StarTalk Radio - Eureka! Asteroid Mining

Episode Date: April 28, 2013

Take off for an asteroid with Neil deGrasse Tyson and Peter Diamandis, the co-founder of Planetary Resources and the man with the plan to mine asteroids for profit and progress. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, where I also serve as the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium. My co-host this week is the one, the only, Chuck Nice. Yes, for now. I plan on cloning myself. Okay, that'd be good. Then you can sleep and work at the same time.

I didn't even think of that. You're smart. You know what this show, it's all about asteroid mining. Awesome. It is. It so is. I'm saying it's awesome, but what exactly is asteroid mining? Well, we can early get to our clip because I recently interviewed Peter Diamandis. And I don't know if you know his name. He gets around a bit in his circles. He's deeply known in his circles. He's the founder of the XPRIZE, which are public competitions, which challenges the world to see if they can come up with technological innovations that you might've thought were out of reach. But if you put a fat billfold in front of him, it's in reach. Isn't it funny how it works like that? Fat Billfolds, the mother of invention.

The mother of invention. So the most famous X Prize is the Ansari X Prize. What he does is he gets founders to help produce this billfold for the particular prize. And that one was related to spacecraft development. But he's coming up with X Prizes that are for all manner of sort of achievements that we long for, for those who remain among us continuing to dream of a tomorrow. I've got a whole other StarTalk show on the XPRIZE with Peter Diamandis, but right now we're talking about asteroid mining. You know why?

Because Peter Diamandis is one of the founders of Planetary Resources. Okay. Just a few months back, there's a big announcement, and it's a company that has the goal of mining asteroids. Mining asteroids. Out of control. That is, that's a little crazy. That's crazy.

I mean, the whole thought of, I'm just looking forward to the day where we'll actually say, where'd you pull that out of, your asteroid? And where we'll actually mean it. We'll actually mean it. Let us quickly go to clip. Let's see. My first clip with Peter Diamandis, we ran into each other at a conference, and I said, I'm not going to let this opportunity go.

Let's see what he has to say about his new venture. We now have the ability privately to go out and begin to extract resources from asteroids. You know, much of humanity's exploration, much of humanity's growth has been a function of gaining access to resources, whether it's the Silk Trail from Asia, whether it's Europeans looking to the New World for gold and spices, or American settlers looking to the West Coast for timber, land, gold, oil. That's what's driven us.

It's driven us consistently. And so as I... Yeah, think about it. Why are the 49ers called the 49ers? Because in 1849, there was the gold rush in San Francisco. There's people moving body and soul. And that drove the creation of the railroads. It drove different parts of the United States to be literally settled, Homestead Act and

so forth. So people were looking for resources that would create value and uplift humanity in that regard. The space program has been on again, off again. You know, it's been the ups and downs of Congress. A new administration comes in, they say, forget about the moon and Mars, we're going here. Another administration comes in, they say, forget about, you know, there, we're going back to the moon and Mars. And literally, we don't ever make consistent progress. So my mission has been, how do we connect opening the space frontier to what I call an exothermic economic reaction? Meaning, how do we connect it to something that makes a profit that consistently drives us? Exothermic, that is the release of energy more than what you put in.

And as I think about this, space has tremendous value. Everything we fight wars over on Earth, metals, minerals, energy, real estate, those things are near infinite quantities in space. People look at the Earth as a very closed system, but the Earth is a crumb in a supermarket filled with resources. And if we can gain access to those resources, it uplifts everybody. It makes it possible that we can make use of what we call strategic or rare metals far more usefully. For example, I wrote this book, Abundance, and the cover is wrapped in aluminum because in 1840s, aluminum was more precious than gold and platinum.

Even though aluminum makes up 8.4% of the earth by weight, all the aluminum… Earth's crust. Earth's crust by weight. All of the aluminum is bound with oxygen and silicates to form bauxite. You don't go and find pure aluminum in the ground. to form bauxite. You don't go and find pure aluminum in the ground. But technology came along that was able to extract the aluminum from bauxite so cheaply that we make use of it with aluminum foil. Aluminum cans don't think about it. But in 1840... And we just throw it away when we're done. We throw it away. But in 1840, aluminum was so precious, they capped the top of the Washington

Monument with aluminum because it was worth more than gold and platinum. So I think about technology liberating resources. And we now have the technology to gain access to asteroids which are rich in platinum group metals, PGMs, rubidium, palladium, platinum, things like that, that are very important for humanity for batteries and electronics and medical. Industry thrives on these elements. People write reports that say we only have 17 years left of rubidium. Well, if you've got a myopic focus of looking just down at the ground, but my God, there's tons of it in space. Wow.

Yeah, the man is thinking future. That is way future. It is way future. But to him, it's like reachable future. And that's not even XPRIZE future. That's like, let's do this. Right. Now, the interesting thing is we know how to get to asteroids.

