MATT O'DOWD: Thank
you to Audible.com for supporting PBS
Digital Studios. Quietly on January
1, 2009, a company called Arkyd
Astronautics was formed, a secretive organization
with a cryptic name and with ties to billionaires
like XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis and James Cameron. In 2012, they revealed
their plan to the world. Under the banner of a new
company, Planetary Resources, they would mine asteroids
for their precious resources and perhaps save the
world along the way. The richest person
in modern history was John Davis Rockefeller. His net worth was
three times greater than that of our richest
tech billionaires, inflation adjusted. And the source of that fortune-- timely exploitation of a vast,
then-untapped natural resource, oil. Well, the days of
oil may be numbered, but there's another
natural resource that's never been touched,
is effectively inexhaustible, and has a dollar
value large enough to disrupt entire economies. That resource-- asteroids
and the precious materials they contain. Astrophysicist
Neil deGrasse Tyson predicts that the world's
first trillionaire will be an asteroid miner. The Rockefellers
of the 21st century may be less like the
internet and tech moguls of the 20th century and
more like the old-school oil barons of the 19th. But asteroid mining isn't
the same as drilling a hole and hoping black
gold spurts out. It will take years of work
by dedicated engineers and scientists and
billions of dollars to extract the
first dollar's worth of useful asteroid material. So will it happen? Can it happen? To answer this question, we need
to learn a bit about asteroids. Asteroids, along with
comets, are leftover material from the formation
of the solar system. They range from a
meter or so to hundreds of kilometers in diameter,
and they live primarily in the asteroid belt
between Mars and Jupiter. There are also a
few smaller groups of asteroids inhabiting
different regions and orbits in the inner solar
system, including some that cross Earth's orbit. As you'll see, these
will become important. Unlike the more-icy comets
of the outer solar system, asteroids are rocky or metallic. They are the stuff of
the terrestrial planets, the building blocks of
worlds like the Earth that never managed to pull
themselves together. The most abundant asteroids
are C-type or carbonaceous asteroids, constituting
3/4 of all known asteroids. They have high abundance of
water, an extremely valuable resource in space. And I'll explain why in a sec. C-type asteroids do contain
some valuable heavy elements, but not as much as some of
the other asteroid types. For example, S-type, or
silicaceous asteroids, they make up roughly
17% of the asteroids and contain, you
guessed it, silicates. They're rocks. They contain more-valuable
elements than C-type, so a good amount
of iron and nickel, and a smattering of
more-precious stuff that I'll get back to. Third-most abundant
are M-type asteroids. That's M for metallic. Most are big chunks
of iron and nickel. These are the leftover cores
of larger asteroids that were destroyed by collisions. If an asteroid is
massive enough, it will undergo a process
called differentiation. During its formation
when it's still a giant bowl of
molten space rock, heavier iron and nickel will
sink to the asteroid's center. Smash that asteroid hard
enough and you shatter it, exposing a juicy,
rich metallic core. All asteroid types have the
potential to be profitable. The key to their profitability
is the right combination of valuable contents,
mission-essential resources, and accessibility. Let's start with the good stuff. What loot do asteroids drop-- well, definitely
gold and platinum and other precious metals. It's not that there's more
of this stuff in asteroids than on Earth, it's just
that it's more accessible. See, the same
differentiation process that led to M-type
asteroids long ago sucked Earth's crust dry
of many of these elements. This is particularly
true of elements that alloy readily with iron. They followed iron
into the core or mantle during Earth's formation. This included gold,
platinum, and silver, but also key industrial metals
like palladium, rhodium, and iridium. These elements are just
more accessible in all but the largest asteroids. In fact, much of the
precious-metal content of Earth's crust came
from old asteroid impacts. The Planetary Resources
company estimates that a single 30-meter asteroid
may contain $30 billion in platinum alone, and that a
500-meter rock could contain half again the
entire world reserves of platinum-group metals. Kilometer-scale asteroids
would be worth many trillions. It's worth noting that the
value of some elements like gold and platinum are largely
due to their rarity. Asteroid miners
are going to have to be careful not to crash
the value of these materials with oversupply. Perhaps the most
lucrative asteroid loot will be the stuff that's
useful to industry. That includes some of the
aforementioned platinum-group elements but also the
rare-earth elements. Both groups are
essential in everything from electronic components,
batteries and fuel cells, magnets, as chemical
catalysts and reagents, and in a huge range
of advanced materials. The technological
world is utterly dependent on these elements
and becoming more so. While rare-earth
elements aren't actually all that rare in
Earth's crust, most are dispersed in a way
that makes sifting them out not commercially viable. Concentrated rare-earth
mineral deposits do exist, but those are genuinely rare,
and the accessible supply is running low. Asteroids are literal
gold mines for stuff we want to bring back
