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| Stephen Brooks 2002-11-20 12:52:01 | Tom King labelled an asteroid "$35" on a Yahoo whiteboarding session just now. This lead me to wonder how much an asteroid will really cost. Assuming the net worth of the whole asteroid belt to be £100bn, I found this site, which estimates between 1.1 and 1.9 million asteroids over 1km in diameter, meaning a typical one will cost £60-90k. Of course my net worth estimate is pure guesswork. It could be trillions, but on the other hand asteroids aren't really _that_ exciting - they're mostly just lumps of rhubarb. Some have precious elements in them but they aren't really a gold mine. "As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline" [This message was edited by Stephen Brooks on 2002-Dec-01 at 2:52.] |
| [DPC] Jive 2002-12-02 07:46:04 | Makes u think about worth. An asteroid's worth pure on it's ore-resources could be very little, compared to it's worth as a resource-hop for it's location (consider the cost of moving the resources by itself from it's current location) or as a place to mine the resources when u are hopping onwards outside the sol-system. A hydrogen asteroid could be of more worth out there on the fringe for a couple of hydrogen-propulsion based spaceships than the entire amount of gold which currently reside on American (or european for that matter) soil. So thinking like that, i'd say that some asteroids worth is beyond our comprehensive measure (like gazillions of trillions of billions of Euro's) based on their location (free-floating in space with very little gravity). |
| Stephen Brooks 2002-12-02 16:05:15 | If they could build inside an asteroid in such a way that it was vacuum-sealed, they might be able to dramatically reduce the costs of making large space colonies: they'd only need bulkheads in the entrances and exits and just dig out the rest. (This all rests on fairly strong assumptions about the internal makeup of asteroids though). "As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline" |
| [DPC] Jive 2002-12-03 07:07:26 | All the resources they need they can dig out. So essentially u would only need a flying concrete-factory & some digging equipment. Maybee a ore-smelter to process the metals for the bulkheads ... But that would be all u needed to make a flying rock i suppose. |
| Stephen Brooks 2002-12-03 14:06:19 | Do you know the ship in Red Dwarf? I think it was built a bit like that because it has half an asteroid sticking out one side.  From what I know of asteroids, when the planetesimals were forming, some of them got hot enough and large enough to "differentiate" into layers so the iron sunk to the bottom and the rocky and coal-like stuff rose to the top. Then they got smashed up, so among the asteroids you've got a few that are like big chunks of iron. I'd imagine these would be solid enough to be vacuum-sealed, although a REAL PAIN to tunnel into  . I seem to remember the mineral-rich layers are suspected to be at the iron/rock boundaries on the differentiated asteroids."As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline" |
| Kileran 2006-05-22 06:53:37 | Not sure if your still interested, but the asteroid belt has been since priced, using the data you have (1.1 and 1.9 million asteroids at 1km diameter) as well as a pricing structure estimating the raw cost of the asteroids, based on estimates of mineral composition. I dont remember the final math, i do however remember this. if it was all mined, there would be enough for every person on earth to pocket over 200 billion dollars each. |
