Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Love, fear, greed, and asteroids (featuring Martin Elvis)

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

Daniel and Kelly chat with Dr. Martin Elvis about the promise and perils of space resources.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. When Spaniards first encountered platinum in Colombia, they named it Platina, which means little silver. What they wanted was the silver, and the platinum was a sort of unwanted impurity. But today, on the American precious metals exchange on September 23rd in 2024, the price for an ounce of platinum was about $978 U.S. dollars, while silver was going for only about $31. We have found lots of uses for platinum and other platinum group metals like palladium and

rhodium. The chemical industry uses platinum group metals in the production of nitric oxide, which we use to make fertilizers. The metals are also important in the automotive industry. For example, we use them in catalytic converters to try to clean up automobile exhausts. And they're also used in jewelry. Part of why these metals are so expensive is because they're super rare. For example, platinum we mostly get from South Africa and Russia. And the fact that we get a lot of it from Russia, hits home a point. When you only get something really important from a few places, there's a risk of the supply chain getting disrupted.

For example, right now, we don't really want to buy from Russia because they've invaded Ukraine. The United States Geological Society has a critical minerals list, which is a list of stuff the U.S. really needs that is either like rare or might be hard to get, and three of the six platinum group metals are included in the list top three. So where can we get more of these bests? valuable metals. Well, out in space, vast quantities of resources that are becoming rare or hard

to get here on Earth are found in pretty vast quantities in the asteroids. There are asteroids that contain these platinum group metals at higher concentrations than we know of that can be found on Earth right now. And maybe you've even heard that the first trillionaire will be the first person who can successfully mine asteroid resources and then sell them back here on Earth. But is there really that much money to be made in asteroid resources? And how expensive would it be to go out and get these resources in the first place? Do we have the technology that we need to do it? And if you can do it, who owns those asteroids? Is it legal to extract those resources and sell them on the open market? And what other resources are out there? And could we use those resources to build

the first settlements in space? On today's episode, love, fear, greed, and asteroids, we talked to astronomer and space resources expert, Dr. Martin Elvis. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle exist, and I never want to go to space. Hi, I'm Kelly. I'm a parasitologist and space settlement nerd, and you know, I also don't ever. want to go to space. I'm sure it would make me puke and I'm worried I would die. But you know, space might be filled with glittering jewels, which makes me wonder, Kelly, here's a question for you. What is the most expensive thing that you own?

Whoa. Okay. So other than the farm that I live on in my cars and then I guess my laptop, because I am a snooty person who really loves my MacBook Pro. I think those are my most expensive possessions. What about you? Me too. I'm not like a fancy jewelry person. I don't have like an emerald or some fancy gold chain or anything. I think my laptop is my most expensive purchase other than of course house and car. So I don't really worry about like getting burgled very much because I don't have anything expensive in there. There's a bunch of old New Yorkers. You know, what else is somebody going to steal from me? So we have a tractor, but I feel like that's just another form of car. But the tractor costs more than my laptop. But yeah, I don't like fancy stuff.

for the most part, because I know that I'd break it or my kids would, so why bother? Yes, exactly, right. I don't trust myself with fancy stuff. But, of course, there's lots of fancy stuff on Earth and out in space, right? It's filled with all sorts of shiny stuff that people could make money on. Well, okay, so is it? So there is a lot of shiny stuff out there that people could make money on, but maybe you've watched Star Wars.

Of course you've watched Star Wars. And, you know, when like Hans Solo and everyone's going through the asteroid field and there's like asteroids everywhere, they're dodging back and forth. Actually, those asteroids are way more spread out. Like, you could stand on one and maybe not see another one. And when you are standing on one, it's probably not a solid rock in a lot of cases. It's like a rubble pile. We had Phil Plate talking about this the other day, how you might sink inside of one.

They probably don't have huge space worms inside of them. Yeah, I know. As a biologist, I would be interested in the space worms, but probably not. So Star Wars, not a documentary, you're saying. That and the Martian, not documentaries. And the expanse. and the expanse. None of those are documentaries, but they're all wonderful. And we'll be interviewing the expanse guys for an upcoming episode, which I'm excited about. Very excited. Yeah. So I think that you

imagine mining for space resources and maybe you don't have a grasp on like how far away those resources are and how rare they are and how spread out and how little we understand like the location of these resources and the quantity of these resources out in the solar system. It gets complicated, but we've got an expert today. Don't do your space pessimism thing, Kelly. I just want to think about huge nuggets of platinum floating in space that I could just grab onto and then I'm the first trillionaire or quadrillionaire. Don't rain on that parade. Okay, I won't read on that parade. And I will say that every once in a while, I'll note that I have been told that I'm relentlessly depressing. Today's guest is the person who told me that I'm relentlessly depressing. So

anyway, I look forward to Martin's optimism. But first, we wanted to get a handle on what people think are the most valuable resources out there. So I asked my social network, what are the most valuable resources in space, and here are some of the answers that they gave us. Probably asteroids that we could mine, but maybe also sunlight. Okay, the most important resource from outer space, as far as I'm concerned, are ideas about the universe, understanding of where we are, appreciation of Earth as a resource and what it provides for us, all of the things that come from outer space sort of intellectually,

rather than necessarily physically. I'm going to guess minerals. So I'm biased towards life, the whole biophilia thing and so on. So I would think that some of the most valuable resources in space are actually not in space because they're first-bound things like food and organic life. That being said, I guess the other valuable things in space would be water and oxygen. and I suppose in a broader sense there could be some theoretically valuable raw materials such as metal and to get more abstract with it one of the most valuable resources in space is possibility

maybe there is unknown life or as yet unknown life out there and maybe there are materials to do new things with it might just reflect the fact that these were like my friend group that got asked these questions, but I really loved that a common answer was possibility and the things that we could learn along the way and not necessarily platinum or something. But I think realistically, platinum is what we're going out there for. But I loved the optimism. It's nice to think that we're not just a new version of conquistadors, you know, out there to plunder and enrich ourselves. That, you know, we're going to want to enrich ourselves in other ways, intellectually, scientifically. I want to believe that too.

