[ExI] Hawking urges Moon landing to 'elevate humanity'

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sat, Jun 24, 2017 at 5:46 AM, Dan TheBookMan <danust2012 at gmail.com> wrote:
> One major problem with this: real world markets ate forward-looking. The
> prices for the commodities would likely crash beforehand based on the
> expectation of such sales. If traders expected the project to work -- and
> it's hard to see how they wouldn't unless you somehow keep the whole thing
> secret or most traders expect failure right until contracts are signed.

There's no way to keep such a thing secret, and once it's in orbit
it's in orbit.  There are a number of ways for it to go wrong, such as
international claims that it's still anyone's asteroid (which...okay,
yeah, but you still have to actually put mining infrastructure up
there, and if you have people up there then you might be justified in
putting in measures to push away anyone else's spacecraft that comes
near your crew without your permission - assuming anyone else actually
launches mining equipment to the asteroid, which might well not
happen).

But even with such crashes, the sheer amount of material that can be
mined and sold quickly might still recover the investment.  Wikipedia
says 161 metric tons of platinum are mined per year ;
http://www.businessinsider.com/one-years-worth-of-mined-commodities-2014-9#platinum-4
gives about the same figure and prices it at $8B.  If you only drop 10
tons during your first year of operation, and seem likely to continue
that rate, that's hardly enough to crash platinum down to a penny per
ton - and if you can keep steps 2 and 3 to around $100M or so, that
recovers the investment in the first year.

Of course, then you have to figure how you can do steps 2 and 3 on a
combined budget of only $100M or so (possibly with another few times
that on loan to be paid off over a few years, acquired once it seems
very likely that you will generate ongoing revenue - so, at a minimum
after step 2).  I suspect step 3 will be the bulk of the budget.