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Mass_Driver comments on Help Build a Landing Page for Existential Risk? - Less Wrong
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Great! Pick one and get started, please. If you can't decide which one to do, please do asteroids.
I will do asteroids.
Also, can I write in my asteroid essay the potential helpfullness of asteroids? We belive that one asteroid(just one!) could be worth $1,000,000,000,000. In other words, catching one asteroid could be worth one-trillion dollars. Could I mention that in my hundred word blurb?
At... current market prices, or market prices once the asteroid is successfully caught and mining begins?
I don't know the exact numbers, nor how carefully that was found out. The point is that asteroids contain mor metals than we ever mined ever and that adds up to be a lot of money.
Well, if you consider that the asteroids would presumably be made of more-or-less the same stuff as the Earth, only spread out in small chunks instead of lumped into one great big ball that we can only get to a thin portion of the outer layer of (like Earth) it's easy to see that there's a great potential wealth of minerals and metals in there. (No oil or coal, though, as those require organics in order to form).
If you're going to be quoting exact figures, though, then you probably need to be aware of exactly where the figure comes from. Especially if the figure is particularly surprising.
Actually the number in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining is even larger than that: $20,000,000,000,000 .
This amount seems so large that I would expect metal prices to decrease substantially, but even if they would do so, the potential value is huge when someone finds a commercially viable manner to extract and especially fetch the ore.
Hmmm, looking at the citation brings me to this page...
It seems that, as you point out, that value entirely fails to take into account the severe drop in price caused by the vast amount of metal suddenly on the market...
If all of those asteroids are owned by one company, then they can sell the metal of the asteroids for as much as it was before because they would be the only people with that much metal, having something similar to a monopoly. They would have the choice of lowering the value of the metals, because if they only made $10/ton. of metal and they sold 1 million tons, then they make ten million dollars. However, if a different company with ten tons of metal making $10/ton. of metal would make one hundred dollars, perhaps not be able to pay their workers, and go out of business. That would reduce competition for the company that caught the asteroid. However, if the company sold them for the same prices long-term they could make trillions of dollars.
Yeah, but in order to pull that off, they need to dribble the metal slowly enough into the market. Considering that they have significant up-front costs in getting the stuff, and furthermore considering that they have to deal with an economics phenomenon called the time value of money (basically, $100 now is worth more than $100 next year because if you have it now you can earn interest on it for a year), dribbling it into the market like that might just mean that they can never quite recover the value of their initial investment.
Astroid defense seems mostly about better mapping abilities and not about mining asteroids.
It seems to me that roughly similar capabilities are useful for mining asteroids and deflecting asteroids with known impact trajectories (i.e. step 2 in the Don't Die plan), and this puts this into the class of opportunities where succeeding gives you more than just not dying (like AGI).
On the other hand, asteroid mining technologies have some risks of their own, although this only reaches "existential" if somebody starts mining the big ones.
Sure!