And I say, thank goodness that there are not indigenous peoples living on those asteroids that we want to be mining. There could be indigenous microbes. There could be. What about microbes? That's true. I wanted to say microbes are people too, but I know that they're not. So it doesn't really work. As a biologist, if there is another instance of life out there, like, you know, the cases of evolution, there's an N equals two for us to discover.

That would be way more exciting to me than platinum. But we'll just have to wait and see. But platinum is so shiny. It is so shiny. And it makes pretty jewelry, but I'm guessing neither of us own platinum jewelry. I own zero platinum. That is correct. Yes, I can confirm that.

So platinum is used in catalytic converters to clean up automobile exhaust. So we might have some platinum in our cars. I have two electric cars, zero emission vehicles. Oh, I've got hybrids. But there might be platinum in some of the electronics, actually. Uh-huh. Okay, well, you win the hippie contest we just had there. You have more points than I do.

All right. More Berkeley points from me. That's right. All right. Well, let's go ahead and jump in and chat with our experts whose last name is Elvis, which is great. Is he going to tell us all about what it's like to build a heartbreak hotel in space? You know, if I were a better podcast host, I would have looked up more Elvis song names. But I'm so glad that we're a team and you've got us covered. I got your back there, Kelly. Got your back. Thanks, Daniel. All right. On today's show, we have done.

Dr. Martin Elvis. First thing to know is that he has an awesome last name. And second is that he's an astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. His work on quasars got him concerned about the cost of space telescopes. This got him interested in asteroid mining as a way to cut the cost of this research. I personally appreciate Martin's work because I think he's done an incredible job of drumming up loads of excitement for mining space resources while still making clear that there's a lot of technological, political, and economic hurdles and reasons why space mining might be tough.

Asteroid 9283 Martin Elvis is named after him. That's pretty awesome. That's a new life goal of mine. And he wrote an excellent book called Asteroids, How Love, Fear, and Greed will determine our future in space. Welcome to the show, Martin. Hi. Good to be here.

Good to have you. How's your day going? That's not very interesting, actually. It's all bureaucracy so far, but this will help. We had Phil Plate on the show to talk about how asteroids might crash into the earth and cause problems. So you are going to give us a more upbeat perspective on asteroids today, I suspect. Yeah, that's one of the things, but there's other things to love about asteroids, too.

Okay, well, let's jump right into that. So your book lays out three motivations for working on resources in space, love, fear, and greed. Let's start with love and fear. How do these motivations work in space? Fear is what you were talking to Phil Platt about, because that's killing off the dinosaurs and could it happen to us? And the answer is yes. And eventually it will if we don't do something about it.

Right now, there could be a thousand of these dinosaur killer-type asteroids out there. We found 900-something of them, but it only takes one. So we better find all of them, right? And we have plans to do that. So that's a really good thing. And then what do you do if you find one? you have to move it, change its orbit enough to stop it hitting the Earth. And that's why NASA did the dart test, hitting the moon of another asteroid, and watching

you change its orbit that way. The first time humanity has ever changed the solar system, at least deliberately. That went well? It went amazingly well, yes. Nice. Let's hope we're not fooled by that and say, okay, we don't need a really big rocket to hit this thing. It just the regular-sized one and then the next one that's actually going to kill us all doesn't respond as effectively as we'd like. Then you're all going to die. Oh, good, good. So I reckon we need to practice just a few more times to make sure that wasn't an outlier. We don't want any of these asteroids to enter the atmosphere and become hunks and hunks of burning love, do we? Is that some kind of Elvis joke? That was my best Elvis joke. We're done with that now. Let's leave

it at that then. Good. But you raise a real issue there, which is that we don't know what these asteroids are made out of, so we don't know how they'll respond to a push, right? Some of them might be piles of rubble, other ones might be mostly ice. What do we know about what's inside these asteroids? That's right. Inside is really tricky. We know what the surfaces like what is made of for about a thousand or 2,000 of them, something like that.

But there's like many, many times that out there that we'd love to know what they are. And then what you do is take a spectrum. Look at the colors of an asteroid as it reflected sunlight. So it reflects sunlight like everything. And if it turns out that it's got a dip in its colors, that one's missing, basically, way in the infrared beyond what we can see, then you know it's got water on the surface, or at least water bound into clay.

So it's a wet thing. Because it's absorbing light of a certain frequency. Yeah, there's water in there. Water absorbs a particular kind of frequency of light or wavelength of light. But we can't do that very easily because that's a very difficult wavelength to look at from the ground. So we really need a telescope in orbit to do that. And I think some observations with the James Webb Space Telescope are trying to do that for a few objects. But that's much too valuable piece of equipment to spend a huge amount of time when doing asteroids.

