[ExI] Mining the Sky SL Talk I gave today

[Adrian Tymes]

--- On Sat, 5/1/10, samantha <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:
> The precious
> metals are mainly, in my mind, a way to quickly fund more launches and
> amass a lot of working capital while the groundlings come to understand
> the huge future value of what you are gathering in orbit.

Quite.  Say it takes 10 years, including all design and engineering and
financing/business development (yes, that's going to take non-trivial
time), until we get first sale of platinum from an asteroid in orbit.
Say it's a small one, so even working slowly, we consume it entirely in
only 2 years (selling metal on the ground, maybe a little early space
manufacturing to build stuff in orbit - whatever, it's all used).  Two
things then happen:

1. Whoever did it presumably has more than enough money to do it again.
Not to mention, designs, talent, and other things needed to build the
probe, machinery, and other things needed to do it again.  They'll
quite probably go get another asteroid.  With a lot of the development
(and financing) already taken care of, not to mention knowing some ways
to refine the process, they can do it faster.

2. Other people, capable of doing it but not believing it could be
done safely & profitably - or just not taking space industry seriously
- sit up and take notice.  Most likely, some of them go get their own
asteroids, some of them openly imitating the original project.

This starts to feed on itself.  What happens if this causes an
exponential curve - something like Moore's Law - to apply to the amount
of raw material humanity harvests from asteroids each year, after the
first asteroid is done?  And, as a consequence, to the amount of solar
energy harvested each year?  (If building another solar power
satellite is substantially cheaper than building another coal plant -
or even about the same, since solar energy is effectively free, so the
ongoing cost is much less - then simple economics can displace fossil
fuels, at least for non-mobile power generation.  If energy gets
cheap enough, synthetic gasoline eventually gets cheaper than the real
thing, even assuming no further progress in electric vehicles.  And so
on.)