Profits From Asteroid Mining

After the very cool news showing pretty solid evidence that an asteroid breakup and bolide shower was likely responsible for the mid-Ordovician ice age (Schmitz et al 2019), I read about one candidate parent body (or what's left of it) for the L-type chondrites, 433 Eros. This article states that 433 Eros contains "...20 billion tonnes of aluminum and similar amounts of metals that are rare on Earth, such as gold and platinum."

So I set out to calculate the mineral value, based on current prices. For aluminum, I see bauxite cheapest at $50/ton. For gold and platinum, I couldn’t find values per ton of ore so I looked up the current prices (US$1533 and $955/oz resp. as of this writing) then look up average richness of the ores (1 oz/ton and 0.1 oz per ton resp.). Assuming similar richness in asteroid ores to deposits on Earth, would be over thirty-three trillion dollars, which is about 41% of the annual GDP of Earth. And that’s assuming an average 2% growth rate. (The article I linked to calculated twenty trillion, which it may have been closer to in 2014.) Granted, obviously the value will drop when there is suddenly an influx of valuable metals, but I'm assuming you're smart enough to leak the ore slowly and somehow get it to the surface with causing any repeat Chicxulubs.


A question and an observation:

1) How to get down to the surface? Gliders? Can you make gliders out of the (maybe partly processed) material that are disassembled at the surface? There are a number of established concerns that have gathered investors for this enterprise, but that I found, none of them has described how they would get material to the Earth's surface.

2) Most proposals involve mining the asteroids where they are, rather than bringing them nearer to Earth. There's actually a Wikipedia article with a good roundup and list of the companies, but that also points out that Osiris Rex will bring back 60g at a cost of 1 billion dollars.

3) At 2900 cubic kilometers, even if 433 Eros were a perfect sphere (which it's not) it would be just under 9 km to the farthest point from the surface. The deepest operating mine on Earth is South Africa's Ashanti Mponeng at 3.84 km deep. But on Eros, there would not be the same increase in heat and all the attendant problems of real gravity - so the proper comparison is to distance to the pit face. El Teniente in Chile is digging out a single (underground) road that is 17 km, and there are overall in that one mine 3,000 km of tunnels. Compare to Earth, which may have mineral deposits more than 4km below the crust, but we may never got to them - and past the crust, the inside of the planet is a waste because the mantle is molten and mixed. Of course the lay conception of asteroids as solid rocks is usually not correct, as most of them we've interacted with have been rubble piles barely held together by gravity.

4) I selfishly want asteroids to be mined in my lifetime because I believe that's where we'll find evidence of alien life - in the form of small mutant von Neumann probes made from organic chemicals.

Putting Numbers on Panspermia: Material From Earth Impacting Outer System Moons, and Escaping Solar System

In a simulation, Worth Sigurdsson and House (2013) (WSH) retrodict that Europa, Callisto, Titan, and Enceladus have received 1,900, 370, 510 and 340 metric tons of material from Earth, with 3.4 billion metric tons from Earth ejected from the solar system entirely. Enceladus may be less interesting if it really did only form in the cretaceous, but the others have all been there since the start of the solar system. WSH state explicitly that they didn't try to estimate the viability of life surviving the journey, but it cannot be repeated enough that we now have evidence that living things - metazoans, in fact - can survive uncontrolled re-entry with minimal protection, as some worms that were on board the Columbia were found alive on the ground weeks later. We're now able to start putting bounds at least on local panspermia (within our own solar system), though it would be interesting to estimate the chances for gravitational capture by surrounding stars. This is exciting not only to flesh out the realism of panspermia as traditionally considered, but also the idea of very small, molecule- or cell-sized organic von Neumann probes passively spreading between lower-gravity bodies.

A very basic calculation using water surface area and the time it took for life to appear on Earth, shows that all other things being equal, there is a 1-in-3 chance of indigenous life on Europa. An experiment in reproducing impact conditions and local conditions on these moons, along with adding most-likely-transferred Earth fauna, seems that it would be fairly easy to do - a sort of Miller-Urey experiment for local panspermia.

R.J. Worth, Steinn Sigurdsson, and Christopher H. House. Seeding Life on the Moons of the Outer Planets via Lithopanspermia. Astrobiology, Dec 2013.

Ice Volcanoes on Ceres May Provide Replicators Means of Spreading

Extraterrestrial replicators (be they naturally-evolved, or von Neumann probes or the mutant descendants thereof) are at least as likely to be based on organic chemistry as on clanking iron-age technology, as is often imagined. Material returned from comet Wild-2 showed that it was actually an extraterrestrial comet, and had amino acids on it. Other investigations have shown the presence of nucleobases (the components of DNA and RNA.)