Most astronomers think of them as vermin of the skies, right? Just a little bits of rock and get in the way. What about the theoretical side? You've told us about what we could do to see these asteroids, bounce light off of them. But what about our models of solar system development? Do they tell us that asteroids should be made of the same stuff that the Earth is made out of, or different stuff?

Ballpark, the whole solar system is made out of the same stuff, right? But in the case of small things like the Earth or asteroids, most of the hydrogen has disappeared. That's only left attached to the big planets that have a strong enough gravity to do that. So apart from hydrogen and some helium, two, then we're more or less the same. Now, all geologists and planetary scientists get really annoyed with me. They're no, they're not. There's fascinating differences. Yeah, yeah, true.

But overall, everything has the same composition. The differences come from processes like when you make an asteroid or any big enough body. It starts to melt and get hot because of the radioactive decay on the elements. And that's enough to liquefy modest-sized planets, including the Earth at first. And even the precursors of the asteroids called planetesimals, they were like 1,000 miles across. And that was big enough that they kept enough heat in, that they melted and differentiated. That is, the heavy stuff fell to the center and the light stuff stayed on the top. And so you get the same kind of structure you have on Earth, where you have metal core made of solid iron, and whatever dissolves in iron, which turns

out to be very interesting because those are the platinum group metals, very expensive things because they're rare and they're rare because most of the platinum on earth is 6,000 kilometers beneath your feet in the core of the earth, right? That's not very helpful, yeah. Around the metal core is a pile of silicate rock, which is kind of not interesting to me, but I'm sure the details are really fascinating. And then sometimes, at least, around that is a sort of crust, which isn't quite, the same as the bit that never got hot enough. So it's still got the original composition of the

solar system. And that's where there's lots of water. Because water is very common in space, it turns out. Not what you'd think, but it is. Because hydrogen and oxygen are two of the most common elements, and that's the simplest thing molecule they can make. And it happens in all sorts of star forming regions, dark clouds are full of water. That's lucky for us. I think that's something a lot of people don't appreciate how much water there is in the solar system. You know, they imagine we'll have to bring water with us from Earth or something, but like the ice giants are basically huge balls of water, right? There are icy moons that are pretty solidly water. What about Neptune and Uranus?

Well, when they call them ice, they're not talking about water ice. Oh, astronomers have a different meaning of the word ice, don't they? As we do are metals. The astronomers' periodic table says hydrogen, helium, metals. So, you know, we'd like to gloss over fiddly detail. for convenience of some time. One of the things to me that was most surprising in your book was that you argue that one of the first resources that's going to be the most valuable in space is water, which I think we take for granted

because we live on like a super wet planet. Can you go into a little bit more about why water will be so valuable in space? If you're living on the International Space Station right now, you don't use a lot of water, actually. You reuse a lot of water, as you were pointing out in a recent talk. Yesterday's coffee?

Yesterday's coffee. Mmm. But I can't see, after the first few tourist types go up there or researchers or industrial people, they're not going to put up with the kind of conditions that these right stuff kind of astronauts do. I mean, they have that sort of a macho thing about it. I think that, yeah, we can put up with this. That's not going to fly for most people. So they're going to need showers, toilets that really work.

Eventually they're going to have to grow crops in orbit. because it's ridiculously expensive to take a salad from the ground and bring it to the space station. And it wouldn't be all that fresh either, right? So there's going to be a bigger demand for water in orbit if there are all these other people going to orbit. And that depends on how well tourism really takes off, which I think is likely to be getting a lot cheaper quite quickly once the initial exploration has been done. You know, trials have been done. If we get real space stations that replace the international space station, which would be a lot cheaper to use. operate and use, then it could become economical to first have a space hotel. And that would be

occupied by people who think five-star hotels are a bit of a come-down. So they would have to have some serious facilities on board to make them comfortable. Then you're going to have ordinary scientists doing research, not astronaut scientists, because at a moment you have to learn Russian and then spend two years training for every mission. No scientist can actually afford to be away from their work for two years because you completely get out of touch with where the field's got to. I'm sure you appreciate that. Can we go back to space hotels, though? I feel like I've been hearing projections that space hotels are 10 years away forever.

When do you think we're going to have a first, like, space hotel and people can actually go and spend their honeymoon, you know, looking at the stars? I was pretty keen on axiom space because they seem to be clued into the whole massive network and they knew what was going on and they seemed to have a good plan. And apparently they're in financial difficulties right now, so that's unfortunate. They were planning for like 2030 to launch a module one piece of a space station that would start off attach to the International Space Station, but then later detach once the International Space Station has reached its end of life. And I read just now this morning that there's a leak in one of the Russian pieces of the space station that's been there since 2019 and presumably getting a little worse and getting people really worried now. If it breaks off, what does that mean?

Yikes. That's exaggerating. I don't know that that's going to happen, but they're concerned, let's say. I think leaks happen on the International Space Station and other space stations before that way more often than I would be comfortable with if I were an astronaut. There was a story a little while ago about a Soyuz having a hole in it that appeared to have been drilled. And it was not clear if while the Soyas was being made, somebody accidentally drilled a hole and then patched it in a crappy way, like didn't do enough. And then when it got to space, the patch came off. Or then the Russians were saying that one of the astronauts wanted to go back to Earth really quickly and was angry.

And so they drilled a hole to try to, like, force an emergency landing. International politics on the ISS. It's exciting stuff. That's just the case of somebody going crazy, right? That's right. Space madness. But the point is everything is harder in space. I think running a hotel down here on Earth is a pretty small margin business.

