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Old 04-24-2012, 08:52 AM   #4
photon
The new goggles also do nothing.
 
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Join Date: Oct 2001
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Quote:
Originally Posted by icarus View Post
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17827347

Could this ever be economically viable? Might as well huck some waste from Earth into the sun while we're up there.
The amount of resources in a single asteroid is enormous, especially if you pick the right asteroid.

However there's a couple of problems that I can think of, the most obvious one being mining... every method we use has been developed over a looong time and with gravity and atmosphere. Mining in microgravity with no atmosphere is so different, I mean you can't even use the same tools because metals will weld to each other in a vacuum (for example).

So there's a lot of work to do just to be able to mine the resources.

And the other thing is if you all of a sudden bring as much platinum into the world market as there already is platinum in the world market, the price isn't going to stay the same.
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