reeling
Have we even confirmed there are asteroids made of gold yet?
Good source of iridium, which is rare on earth
Asteroid might remain too expensive if it's even possible, with rocket fuel, mining equipment in space,etc
Can’t wait for the day when we can have proper corrosion resistant materials. Just gold plate the hull of a ship, and salt water can’t do much.
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).
Yeah, well maybe ships weren't the best example.
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).
Asteroid mining is still science fiction.
Right? Diamond is a crystal of Carbon. Its synthesis was a challenge, required high pressure, but sounde doable from the beggining.
Now, transmuting one element into other (gold)... That's atomic energy right there. A whole new level.
I'm skeptical about the feasibility of transporting heavy metals through space. Also, diamond were never scarce, it was all literally market manipulation.
Yes, if diamonds were rare I wouldn't have a diamond tipped drillbit set and several diamond saws. "Blah blah" quality ... sure ... but rare is rare.
Why wouldn't it be feasible to transport heavy metals through space? They would just float.
Shooting stuff into space is hard, bringing it back to Earth is harder.
The breaktrough for asteroid mining isn't propulsion but how to mine and process ore in a vacuum.
Excellent. One of Israels biggest exports is finished gemstones. I hope they are crushed.
they don't mine them. just process them. not sure it's lowering the cost of raw diamonds will change the processing cost.
its morning and haven't had my coffee, so I'm on instinct. I feel like it would lower the cost.
It's possible gold has twenty years or less of being high value left.
In 20 years florida and NYC may be underwater.
In 20 years Flordians won't have teeth.
They can replace them with gold teeth for rock bottom prices!
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.
still one of humanity's less stupid ideas, even so.
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.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-industry-sector-share/
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.
Asteroid mining would collapse the markets for most minerals, except perhaps the higher volume stuff like iron.
But the plummeting price of gold from the abundance would make the asteroid mining commercially nonviable. As an aside, only 7.16% of the gold demand in the world is actually for technology: https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-industry-sector-share/
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.)
If the price of gold plunges one day, it should already plunge today. In other words, the probability for success of those mining operations is low.
Why should it already plunge today? The demand/supply is still the same.
But it will not be the same when asteroid mining increases the supply tenfold.
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.
Why not lab grown gold?
*(it's not a serious question)
Because of nuclear physics.
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).
Alchemists have been trying for thousands of years, you're welcome to join them
Now we call them nuclear physicists
they actually made gold from lead, in the hadron collider. but it was a few particles, and very unstable, still gold!
Diamonds are just Carbon atoms in Chrystal form.
You can take carbon from say coal, turn it into a Chrystal and you've got a diamond.
Gold is just gold atoms, you can't make gold atoms
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.
Careful there, you'll trigger a lot of gold worshiping tryhards
Neat! Let it come down to it's real value.
The rocket equation wants to have words with you.
If one day there are folks mining asteroids for gold they will not be humans as we will make ourselves extinct before that ever happens.