2030 seems very optimistic for having a space hotel. Are we talking decades and decades into the future? I don't think so. I mean, if everything works with, well, even without Starship, the SpaceX Starship, which should bring the cost of doing things in getting to low Earth orbit down by tenfold, we still have just with Falcon 9 and presumably with Blue Origins coming up there, new Glenn rocket, that should enable access to space at a much better price than people are currently paying.

What's the guy's name, Jared, something, who just went up. did a spacewalk. I don't remember his name, but yeah. They're paying tens of millions of dollars, maybe $50 million per person. That's kind of too much for a real market. I mean, if there's a billionaire market, that's great. But then there's no reason it has to cost that much. I think they're paying a premium for being first.

And it should come down to just a few million, a handful of millions soon. So, you know, I just open that piggy bank and away you go. Yeah, so I'm still not going. You've read all about the dangerous holes that get drilled in the side of these things. You know, that would be on my mind too, but also I don't have the money. But there is a much bigger market for $1 million than for $10 million and sort of, right? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I can imagine some people saving their whole life for like that amazing trip,

and I'm sure it would be incredible holes in the habitats aside. But so you had mentioned that, like, tourists are probably not going to want to drink water that was recycled from urine. And so they're going to want clean water. Why would you get it from asteroids or somewhere else in space rather than shipping it from Earth? Even with Starship, it's going to cost you a million dollars a ton, just pure water, and then you have to put it in a container of some kind, so it probably goes up to $2 million a ton. So it's still expensive even then. And if you need many tons, maybe it's cheaper to bring it from an asteroid.

But that depends a lot on whether we can bring the cost of mining an asteroid down to something less than that. So it's a business case. It's not a physics problem, right? The physics tells you that in energy terms, it's much better to get it from an asteroid because you're both already out in space away from the gravity well of the Earth as opposed to trying to climb out of that every time.

So energy-wise, yeah, it's absolutely much better to go to the asteroid or the moon. There are asteroids that are easier to reach and get back from on the moon. But I want to point out, and we'll come back to this later, I think, that this is a scenario where you find the resource in space and you use the resource in space.

It's not like you're mining it in the afterwards and then you're bringing it down to Earth or something crazy like that. It's in situ, right? But this touches on sort of the bigger picture here. Kelly talked about love and fear and you're really talking about business and like greed. Well, this is greed.

Sorry, how did I get onto that? It's just my natural. You're in the U.S., so. It's fascinating if capitalism is really going to drive our exploration into space. You see that as the future of this field? Well, yeah. The trouble is, I wrote this for a conference called Building a Space Faring Civilization.

I wrote this chapter where I said, you know, we talk about going to the stars and thinking that we'll take our better selves there. But immediately, when we start talking about how we're going to do it, it's the same old stuff we do anyway, and we take really just going to reproduce our civilization in space. it'll look a bit different, but the things that are driving us so like profit, it's how we get started for sure. Is there any way to not do that later on and get a more perhaps nobler way of doing things? Maybe that we don't need anything like that and it's fine. But I get a bit depressed because in some ways, because in the longer term, if we keep on growing our economy

the way we have for the past 200 years since the Industrial Revolution started, then in 400 years we'll have finished with all the resources of the solar system that are accessible because it's exponential growth and that runs away, right? You go one, two, four, eight, 16, 32, and very soon you're into big numbers. I thought our population, so like the number of babies that every woman is having globally is projected to fall below replacement rate. So every, you know, man and woman on average will have less than two kids. Is that going to help with the resource use?

It seems like it should go down at some point. You would think so. And also there's some kind of belief that so some numbers to suggest that energy use and material use per dollar of GDP is going down. So we're getting better at making things that don't actually need huge amounts of iron and concrete and so on. And that's like information and related stuff, mostly, I assume. On the other hand, there is a big physical underpinning to that. And will we reach a saturation point in that? I don't know.

Yeah, I guess I was getting annoyed in a way with Jeff Bezos because he's saying he has a vision of a future where there's a trillion people living and working in space. You know, first of all, I guess he said a trillion because it's the only number that still impresses him. He's really wanting that trillion hair. He might get there. He might, he might.

Mr. Musk, if he doesn't mess up. Further. Who knows? But what's your objection to the number of a trillion? If you imagine a trillion people living in working space, they can't be all on planets because there aren't enough room on planets. So they have to be living in these artificial space cities that are rotating cylinders. So you stand on the inside of the wall of it and you feel 1G gravity like Earth. But I happened to have handy, just over there on my shelf, a 1977 study of these things.

And it turns out, although the illustrations show pictures of green, scenery, stretching away, and then Renaissance Cathedral here and a French bistro there, it's actually going to be kind of crowded. It's more like the Bronx. The amount of space you get is really small per person. You get a two-bedroom apartment per person and a little bit of outdoor space per person. But for a million people, it adds up to like five central parks, I think it is. Wow. Not small, but there's nothing like a wilderness area that you can really get lost in for a few days. That won't be available.

Let's take a quick break and we'll get back to, I don't want to miss my chance to rant about rotating space stations. So when we get back from the break, I'll take my moment. Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone, think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control.