We've sent robotic missions to asteroids. We've landed on asteroids. We've orbited asteroids. And so getting there is not the issue. It's now what are you going to do with this stuff? And that's really the future shock right there. Well, that and the fact that I realized from listening to him that basically greed is what drives us as a race of people.

Well, I didn't know until we researched the show that the first transcontinental railroad was funded in part by gold rush money. I just didn't know that. And in fact, gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill, 1848. And so why do they call them the 49ers? Oh, it took a while to like that information to get out and for people to then rush the state. See, this is what happens when you don't have Twitter. It takes a whole year for the word to get out that there's gold in them. There are hills.

Them there are hills. And in fact, when you find gold, what's the first word that comes out of your mouth? Eureka. Eureka. And in fact, that is the California state motto. Really? Yeah. The state motto of California is a fricking vacuum cleaner. It's Eureka. Eureka. That sounds great. Yeah. And of course, that word, we attribute that to Archimedes. When he first dipped himself in a bathtub, he thought his brain was always thinking. And he overfilled his bathtub before he stepped in. Right. And what happens when that happens?

You overflow the tub. You overflow the tub. And he realized that his body volume must equal the volume of water that spills out of the tub, which in retrospect sounds trivial. But this could be a way to measure the volume of irregular objects like king's crowns. And you want to find out whether it's made of gold. That's the first step in that process. And I would have said Eureka as well. Eureka.

We're going to end this segment when we come back more on asteroid mining with StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, and this week, my co-host Chuck Nice. Hey. Tweeting at Chuck Nice Comics. That's right, Chuck Nice Comics. We'll be looking for you there. Absolutely. We're featuring my interview with Peter Diamandis, who founded a brand new company called Planetary

Resources. He wants to mine asteroids. Man, it's crazy fun just to hear about what he wants to do. Out there he is. And we left off talking about the word eureka because that was how they, it's the word you say when you find gold and they said it in California and the gold rush. Right. And we traced that to Archimedes when he figured out how to measure the volume of an irregular object.

And when he dipped his body in, he spilled out the amount of water that his body occupied. How else are you going to measure the volume of a human body? Yeah. That's an irregular object. Not that you're an irregular object, but looking at your volume, you seem to be a lot less voluminous, my friend. I have a little bit human body. Yeah. That's an irregular object. Not that you're an irregular object, but looking at your volume, you seem to be a lot less voluminous, my friend.

I have a little bit less body. I'm saying you do. I'm trimming down for Cosmos is actually what's happening there. The TV show. The TV program, yeah, yeah.

It's just TV vanity pounds. Interesting that you mentioned this on the radio. Yeah, everyone see? Yes. Hey, guys, look at Neil right now. He looks fantastic.

Chuck, this is radio. This is the only time I look good, Neil. So let's go back to my Peter Diamandis. I met up with him at a conference and I said, I got to whip out my microphone and talk to this guy about his crazy ideas that are going to change the world. How's he going to do this? Let's find out. Back about three and a half years ago, when we said, let's do this, we went out and pulled in some of the very best engineers and scientists. In fact, I have to confess, we rated JPL. Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And four or five

of the top people who built Curiosity that's now sitting on the Martian surface are now working for us. And we hope they'll have as much success with us as they did. So you're mining people. We're mining people out of JPL. And so we are building the very super low cost deep space satellites, satellites that can go beyond low earth orbit, millions of miles, and consistently, accurately operate out there, communicate back by laser, have super high precision pointing, have big optics to look for asteroids, and ultimately go out to them, prospect them, understand what they're made of, put a beacon on them as the first step, and then be able to extract valuable resources. Okay, so there's a whole prospecting phase. How long is that?

We're going to be prospecting for decades, I'm sure. But we're launching our first of what we call the ARCID series of spacecraft within 18 to 24 months. And these ARCID spacecraft are space telescopes. They're telescopes that, in low Earth orbit, are able to see asteroids coming whizzing by the Earth because there are thousands of them of different size and shapes that come very close to the Earth. Sometimes they hit the Earth, and that's not a good thing.

But as they come by, they're relatively low from what we call a delta V in energy standpoint. And the second iteration of the Ark of theid spacecraft are going to have propulsion that you see it coming by ignite the engines and go on an intercept course okay so first you see that they're out there now you chase them down chase them down bag them and tag them i like i think we're going to call them officially the bag and a tag admission i mean we look at three phases phase oneID-100 are spacecraft in orbit of the Earth trying to characterize and find these Earth-approaching asteroids. That's prospecting. Next?

Next is we go out. Phase two, the ARCID-200 spacecraft are propulsion on them. They're going out to actually tap these spacecraft, put a beacon on them, dock with them, and be able to actually characterize them. What are they made of? How big are they? so one is telescopically the next one is the next one actually has the same telescope on board because they're going to be using these telescopes to actually look at them and point at them as you're going

close because these things are moving at tens of thousands of miles per hour and you need to be able to accurately track them down and go and dock with them. But once you dock with them, now you're there. Now we're putting a beacon on them. Then the third phase ultimately is going to be, as you said, bag them and extract the resources. He's got this thought out, Chuck.

