Polywell on the Moon?

MirariNefas · Post by **MirariNefas** » Fri Oct 23, 2009 9:23 pm

10,000 tons of platinum? What would that do to the price of platinum?

Let's see, platinum goes for about $1360/oz right now (http://www.kitco.com/charts/liveplatinum.html). At 28.35 grams per ounce, that's $47.97 per gram. That's $47,970,000 per tonne. Wikipedia tells me that 239 tonnes of platinum were sold in 2006, so that would be a value of about $11.9 billion per year in the global platinum trade.

10,000 tonnes of platinum would clearly shock the price down - who knows how low. But the overall total value of platinum traded would go up, with new demand opening up at lower prices.

The 10,000 tonnes would effectively give you 98% of the market if you could sell it all. Maybe more, if Earth-side producers decide it isn't worth mining platinum anymore. Let's pretend that the world is only willing to spend the current amount of $11.9 billion on platinum no matter how much is available, and that for some strange reason you must sell it all in one year. You'd still get 98% of the $11.9 billion market. An increase in supply will never shrink a market (edit* okay, maybe eventually you could saturate it, but this isn't likely with a few asteroids). This would say that space mining is worth at least $11.9 billion a year.

You rapidly run into diminishing marginal returns of course. If you only get one asteroid, you wouldn't sell it all at once. You'd split it up and dole out the pieces for ten years and make $120+ billion. You'd make $11.9+ billion per year, with the lowest costs per year because it only takes one mission. Another mission doesn't double the worth of platinum you can sell per year. The missions do get a bit cheaper though, but it probably wouldn't take that many missions in a ten year time frame before you've maxed your per mission value. Maybe two or three.

Of course, there are other metals out there. 10k tonnes of platinum plus 10k tonnes of gold plus 10k tonnes of scandium and so on can add up to a lot of mining missions per decade and a lot of value per year. I think that a value of $100 billion per year from space resources is a highly conservative estimate.

MirariNefas · Post by **MirariNefas** » Fri Oct 23, 2009 9:59 pm

Let's do this again with gold. Gold is going for about $1050 per ounce (http://www.kitco.com/charts/livegold.html). That converts to $37.5 million/tonne. Wikipedia says in 2001 2604 tonnes was mined, totaling 67% of gold demand for that year (the rest presumably comes from something other than mining). So, there is a demand for 3904 tonnes per year in 2001. If that's similar to today, using today's prices we get a value of $146.4 billion/year. If the total value of the market remained unchanged and again you had to sell your asteroid resources all at once, you'd get 72% of the $146.4 billion market, for a total value of $105.4 billion. This is basically minimum value - if you split it up and sold it over time, it would end up coming in somewhere between that and a maximum of $375 billion at today's unchanged prices.

Aero · Post by **Aero** » Sat Oct 24, 2009 1:05 am

I used to do placer mining for gold as a hobby. Its very convenient to measure gold in little one ounce vials and carry concentrated sands in 5 gallon buckets. The asteroid miner needs 2.734700335 five gallon buckets of pure gold to mass a tonne. Ten thousand tonnes is a lot of buckets. In fact, it is 517.5983437 cubic meters of gold by volume.

It would take a lot of reaction mass to generate the delta V needed to inject the gold into an Earth return orbit. It has to get there in time to pay down the mission debt. I guess this is why we need advanced space propulsion systems and space colonization.

I read somewhere that water, carried to the moon is worth five times its weight in gold on Earth. We have to find the consumables locally in the belt, mine and refine them there, then send our product (gold) to Earth. That means we start with the asteroid belt scouting missions that Tom wrote about. And I think it all falls apart if we're stuck with chemical propulsion.

kunkmiester · Post by **kunkmiester** » Sat Oct 24, 2009 1:48 am

Would ten years be unreasonable for the length of a return orbit? I'd imagine the energy is only massive if you want to get it back very quickly. A manned mining ship would want to, but the product, or a robotic system, wouldn't really care.

They talk about using pretty small amounts of thrust to move asteroids around, smaller chunks of metal would be easier. Even easier still is to find a "near-earth" asteroid that's already on a good heading, and knock it into a parallel or even high earth orbit.

I've always seen future ships made of iron, not titanium or something. Why? Because even at the lower costs, you still have to move most such material into orbit. If you have iron in orbit, it's easier to work, and orbit-to-orbit work is less mass sensitive--an iron framed/hulled ship is less of a liability. Save the light stuff for the landers.

Aero · Post by **Aero** » Sat Oct 24, 2009 2:40 am

Would ten years be unreasonable for the length of a return orbit? I'd imagine the energy is only massive if you want to get it back very quickly. A manned mining ship would want to, but the product, or a robotic system, wouldn't really care.

Maybe you could send some of it on a 10 year trip, but economics is going to require some penalty if you don't start paying soon. I guess it depends on the specifics of your contract with your backers.