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Hola, it's HoneyGerman. And my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world. music and entertainment, with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talked all about what's viral and trending,

with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vivras you've come to expect. And, of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash,

because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. okay and we're back one of the other things that i wonder about when i look at those

rotating space station so first of all the exterior is always glass which i think is just not going to work with space radiation that you're going to get baked inside of there but then also like you look along the bike tire shaped habitat and there's no airlock separating each of the different things, right? And so if base is filled with junk, if something crashes one of your windows, everyone's getting sucked into the abyss. Yes, absolutely. You've got to divide it into airtight sections. Yes. And as a bioperson, you'll be pleased to realize that when your food growing areas also very much have to be sealed off and kept pristine, because if you get potato blight or the equivalent in one of them and it spreads, you all die. Yeah. So it's got to be at least,

I would say 10 or a dozen sections. Yeah. On the plus side, that would make it harder for any would-be dictator to take over the whole place because each sector would have to be self-sufficient. So they couldn't say, I will turn off your oxygen supply if you don't do everything I say. Charles Kakel would be very happy with this design. That's how it came up because he was talking about his freedom engineering and this modular design stuff.

It's just like the Titanic only slightly improved, where you have a separate section. Hermetically sealed and then it's difficult and each one would have to have escape ponds that could get to the next one of these space cities and so on and these space cities presumably were building them in space and so we're going to need resources which I hope takes us back to the question of asteroid mining what's in the asteroids and can we use those asteroids to like build these fantastical space cities yes indeed because precursors of the asteroids were these panetessimals but then they they were formed on random orbit so they tended to collide with each other and break up and so

So the cores, the iron cores, got exposed. And there's a mission on its way to 16 Psyche called Psyche, which is a terrible idea. It's confusion all around. You mean the asteroid or you mean the mission? Anyway, Psyche is about to see if 16 Psyche, which is the formal name of the asteroid, is made of solid metal. Is it really the core of a planet or a planetesimal, a little planet? And if it is, then there's huge amounts of iron there. And iron in orbit could be used for construction.

For instance, you could build space cities, or you could build giant telescopes. Oh, am I letting my astronomy show? So all of the use cases for the resources that you've noted have been in space. Is there any resource that would be worth bringing back to Earth to sell? Is the only reason to go out and use the space resources to use them for the purpose of space? talked about, right? One of them is not from asteroids, but only from the moon. The one from asteroids is the platinum group metals, because I mentioned they dissolved in liquid iron early on and got sank to the core. So 16 Psyche should be rich in platinum and palladium and

other very expensive, rare precious metals. So you could mine those and bring them back to earth and in principle make a profit. You could sell them for a lot of money anyway, right? And I did ask some banking people and they thought that the market was elation. Have I got it the right way around? That is if you sell more, the price stays constant as opposed to declining. You've saturated the market or whatever it's called. Okay. But again, these metals are also present here on Earth,

and presumably we've got much more of them in the Earth than we do in the asteroids. Is the reason they might be accessible economically in asteroids just because asteroids are smaller, so it's easier to get to them? You have to dig as far into them as you do into the Earth? No, I think in total the asteroids will have more. accessible platinum than the whole of the crust of the Earth. Because we can't get to the core and mine our own platinum from a molten core of the Earth. But most of the platinum, which I didn't really get into,

it comes from collisions with asteroids in the early solar system. They used to plunge in, go right through the crust, but then get recycled into the crust through convection and stuff. All those geology things that happen. I don't know those stuff. But it really is about access. It's about where they are. object. There's also the strategic thing, that there are two places which produce 90-something percent

of the platinum in the world, and that's southern Africa and Russia. Neither is a particularly stable place, so you might worry that the supply would disappear or be highly curtailed at some point. But they're worth $50 million a tonne, roughly, so you don't have to bring back 10 tons and you've got a serious amount of money. But, of course, you have to be able to bring that amount back for less than you're going to get paid for it. So whether that's true is another business case, and I don't know that. Could you walk us through, like, where are these asteroids? What kind of technology would we need to extract this stuff?

Like, what would it look like to actually try to do this? Yeah. So absolutely always, the asteroids you first go to are the ones that are energetically easiest to reach. That means your rocket has to be less powerful than it would otherwise. And most of those are in what orbits, that come near to the earth, and they're cleverly named near-ear-earth objects. They're not always near the earth, but they do come near the earth at some point.

There are only 10 or 20,000 of those that are a reasonable size, like big as a football stadium or something like that, which you could mine. And then only a few percent of those are actually going to be made of iron and have platinum in them. And of those, only a quarter will be rich in platinum. And that's based just on the numbers we get from picking up iron meteorites on earth and which are just little fragments of asteroids. So we have some idea how often we get that.

So some small fraction, like one or two percent of all asteroids are going to be rich in platinum. And that comes down to 200 or so candidates. And you would go to the biggest one because that obviously gives you the most payoff and start mining it. Extracting platinum from these asteroids, although they're rich in platinum,

that's still, you know, grams, tonne. So a fraction of an ounce per tongue, a small fraction of an ounce per ton. So it actually takes up quite a bit of clever chemistry to extract that platinum or and the other metals there like palladium. And even before you extract it from the ore, how do you get the ore? I mean, you have to like deliver some mining equipment to this asteroid. Presumably you've done all your prospecting remotely with telescopes and then by going nearby and getting samples of the surface or maybe hit it with a laser, let it evaporate them. see what it's made of that way.