to Earth, but they also contain materials useful for
the mining process itself. Raw materials like iron,
nickel, aluminium, and titanium are not cost effective
to bring back to Earth, but they can go towards
building infrastructure in space, including more
asteroid-mining facilities. But even more
important is water. Water dissociates into
hydrogen and oxygen, becoming rocket fuel, which
is critical for shipping mined resources back to Earth. If you have to carry
all that return fuel on the initial
launch vehicle, you have to massively cut
back on the amount of mining equipment, and you also limit
what asteroids you can access. The perfect asteroid has
a decent amount of water but also a high abundance
of valuable materials. It also needs to be large
enough to be worth the effort and accessible by an
economical spacecraft. And eventually we'll probably
see mining operations in the actual asteroid
belt where useful rocks are plentiful, but to start
with, it's much easier if the asteroid comes to us. Fortunately for asteroid
miners, though less fortunately for the
dinosaurs, many asteroids do cross Earth's orbit in
their passage around the Sun. Some of these
near-Earth asteroids can be accessed with relatively
little fuel expenditure from Earth orbit, and
these will be the target of the first missions. Identifying the perfect easily
recoverable object or ERO is where a lot of the
action is right now. This asteroid prospecting
is the current focus of effort for Planetary
Resources and its competitors. We know of over 17,000
near-Earth asteroids, but only a small fraction
are likely to be cheaply accessible, large enough, and
have the right composition to be worth the effort. To be short of a
profitable composition, robotic prospectors are going
to have to visit asteroids. Planetary Resources is
developing its Arkyd spacecraft with that initial goal. And its main competitor,
Deep Space Industries, is working on a range of
low-cost prospector craft. Interestingly, both
of these companies have significant funding from
the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Apparently this tiny
landlocked nation has some impressive
cosmic aspirations. So, let's say we find
the right asteroid. Then what? Well, we can attempt to
mine it on location, so with the orbit of the
asteroid, or we can nudge it into a more accessible
orbit close to the Earth, perhaps even in orbit
around the Moon. This can be done with a
gravitational tractor, which we talked about
before, or with rockets fueled by the asteroid's
own water supply. Moving a near-Earth
asteroid into lunar orbit was the goal of NASA's
Asteroid Redirect Mission, but it was canceled
in 2017 due to lack of congressional support. Shame, really. It was one of the
few missions that had a clear track to
massive potential profits and saving the planet
from asteroid impact. Because if we learned how to
land on and push an asteroid to a different course,
we could potentially push an Earth-killing
asteroid off course. OK, we found our asteroid
and sent our mining facility. How do we harvest the goods? It could be a simple matter
of scooping up rocky material from the surface. Smaller asteroids are expected
to be loosely bound rubble piles, so breaking them apart
will be relatively easy. There are also proposals to
scrape regolith, asteroid dust, from the surface, or
to magnetically harvest loose surface metals. There's also the Mond process
by which carbon monoxide gas reacts with nickel and iron
to produce a gas containing these elements. This can then be collected and
processed by the spacecraft. Water is the easiest to extract. It can simply be
evaporated from the surface and collected as vapor. For larger solid asteroids,
it may make sense to actually tunnel
into their interiors, but that's a way down the track. The first
asteroid-mining missions are slated for the 2020s, but
the timetable is very loose. Once the enterprise is
demonstrated to be profitable, you can be sure the real
gold rush will begin. Money talks, and
tens of billions or even trillions of dollars
per asteroid speaks very loudly. Perhaps in just a
few decades we'll have mining outposts
in the asteroid belt. The first effort will
be purely robotic. But as the industry scales
up in the asteroid belt, real-life human
operators may be needed. Who knows? perhaps season
30 of "The Expanse" will be listed in drama
instead of science fiction. And with that abundant
supply of resources and without the insane
per-kilogram price tag of launch from Earth,
perhaps the real work can begin of expanding
humanity's reach into more distant regions of space time. Today's episode of "Space
Time" was sponsored by Audible. Audible is a leading
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and entertainment. And this summer, you can
pick the perfect audiobook to complement your hikes,
road trips, beach days, and those long starry night when
you contemplate the universe. And to help you
understand the universe, I recommend "Our Mathematical
Universe" by Max Tegmark. In it, Professor Tegmark
explores an incredible idea that perhaps our
reality is mathematical at its most fundamental level. So, start a 30-day trial and
your first audiobook is free. Go to audible.com/spacetime,
or if you're in the US, text spacetime to 500500. Once again, that's
audible.com/spacetime, or text spacetime to 500500.
Season 30? Hot dog! Thanks Jeff Bezos!
LOL I didn't understand why you were linking to this video until I saw how the presenter just dropped that line.
TO BE CLEAR, HE DIDN'T SAY IT
WILL
He said "maybe it will"
Duplicated: https://redd.it/8ucq5i
Spacetime is a great channel overall