You might also be concerned about hijackers. The longer your gold is up there, the more chances for some nefarious persons to figure out how to profit by it. Steal it directly or indirectly by selling short on the market when it gets here. Better to have it dribble in a few buckets at a time if you can do that.

pfrit · Post by **pfrit** » Sat Oct 24, 2009 3:14 pm

I remember reading that if we discovered gold bricks just sitting on the moon, it would not be profitable to go and get them. Now, that argument is specious for at least two reasons and I will let the reader come up with the reasons why for themselves, but the point DOES reflect something valid. If you want to mine something in space, would it be cheaper/easier than mining the Earth's mantle?

MirariNefas · Post by **MirariNefas** » Sat Oct 24, 2009 7:03 pm

Aero wrote:Better to have it dribble in a few buckets at a time if you can do that.

I completely agree.

pfrit wrote:I remember reading that if we discovered gold bricks just sitting on the moon, it would not be profitable to go and get them. Now, that argument is specious for at least two reasons and I will let the reader come up with the reasons why for themselves, but the point DOES reflect something valid. If you want to mine something in space, would it be cheaper/easier than mining the Earth's mantle?

If you want to send up a person to go pick up ten gold bricks, then no. If you want to send up some system to harvest ten thousand gold bricks, then things get tricky.

When you only want a little bit of something, you're paying for a lot of technology and infrastructure development for a single trip. When you want a lot of something, your dollars per pound goes down. Eventually, I'm confidant that the dollars per pound would be reasonable.

After that comes the actual mining process. The mantle is high energy, high pressure, doesn't have a high ppm of gold, I can only imagine there would be outgassing, and all the non-gold material would end up being dumped somewhere with chemical repercussions for the local ecosystem. As far as I know none of our boreholes has yet reached the mantle, so I expect developing a mining system like this would be extremely expensive.

Would things be easier in space? Well, nobody's tried. Someone needs to fund some drill demos in space, and whatever other equipment is needed. NASA funds competitions to develop systems for pulling oxygen out of lunar dirt, and similar programs are needed for harvesting other materials from asteroids. Considering how apparently concentrated some asteroids seem to be with high value materials though, I expect the actual extraction process wouldn't be that bad. Mostly I think the limiter is the cost of rocketry.

MSimon · Post by **MSimon** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 12:54 pm

chrismb wrote:
Tom Ligon wrote:10,000 tons of platinum? What would that do to the price of platinum?
Thinking a moment longer on that, it is a bit bizarre, really. Are we really saying that we actually don't want platinum, but actually we only want what the earth has got and in limited supplies so as to hold the 'price' up!?!

As I suggested before, in the future they won't have 'money' as we know it today and such an idea that there actually may not be value in bringing scarce resources back to earth will be looked upon as completely bonkers.

This is the absolute, core problem with 'wealth' and 'money'. If the prime object is getting rich (which is the key purpose of being in business and/or getting 'shareholder value') then technology and resources are pointless. There were plenty of rich people 5,000 years ago. This cannot be an objective. The objective has to be to give everyone all that they can possibly want. But that'd mean the 'rich' people aren't 'rich' any more so they'll keep brainwashing you that this is a wrong conclusion.

You are up against human nature chris. Humans want stuff. Stuff attracts mates. Males just love mating.

Now if you can drive down the marginal value of stuff to zero you may have a point. And who will do the driving? Humans who want stuff to attract mates.

Like all Marxists (or utopians in general) you assume we are there already (i.e. the marginal cost of the next bit of stuff is zero). We are not there. It would be stupid to kill the incentive system until we get to the desired end.

chrismb · Post by **chrismb** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 1:52 pm

I'm not suggesting the transition can be made now, or even begun to be contemplated, but we should, as intellectual beings, either be drawing up a road-map [viz. building up a strategic philosophical culture] to that point or just saying "ah, what the hell, once we've used up all the resources and discovered everything we think we can discover, then we just climb back up the trees". This isn't a 5 year business plan. It's not a 500 year plan for the culture. It's a 500,000 year plan to ensure we're not only still alive but better then than we are now. That next 500,000 years begins today. The fact that the general culture denegrates technological success, e.g. prefers to acclaim sportsmen who've won a match than engineers who have just built a bridge, says to me the "Western" culture I live in is in the "up-the-trees" bracket. But that is no reason not to work to higher ideals.

MSimon · Post by **MSimon** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 4:24 pm

Chris,

The road map is already on the drawing board in the rip-rap (is that the proper term?) community.