Or of course, my favorite method is x-ray fluorescence, which is, because I'm an X-ray astronomer, so I naturally think of that. And the sun's x-rays from the sun hit the surface, and that excites the atoms to emit in particular energies of x-ray wavelengths and so on. And you can tell what it's made of from that. And it's particularly good for the heavy elements

like iron and platinum and so on. Anyway, however you've done it, you've done that kind of prospecting work. Now you have to send out quite a few tons I would think of mining equipment, right? So the Osiris Rex spacecraft weighed two tons when it got to Benu, the little asteroid Benu, which is about the size of asteroid you'd be mining. You think, well, two tons, that's about the same as an F-150 pickup.

So that's pretty hefty, you know, seriously. But then you're backing that F-150 up to the Rose Bowl and saying, okay, I'm now going to start digging and taking away this stadium and extracting the valuable bits from it. And it's like, yeah, let's say that's optimistic or a minimum. So you have to get at least two tons, probably 10 tons, at least before you can get serious about mining. But the mechanics of mining, like, do the technology and the robots that we have here on Earth apply at all? Or is a completely different problem to get the ore off the surface and into your processing pipeline?

We'll know a lot more about that after Psyche has done its job because is it one solid lump of iron? like it melted, it's set, solidified, and never broke up again? Or is it a pile of rubble, which, like many rocky asteroids are made of, just piles of rubble, in which case you can actually scoop it up pretty easily. So it's going to make a huge difference, whether it's solid iron or not. If you're after the iron, it's great. You just chop it into pieces, and here's a chunk, and you take it home. Sorry, how do you chop solid iron into pieces in space?

With a saw. I mean, I do that in my garage all the time. Yeah, of course you do. But you have to worry that different problems come up. I mean, you have to use special vacuum grease to keep it. And you'd have to have some way of cooling it because it's going to get hot. And there's probably a bunch of other issues coming up. But I don't think you can actually tell now what the best way of doing it is.

You're going to have to learn about these asteroids, do some little tests. And there's going to be a lot of learning. on this. And that makes me wonder about the balance between, you know, government research funding and capitalism business funding. I think a lot of times in our history, we've had the government fund research for a long time when it was very long term before it would have any payoff. And then at some point it becomes commercial and industry rushes in. And of course, there's a lot more resources. Do you think we're at that point where, like, business is ready to invest in these technologies, to develop these tools, even when we don't know, like, what the basic mechanism will be

for extracting this stuff from the asteroid? Or do we need a little bit more government-funded exploration to answer these questions? I would think we're at the beginning of the wedge where commercial interests are going to start doing things. We've had our first round of asteroid mining companies that were all very famous for a short while and then their 15 minutes was up and they didn't get anywhere.

There's a new crop coming up now. They should always be doing this. This is what capitalist systems do. You keep trying until someday, you'll hit the right moment of which to do this. Before that, everybody fails, and then suddenly it's a great success. And if you wait longer, then you've missed the boat, right? So you have to keep trying.

But I'd say first of all, we're going to know a lot more about the whole asteroid population in 10 years' time, and that's not an arbitrary time. The telescope now just starting up in Chile, which is the Vera Rubin Observatory, is doing what they call a large-scale survey. in space and time, which means they take a photograph of the all the night sky that ever comes up in South America. Every three nights, they cover the whole sky. And they're particularly working to make sure that they can see asteroids, which come up as look like stars, but they move, which stars don't. So they're now, you know, it's a little rock in the solar system going

around somewhere by tracking how fast it's moving and exactly which way it's going, you can get its orbit. And we'll get the colors of this thing. And you'll be able to tell for sure, if it's just a boring, stony asteroid made of silicate rock. And that's, of the ones we know now that are near the Earth, 85% are just rock. And that's not very interesting, toward capitalist anyway. We have rocks here already. If you're geologists, that's very different. So we've talked a little bit about how we don't really know enough about the asteroids.

And because we don't know enough about the asteroids, we don't really know enough about what kind of techniques we would need to extract the stuff that we're interested in. Let's take a break. And when we come back, let's talk about the legal aspects of going out there and collecting the asteroids.

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Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro, tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to. credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge. It is

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Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So you mentioned that there was a round of asteroid mining companies that kind of peaked and fell. So planetary resources, I think, is probably one of them that you had in mind. And I was talking to Chris Lewicki, who was one of the big guys at planetary resources, and he helped get some of the U.S. laws on the book to try to clarify what's allowed with these asteroids. But my sense from talking to him was that a lack of clarity about what's allowed in space was a big problem. for planetary resources and getting investors. So what is the current status of, like,

if you land on one of those 200 asteroids that have the levels of platinum that would be worth getting, does that belong to you? Are you allowed to collect it and mash it up and sell it? What are you allowed to do in space? Okay.

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 says you cannot own any celestial body or part thereof, right? No one can, no country can in particular. So that's still true. But the act of Congress that Chris Lewicky helped move along said that, yes, but if you pick something up from a celestial body, including the moon, and it becomes property at that point. So if you pick it up and put it in the bag, it's now yours, right? And in fact, I don't know why this isn't actually widely accepted because those Apollo moon rocks clearly belong to the US government and nobody else, and they can do what the hell they like with them. you want to argue? No. Right. No, sir. And the same with the Japanese samples of the asteroids,

the Chinese samples from the far side of the moon, and the old Soviet samples that came back from the lunar missions. So everyone's been acting as though that was absolutely the case forever. But you're using the word samples, which does have a legal definition and is different than collecting an entire giant asteroid and selling it off. At that point, you're not talking samples anymore. Okay. I don't know the legal definition of sample. Do tell me. I don't have it memorized. But it's something like you go and you collect it and it's a quantity that you need to like figure out like what is it made out of. What could you do with it? So none of those things were collected for profit. They were collected for science to try to

understand it better. Some of them did end up on the auction block at So the Bees setting something like precedent. But I still feel like it's a little bit unclear that if you collected one of those giant asteroids and said this is all mine. Well, I think there's a difference between take, if you went to an asteroid and took big pieces away, right? Then maybe you can get away with that up to some point. But some of the ideas are you wrap the entire asteroid in a sealed bag and heat it up and drive off the water and collect the water. And then that whole asteroid has been put in a bag, right?