Even Arrhenius-style "panspermia" spread by passive diffusion on astronomical timescales is not implausible, as our Oort Cloud has mixed with close-passing stars' clouds on the order of once every 0.1 MA (and we should assume this happens to other stars as well.) However, for passively spreading replicators, higher-gravity bodies like planets or large moons are dead ends because they have no means of escaping the gravity well.



Water geysers on Enceladus, from space.com
This is why comets and wet carbonaceous asteroids are the best places to look, and why the Hayabusa-2 probe on Ryugu is so important. Same for the Dawn probe. Europa and even Enceladus may be a tough sell as passively escapable gravity wells, but now we see evidence of active water volcanoes on Ceres through its life span.

Finding Extraterrestrial Organics is Old News; Let's Look for Evidence of Life

There's a new mass spec study[1] of crystals from two meteorites, one of which in turn has material originating from two separate parent bodies. The objects were about 4.5 billion years old, i.e. dating to the birth of the solar system, and showed evidence of organics resulting from aqeous reactions. Some findings of interest: "...signatures of low-mass C5 to C10 hydrocarbons at around 70 to 200 atomic mass units." Not much benzene, suggesting that any aromatic rings are locked up in larger structures. We're finding organics everywhere we look it seems, including Ceres, and that includes even amino acids and nucleobases. Given how quickly after the Earth formed we started seeing evidence of self-replicating molecules (at least the ancestors of cells, if not cells themselves), this means that life originated quickly on Earth, and therefore was a highly probable event.

It's also relevant that polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs - for instance, tar, graphite, anthracene in coal, and fullerenes) have been found in nebulas, as well as in Titan's atmosphere. Not only are they thought to be quite common in the universe, but possibly crucial to the origin of life (see PAH World Hypothesis.) PAH's are predicted to make up a large portion of the carbon at the surface of carbon planets. While carbon planet systems (unlike our own silicate system) were theorized only recently, it turns out that the Hypatia Stone, a bizarre meteorite found in the Egyptian desert, is loaded with PAHs and originated from outside our solar system - possibly as impact debris from just such a planet.[2] (It's becoming increasingly clear that objects from outside the solar system enter it frequently. First Wild-2 (which had amino acids in it), then Oamuamua, and now Hypatia. We've found these things on the Earth's surface without looking that hard for them! Given these observations, we should expect that interstellar mixing on relatively short geologic time scales is the rule.

This suggests several things and begs several questions.

- If a pile of complex molecules were delivered to Earth - say, a bunch of RNA that survived intact inside an impactor - that pushes back the question of the origin of life, but it also suggests it's very likely elsewhere.

- Have we looked for polymerized RNA or amino acids? Mass spec can detect and distinguish small fragments.[3]

- You might ask, why RNA? Why assume any similarity to Earth biochemistry? This raises the larger question of, if there is active extraterrestrial biochemistry in asteroids, how could we detect it? This is the question asked about desert varnish (which has been speculated as evidence of a shadow biosphere of non-DNA based life operating here on Earth under our noses.) If we did find alien biochemistry, how would we know what we were looking at, against the background of organics that we already know is there? While we haven't seen anything that obviously screams "alien biochemistry", that's the point - HOW does something look if it screams "alien biochemistry"? Are there general principles of such systems? You can't just look for macromolecules - if those are composed of the some monomers, they won't necessarily carry information (e.g. aliens trying to figure out our biochemistry from sequencing the fatty acids in our membrane phospholipids will not learn very much.) So it has to be a macromolecule with a limited number of discrete subunits. So far our samples have been limited t one biosphere. If we ever get enough complex organics from a sample return mission to be able to afford to destroy some of it in aqueous chemistry experiences, that will be a boon to astrobiology.

- If there is such a thing as a simple space-borne organism - or even the remnants of aberrant von Neumann probes that have "gone to seed" after eons-long selection for fecundity over their exploration functions - it would make sense to be adapted to low gravity bodies that are cheapest to move back and forth between. If Earth's biosphere is just overgrown von Neumann probes, that might just be because we're a dead end at the bottom of a gravity well.

Previous post on alien evolution, First Interstellar Asteroid? It's Interstellar, But Not the First We've Seen


REFERENCES

[1] Queenie H. S. Chan, Michael E. Zolensky, Yoko Kebukawa, Marc Fries, Motoo Ito, Andrew Steele, Zia Rahman, Aiko Nakato, A. L. David Kilcoyne, Hiroki Suga, Yoshio Takahashi, Yasuo Takeichi and Kazuhiko Mase. Organic matter in extraterrestrial water-bearing salt crystals. Science Advances 10 Jan 2018: Vol. 4, no. 1, eaao3521. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aao3521

[2] Georgy A.Belyanin, Jan D.Kramers, Marco A.G.Andreoli, Francesco Greco, Arnold Gucsik, Tebogo V. Makhubela, Wojciec, J.Przybylowicz, Michael Wiedenbeck. Petrography of the carbonaceous, diamond-bearing stone “Hypatia” from southwest Egypt: A contribution to the debate on its origin. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, Volume 223, 15 February 2018, Pages 462-492.

