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[Maximum™]

Gold is stable and produced in fairly predictable quantities by various astrophysical processes, it is also very dense like iridium and platinum and osmium and whatnot so most of the gold that was here has sunk, with most of the stuff near the surface either brought up as plates move around/open up to the surface, or was deposited later on like various other metals that arrived kinetically over the last few gigayears.

Asteroids which weren't dusty ice balls tend to have certain proportions of metals due to being from the same cloud of material as the rest of the bodies in the solar system, but are much smaller and accordingly less prohibitive to access their interiors than say... Earth is.



Slowing down from orbital speeds precludes the slower speed part initially, it's just a matter of whether you go for aerobraking with a chute or try for something like rocket braking or gliding.

[Duuvian]

Cool, good to know. I wonder if arrestor wire high altitude ballons could work but I guess with complete ignorance they can't go that high and it's probably a silly idea. I'm imagining those racing games where you run over coins or something except in a spaceship with balloons. 100 points 200 points 300 points

[Lord Shonus]

The problem is that anything coming from space to Earth is going to be traveling at a minimum of around 7.5 kilometers a second - over 16000 miles per hour. That's what you get if you settle into a stable orbit and gradually brake into the atmosphere - any other angle is probably going to have a higher speed.

The issue isn't the difficulty of finding a braking system - there's lots and lots of possible systems to safely decelerate from that speed to something that can land safely. The problem is what happens when whatever method you're using fails. Heat shield wears through in an unexpected way and sends the packet hurtling in a random direction, parachute doesn't deploy, retrorockets don't fire, and so on. If that happens you'll only have shed a small portion of your initial velocity and are way, way off course. This is not an insoluble problem - the obvious answer is to put together a treaty to use ocean or large expanses of "waste" land as barriers around your landing zone - but solving it is a political and diplomatic problem, not an engineering one. Political problems are much harder to solve.

There's a real possibility that the benefits would be worth the immense costs, especially if you start using the stuff you mine to fabricate more mining gear, but the immense financial risk means that only a nation-state is likely to have the resources to start the flow. And that's also a major political football.

[Starver]

Gold is stable

...well, the one main isotope of it is (as I found when I went checking for likely 'fingerprints', the modification to my last message now edited in above).

it's just a matter of whether you go for aerobraking with a chute or try for something like rocket braking or gliding.

Lithobraking, surely.

[Madman198237]

A single piece loses kinetic energy *slower* than a shattered-into-bits asteroid because of the lower ratio of surface area to mass of a single object. As for landing materials, yeah dropping literal tons of metal onto Earth is going to be tricky, however you have to remember that we throw hundreds of tons of rocket booster into the atmosphere with the number of space missions run per year and none of them have destroyed any cities yet (China's incredibly stupid use of house-destroying rocket stages notwithstanding).

A properly-designed return capsule would be totally capable of bringing a few tons down to Earth safely without burning up in the atmosphere and posing no risk of city destruction. And it wouldn't use a parachute or rockets, just aerodynamics and the fact that it's a gigantic block of metal that isn't going to be much bothered if it hits the ground at a hundred miles per hour.

[Schmaven]

Since all the gold ever mined on Earth can fit into an olymic swimming pool, and there aren't many large gold asteroids within easy reach, you likely wouldn't have a need to send cubic meter sized loads down at a time.  More practical might be to dock the entire load at a space station and just send little chuncks down each time there is a crew change.

...On American spacecraft of course, because this is the Ameripol thread and all.

[Madman198237]

Given the current state of American politics I see no reason to respect the Ameripol thread. 

[anewaname]

The right says "space re-entries can't land in America unless we-the-right personally benefit without risk" and the left says "stop zoning our housing as a re-entry zone!"

Locked in safely on the Ameripol thread... please continue!

[Maximum™]

I mean, the only real value for gold is down to the energy transfer/absorption/reflection properties, ignoring stupid-ape-want-shiny-rock nonsense.

If we really NEEDED to get as much gold as possible we'd probably wanna get the millions of tons in the ocean, but it isn't valuable enough to go through all that bullshit, the reason we're globally under a quarter of a million tons extracted is because those were the easy deposits found generally.

Using it for financial purposes is only sensible compared to bitcoin.

[Egan_BW]

This ape would prefer tungsten anyways.

[McTraveller]

Gold standard money is the primitive version of bitcoin, yes.  Basically you had to spend tons of resources and energy to mine gold. It would arguably have been better to spend those resources and energy getting stuff society really wanted/needed like food, houses, energy, transportation, or whatever.

Same with Bitcoin and its ilk; what better use could we have made with the thousands (millions?) of megawatt-hours used to mine bitcoin and all the other resources used to make the mining rigs?

There's probably a deeper treatise on that subject somewhere; I'd be surprised if several haven't been written already.

From a policy standpoint, and I think this is relevant to money supply / inflation concerns of today, how can we incentivize production rather than money acquisition?  Many ills of society are linked to the idea of incentivizing acquisition of more money with as little effort possible instead of the more beneficial increased production of goods and services with as little effort (and resource usage) possible.

[Maximum Spin]

Gold standard money is the primitive version of bitcoin, yes.  Basically you had to spend tons of resources and energy to mine gold. It would arguably have been better to spend those resources and energy getting stuff society really wanted/needed like food, houses, energy, transportation, or whatever.

No, not at all. Gold is relatively easy to mine because it doesn't form chemical compounds, it's just rare. Ancient gold mining was of superficial deposits that were basically the easiest thing in the world to mine - one popular mining method used by many peoples, including the Romans, was to dig channels to dump water onto gold deposits to wash away the lighter not-gold and leave the gold behind.

Gold served as money not because it's hard to mine, but because it's rare and pretty and people like it.

[Starver]

...and it's perfectly fungible but (give or take a bit of possible shenanigans for the unwary) verifiably what it claims to be.

[Lord Shonus]

A single piece loses kinetic energy *slower* than a shattered-into-bits asteroid because of the lower ratio of surface area to mass of a single object.

Think you're misreading what I wrote.

When I said "a single piece would release kinetic energy faster", I meant "much less would be drained off in the atmosphere and nearly all would be released in the instant of impact - or, in other words, there would be a much bigger bang when it hit". Broken up asteroids do much less damage than their raw energy would suggest because they dump so much more into the atmosphere over a longer period of time.

I mean, the only real value for gold is down to the energy transfer/absorption/reflection properties, ignoring stupid-ape-want-shiny-rock nonsense.

Gold has a lot of valuable properties. One of the most important is that it is extremely non-reactive - which means it generally doesn't corrode. That's really damn handy. Gold's also a bit of a proxy here - everything here is equally applicable to wolfram, iridium, platinum, and a bunch of other things that rich asteroids likely have in relative abundance.

[Maximum™]

The reaction properties are interesting but it's awfully dense to use for corrosion resistant coatings when numerous other things can achieve similar goals in different ways.

Using it as part of the mirror for the JWST is an example of a smart use, very little deposited very precisely to reflect infrared very well.