It's all yours. You might even mine it so it doesn't exist anymore at all. And you could destroy a celestial object. But you never claim to own it. You only own the product. So you can see the horrifying loops that space lawyers will be getting into. I mean, there's an issue here of relativity also because you land on an object, you pick up a rock. You could say, okay, I've picked the rock up off the asteroid.

You could also say, I've picked the asteroid up off the rock. I mean, physics doesn't really care. You can say, well, now I picked up this whole asteroid and left the rock behind. I'm going to happily claim that. So, yeah, I think the lawyers are going to have a field there. It's kept even more complicated. There are no such things as mining rights. because you can't only SLS your body in any way, say, they mark it as mine for mining purposes.

So without those rights, you're going to get a lot of sketchy behavior going on, right? People will start spying on you to see where you're going, and then maybe they'll try to jump the claim and get there first and start mining before you do, because they didn't have to invest all their money in finding a good asteroid. They just built a bigger rocket and got there faster. could then be rustling of asteroids. If you found the right asteroid, but somebody else rushes there and puts a little rocket motor on the end side of it and pushes it, goes off into some orbit that they know, but you don't. You've lost your asteroid and they've got it. And finally,

there's piracy, which is just intercept your ingots of platinum on the way back. Of those four different things, the only one that's actually illegal is piracy. That's definitely illegal under the the Outer Space Treaty. Spying is actually encouraged. You're allowed to visit other people's facilities in space, and you're not allowed to not say no, in fact, really. All these are laws that we set up decades ago when we didn't really anticipate what was going to happen.

Do you foresee, like, somebody's going to make a whole new set of laws once things really kick into high gear and people want to protect their interests and we sort of understand the dynamics of the space economics? Well, yes, we need those, some laws like that. And then you've got this terrible thing of, if you make a set of laws too soon, you may lock in some stupidities that you didn't anticipate the realities of what doing this kind of mining, space mining is like. If you wait too long,

they'll have been a free-for-all and people have established positions and they aren't going to give those up lightly because it costs a lot to get them. So it's a very tricky job to get the whole international regulation right. Where are we now? Are we too soon? Is it time or have we missed the right time frame? Where are we? Personally, I think we'd better hurry up and do something in the next few years, especially on the moon. There's going to be human bases on the moon and competing ones. And they're going to have a lot of issues. It's where all these issues are first going to arise. And right now, of course, NASA has the Artemis Accords with 30-something other space agencies. And that's great. And they're all going to work together, et cetera,

except they don't include China or Russia. It may help set some standards, but it's not going to be definitive without those countries. The other possibilities going to the United Nations Committee on the peaceful uses of outer space, copuous. I never remember. Congratulations. I can never remember the acronym. Oh, well, some of us have, you know, great talents in these areas. It's true. I even remember the alphabet. Okay, they're studying the issues, right? But they tend to move slowly, and so maybe they'll have a report on what the issues are in four years, and they'll then start considering what to do about it. So that would be good because it's totally international. The Chinese are definitely on board with it, and that is essential. But maybe it will be too late

by the time they actually come out with some rules. I don't know. It's such a tricky one. One of the things that I learned from reading your papers is how rare the good stuff is or like how concentrated it is. I looked at the moon. I'm like, oh, it's all like this gray stuff. kind of seems the same. But, you know, like the water and the great places to set up your solar panels, it's really concentrated. So what do you think the implications are there for geopolitics moving forward? I think you're going to get a lot of people wanting to do land grabs and say, these peaks of eternal light are mine. What are those? Ah, what are the peaks of eternal light? Well, at the poles of the moon, right? If you imagine a single mountain at the south

pole of the moon, for instance, the sun will just circle the horizon all the time, because because there's essentially no seasons on the moon. The Earth is tilted over, 23 and a half degrees, and so sometimes the sun is very low in the sky all the time, and that's winter, and sometimes it's very high in that's summer. Great. The moon instead is tilted 1.5 degrees, so there's a tiny effect,

but basically there are places on the South Pole of the Moon where the sun only sets for a day or so instead of 14 days on the rest of the Moon, and then comes back up and stays for a long, long time, and disappears. That's just, it's going behind some distant mountain on the South Pole. And so you can map out where these places are. And there are no places that are really 100% illuminated all the time throughout the month.

But if you go up a few meters, a few yards above the surface, they get much more illuminated because you're getting above the local ridges and mountains and things. And so pretty quickly you can get 90-something percent in a few small places, 90% till the time is the sun is shining on there, which is great because you get permanent solar power and your equipment isn't cycling between extremely cold and really, really hot all the time. It stays pretty hot.