[3] Zhaojing Meng and Patrick A. Limbach. Mass Spectrometry of RNA: Linking the Genome to the Proteome. Brief Funct Genomic Proteomic. 2006 Mar; 5(1): 87–95.

First Interstellar Asteroid? It's Interstellar, But Not the First We've Seen

Information here and here. Based on the velocity and path, this asteroid originated from outside the solar system. This is a great additional finding, but not actually news! Comet Wild-2 was the subject of the Stardust sample return mission, and analysis showed more than a few interesting things: that it contained the amino acid glycine, and that the nitrogen isotope ratio showed that the object likedly originated from a different solar system.

A point of interest here is that since the solar system's origin, there must have been multiple close passes by other stars - close enough that our respect Oort clouds would mix at the margins, and material would be exchanged between star systems. We have now verified this logical inference visually, and through direct chemical evidence.

Previous post about alien evolution, Life's Origins at Four Billion Years Ago; Implications For Our Future

Asteroid Pass This Friday - 2012 DA14

This Friday 15 February, 2012 DA14 will pass closer to the Earth than geosynchronous satellites. Per the NASA Impact Risk site, it's a zero on the Torino Scale (a combined index of probability that it will hit and damage if it does). Zero means there's no reason in wildest hell to think that it would hit us, or even if it did, it wouldn't reach the surface. It's a -5 on the Palermo Scale which is to say, 100,000 times less likely than a random background event.

If despite the careful work of modern astronomers, there's someone in your social circle who insists that this is the end the Mayans (or Christians, etc.) were talking about, ask them to give them all your worldly possession, and zany hijinx will ensue either way!

Finally, Chemistry from Vesta

No data released yet but we know they're working on it. This is geochemistry they're looking at with a gamma and neutron instrument. Interesting, now that we know the temperature and sunlight is right at the poles for at least solid water to exist. Why interesting? If there are intelligent aliens, there are von Neumann probes. If there are von Neumann probes, they're probably already here in the solar system. If they're here, they're most likely to be on lower gravity bodies, like asteroids.


Temperature map of Vesta's surface. NASA / GSFC / UMBC

Destroy the Earth

Here.

Manned Exploration of Asteroids

The U.S. President has announced his plan to have American astronauts "land" on an asteroid by 2025. This is cool for several reasons:

1) It means that rule-makers are finally taking seriously the idea of asteroid defense.

2) If space exploration is going to continue it must become sustainable; that is, materially profitable. The most expensive thing about space travel is getting out of gravity wells. Raw material from small bodies, i.e. that's already in microgravity is therefore orders of magnitude cheaper than material that has to be brought up. (First organization who can make a self-printing 3D printer mostly out of materials to be found in asteroids wins. Template information up by sat phone, finished products down by parachute.) Asteroids are better candidates than comets because objects in stable, closer orbits are slower than objects that fall in from far away and whip around the sun in a matter of days.

3) We'll get a more in-depth look at an asteroid, and we'll find evidence of alien life. Leaping to conclusions there? I've written before that I think that we can't rule out von Neumann probes or replicating non-terrestrial entities of some kind in our own solar system, and that we haven't seen them yet because we're looking in the wrong places. (This probably also qualifies as one of my most absurd beliefs.) Interestingly, one of the greatest science fiction series of all time begins with an astronaut planting a nuclear bomb on an asteroid, and in the process discovering our first evidence of alien life. I don't think we'll be finding any doorways carved into canyons as in this novel, but I do think we'll find the kind of highly monodisperse heteropolymers - with nitrogen isotope ratio suggesting an extrasolar origin - that are an unmistakable sign of high-fidelity replication systems.

In other impactor-related news, I'm planning a trip to Siberia and Central Asia and I was trying to get to the Tunguska site. But it's way off the Siberian railroad and really hard to get to (a week out of my itinerary?) and Black Oil Aliens notwithstanding, there's nothing obviously special about the site; i.e. you want a crater, go see Winslow, and it's fifteen minutes off I-40 east of Flagstaff. I would still love to go - so, if you happen to have seen this on your Google News feed for Tunguska, and you're looking for someone to collect samples from the site but can't find any hearty risk-takers, why not let a hard-working medical student help you out by funding my extra week to get out there and get your work done for you!