Or any of the other technologies for "instant" prototypes.

http://www.robocommunity.com/blog/entry ... st-of-us-/

MSimon · Post by **MSimon** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 4:32 pm

chrismb wrote:I'm not suggesting the transition can be made now, or even begun to be contemplated, but we should, as intellectual beings, either be drawing up a road-map [viz. building up a strategic philosophical culture] to that point or just saying "ah, what the hell, once we've used up all the resources and discovered everything we think we can discover, then we just climb back up the trees". This isn't a 5 year business plan. It's not a 500 year plan for the culture. It's a 500,000 year plan to ensure we're not only still alive but better then than we are now. That next 500,000 years begins today. The fact that the general culture denegrates technological success, e.g. prefers to acclaim sportsmen who've won a match than engineers who have just built a bridge, says to me the "Western" culture I live in is in the "up-the-trees" bracket. But that is no reason not to work to higher ideals.

Yeah. Engineers don't get no respect. And scientists hardly any more. So what else is new?

What is an IQ 100 going to get about the work of an IQ 140? Not much. It is like two different species. Heck. I'm moderately bright and I don't get most of what the Field Medal winners do. They are in a different world from mine.

Any way it is why I like hanging out around here. Lots of scientists and engineers. My kind of people.

pfrit · Post by **pfrit** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 7:19 pm

MirariNefas wrote: When you only want a little bit of something, you're paying for a lot of technology and infrastructure development for a single trip. When you want a lot of something, your dollars per pound goes down. Eventually, I'm confidant that the dollars per pound would be reasonable.

Economies of scale was one of the two that I was thinking. The other is cost reduction. If you are going for other reasons, than any additional reduction of costs would be benificial.

MirariNefas wrote: After that comes the actual mining process. The mantle is high energy, high pressure, doesn't have a high ppm of gold, I can only imagine there would be outgassing, and all the non-gold material would end up being dumped somewhere with chemical repercussions for the local ecosystem. As far as I know none of our boreholes has yet reached the mantle, so I expect developing a mining system like this would be extremely expensive.

Would things be easier in space? Well, nobody's tried. Someone needs to fund some drill demos in space, and whatever other equipment is needed. NASA funds competitions to develop systems for pulling oxygen out of lunar dirt, and similar programs are needed for harvesting other materials from asteroids. Considering how apparently concentrated some asteroids seem to be with high value materials though, I expect the actual extraction process wouldn't be that bad. Mostly I think the limiter is the cost of rocketry.

If you consider the problems with space mining, you will appreciate that Mantle mining is easier. Not easy, just easier. People can't live in space. Ignore the lack of air and that the nearest grocery store in more than just around the corner. The radiation and zero gee effects eliminate more than short trips for humans into space for the foreseeable future. Given that, the tech you would need to develop for remote mining serves the same purpose for Mantle mining. Any solutions you find are used easier and more effectively at the bottom of the well. That does not mean that there are not good reasons to send people to space, but profit is not one of those reasons. Unless the reason deals with zero gee or vacuum, it will almost always be more profitable on (or under) Earth. At most, there could be some profitable reasons for building things in orbit, but not the Moon or Mars or worse yet, the asteroids. However, if you are going there anyway, you might find ways to do profitable exercises to defray the costs of going.

UncleMatt · Post by **UncleMatt** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 9:34 pm

I am wondering why no one has brought up Helium3? It is VERY scare on earth, yet it is all over the moon in quantities that could serve as fuel for fusion reactors for many thousands of years. THAT is where the value is with regard to harvestable resources on the moon, not in gold bars or platinum.

pfrit · Post by **pfrit** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 9:38 pm

UncleMatt wrote:I am wondering why no one has brought up Helium3? It is VERY scare on earth, yet it is all over the moon in quantities that could serve as fuel for fusion reactors for many thousands of years. THAT is where the value is with regard to harvestable resources on the moon, not in gold bars or platinum.

It would be cheaper to harvest He3 on Earth (not cheap) but no one has a profitable use for it yet. Even if we had a fusion reactor that could be run profitable that required He3, you would still only need grams. Maybe Kilograms. Not worth going to the moon for. Mine it on Earth, at least until you need tons.

UncleMatt · Post by **UncleMatt** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 9:46 pm

pfrit wrote:
UncleMatt wrote:I am wondering why no one has brought up Helium3? It is VERY scare on earth, yet it is all over the moon in quantities that could serve as fuel for fusion reactors for many thousands of years. THAT is where the value is with regard to harvestable resources on the moon, not in gold bars or platinum.
It would be cheaper to harvest He3 on Earth (not cheap) but no one has a profitable use for it yet. Even if we had a fusion reactor that could be run profitable that required He3, you would still only need grams. Maybe Kilograms. Not worth going to the moon for. Mine it on Earth, at least until you need tons.

I don't think it exists in minable amount on earth. The nearest source is the moon. If it were available in the amounts found there, it would spur research into getting a reactor up and running that could use it. Current estimates place the amount on the moon being able to power the whole world at 3 times our current energy usage for over 10,000 years. Plenty of reason to go to the moon and get it...