Then it's easier to deal with because you can add radiators and so on. Anyway, but there are only a few of these places, like really a few. I think it was like one billionth of a percent of the moon surface or something. Oh, it's a tiny, tiny fraction of the moon surface, but even if you just stick to the South Pole, region, it's really only crater rims that get illuminated like this, and occasional ridges connecting one crater to another. So it's kind of long, skinny regions, maybe a mile or so

long by a hundred yards wide. So everyone will want to land there and put their solar power panels there, and because there are so few of them, the chances that two different agencies or whatever will want to land in the same place is not small. I've mapped out where NASA has said they want to land. They had 13 candidate sites where Artemis 3, the first human lander for 50 years will land. 13 sites. The Chinese have mapped out, I think, nine,

and three of them overlap, three or four of them overlap. So already there's a pretty decent chance that the very first time you want to land, somebody else will have landed in your favorite spot already. You can't land next to somebody because when you land, you kick up enormous amounts of fast-moving shark rock, could damage the next spacecraft over.

That's definitely a no-no on the outer space treaty. One of my favorite ways to explore these questions is to read science fiction because in some cases they really have thought this through and imagine what it would be like. Have you ever read science fiction that tackles these questions in a way that you think is insightful or realistic? For example, there's the show on Apple TV called For All Mankind where they talk about a lot of these issues.

And they even, I think, try to redirect an asteroid and all this kind of stuff. Have you seen anything realistic and impressive in that category? Yeah, I enjoyed that whole long series, yeah. They start having international disputes on the moon fairly early on, right? For some reason, they have guns. I've forgotten why they have guns. But there's some excuse. The Chinese race off and do something,

and the Americans go to the Chinese base and destroy it and vice versa, and I don't know what kind of mess they get into after that. But, yeah, there's another, what was that other science fiction? movie, which was mostly terrible and got Pam, but when they land on the moon before going off to, I don't know where, Jupiter or something. And they have this huge base with advertising Arby's roast beef and so on with big neon figures. And then they get into a fight with the neighboring base, which belongs to some other country. I don't know which. Brad Pitt was in this, right? His dad had like lost his mind on some spacecraft and he was supposed to.

to, oh, what was it called? Is this at Astra? Oh, was it? That might be, right? Could be, yeah. But I remember, he went up the elevator and there was an Arby sign and I thought that could be pretty accurate. Yeah, I thought that was the first time I've seen that in a science fiction movie, yeah.

Yeah. Although, if you go back to 2001, we all remember that had Pan Am as a shuttle and the Hilton was in the space station. Another thing they got right, which apparently Arthur C. Clarke didn't like, but Stanley Kubrick insisted on, was that when they land on the moon, they have this giant thing that opens up and they come inside it like in the crater and land in there and then it steals up. That's actually much more plausible than you need have guessed,

because now we know there are these big skylights on the moon that are 100 yards across, and they open into huge spaces underneath called lava tubes, which is where you probably want to build your base. So actually, maybe that was a super smart idea of Mr. Cooper. I guess that wouldn't necessarily save you all the trouble of worrying about regolith and rocks getting blown because you'd still probably do that on the way down. If it's big enough, if you keep going back to the same place, you build a landing pad and then you

don't have the rocks problem. As someone who's excited about base resources, what in the next decade will you be looking for as a sign that things are moving in the right direction, that this is going to happen and it's going to happen in a good way? I never asked people like, how many years until we figure this? out because those kinds of questions depend on political will and blah, blah, blah. What are you looking for to happen to show that, like, we're taking this seriously? So there's several things.

There's actual these surveys for asteroids that I've already talked about. And there's another one that's going there, and it's a NASA mission that will look for very dark asteroids, particularly called the Near-Earth Object Surveyor, which could find huge amounts more water than we currently think is out there. So there's government surveys. There'll be some replacement for the International Space Station, one assumes. And that could be commercial. If it's commercial, that starts to open up that whole regime of an in-space economy we're talking about.

There are the mining companies that are starting up again. Astroforge is a particularly busy one. They are very active. They have a test, some of their equipment in orbit now, and they're going to do a test going to an asteroid, which they will not name soon. And that's the beginning of this problem of not having any kind of mineral rights. If they tell you where they're going, then it gives away a lot of their intellectual property. So it's a whole big legal issue.

There's going to be stuff on the moon, we think. The Chinese want to land there by 2030. NASA keeps saying it's going to land there earlier, but that will be a challenge because it depends on starship, not only working reliably, but also being able to be refueled in orbit and then having a special variant of it which can land on the moon and take off again. So that's a lot of work to do in a very short time if they're going to be 2030. Yeah.

But, you know, that sort of stuff is happening. That will spur a lot of this legal stuff, I suspect. So are you overall feeling optimistic? What do you think? I'm getting a lot older than I was when I started this, and so I'm not too sure I'm going to see much of it. Oh, it never moves as fast as you want it to. Yeah.

But it could happen. I think it will happen eventually. I just want to see it happen peacefully. peacefully and hopefully with a good ethic going forward so we don't actually run out of space resources in 400 years. Well, as much as it's going to make everything more complicated, I'm really hoping for a bunch of surprises. I'm hoping when we get out there and we test out these asteroids,

we discover weird stuff in there that doesn't make any sense or we learn something new about the solar system and that might upend some startup company's plans for extracting the platinum, but that's my preference. I like that. And in fact, I had a high school student and an undergrad who made a list or meteorite minerals, minerals that are found only in meteorites, not on Earth. They had like 70 of them when they finished the list.

So there are strange things out there that we do not know. That seems like an exciting note to end on today. Thank you so much for your time, Martin. It was great chatting with you. And we're all keeping our fingers crossed that this goes forward ethically and ethically. Thank you so much. Great fun. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by IHeart Radio.

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