He really does. Yeah, I mean... A little too thought out for my taste. You think he's going to control the world. Yeah, exactly. This guy little too thought out for my taste. You think he's going to control the world. Yeah, exactly. This guy sounds like a Bond villain. He's talking about chasing down asteroids. We have a million asteroids.

So what's going on here? You realize that there's the asteroid belt in the solar system. Right. In orbit order, you have Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, an asteroid belt, then Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Get over it. There's no Pluto, right. But we're not talking about mining asteroids

in the asteroid belt because they're just too far away. We have to pass Mars. And who's going to want to pass Mars? You're going to want to visit Mars. Well, you've got to visit Mars. It's like going to your mom. You can't just pass by. You've got to stop and say hello. Yeah, Mars found out. You went by and didn't stop by. That's not cool.

So those are too far away, needlessly far away for our needs. It turns out there are tens of thousands of asteroids that have rogue, I call them rogue orbits, but these are orbits that cross the orbits of the inner planets, that cross the orbit of Mars and of Earth. And those are a little closer to us to catch up with. Right. And we don't have to go so far. They're coming to us.

They're coming to us. They're making the trip. They're making the trip. And so those are a little easier to get to, and those form the repository of the asteroids he's talking about. And some of them, as he accurately said, hit us. Yes. Yes.

So let's go to my next clip, because how do you know which asteroid to pick? Okay. There are two different types of rocks out there we're going after. One is carbonaceous chondrites, and these are asteroids, rocks out there that have a high percentage of water and volatiles. Methane, for example. So volatiles are elements that would evaporate, but they're deeper within, so they're still there. And they're shaded from the sun. And so imagine these large carbonaceous chondrate asteroids have about 20% water weight in them. And you can extract the water, you can

extract the methane, and you can break the water down into hydrogen and oxygen using the sunlight, which, by the way, is rocket fuel, right? A 50 meter, 100 meter size asteroid, something in that size. And these asteroids, if they have 20% water, which the average carbonaceous chondrite does, has more hydrogen and oxygen than was used to fuel every space shuttle launched from Earth from the beginning of the space shuttle program. launched from Earth from the beginning of the space shuttle program. So you can imagine extracting the hydrogen and oxygen and leaving it in space as fuel depots for the future missions going to the Moon and Mars.

Quick Mart. Quick filling stations. Absolutely. Because think about it. If you were going to drive from L.A. to D.C. and you'd carry all the gasoline in your car, I mean, you'd have a pretty big tanker you'd have to take with you. Same thing in space.

If you can instead fly to orbit, refuel, go to the moon, refuel, go to Mars, refuel and come back, it allows you to do it much more economically with smaller vehicles. The other category of asteroids we're interested in is asteroids that have a high concentration of platinum group metals, PGMs. And it turns out that, as you well know, these asteroids, many of them are leftover materials from the beginning of the solar system. And that, in fact, some of these are the core of a planet, if you would,

that have broken up, in which these platinum group metals typically would sink to the center of... They're heavier. They're heavier. They sink to the center of their heavier they're heavier they sink to the center of the planet and when it breaks up and forms all of these millions of asteroids some of them are highly concentrated in platinum and in fact many of the platinum mines on earth just to clarify so these these elements are rare in the universe but the action of gravity in the formation of a protoplanet concentrated down

just for us. Just for us. Just for you. For all of us. And in fact, if you think about the platinum mines on Earth that we mine, the platinum ore bodies are places where previous asteroids rich in platinum have hit the Earth. And now we're mining archaeo-asteroid impact sites. Wow.

The man is into it. Yeah, he is. I don't think he's left one stone unturned. You get a Cosby laugh for that one. It's kind of weird. It's kind of like a relationship in many respects. I don't know why. Because he's like, first you've got to see it.

That's the telescope. You've got to like it. That's the spectrometer, right? And then you chase her down. And finally, you tap that asteroid. Okay. That's just the way my mind works. That's why we have you on the show.

So one point that he just blew by, but people might not know, the water you drink. And you just took a sip of water from the table now. Yes, I did. We all know it has H2O. and it's very stable in that form. If you separated them, it takes a lot of energy to do so, but the act of bringing them back releases all that energy that it took you to separate them. Right. And that's an exothermic reaction, and that released energy can serve as rocket fuel. And the big orange tank on the shuttle has two tanks inside of it that you can't see.

One twice as big as the other. The one that's twice as big has hydrogen. The one that's half the size has oxygen. It brings them together and poof, poof. It makes energy. And guess what the waste product is? Let me guess. Space poop.

No, water. It's water. Water is the exhaust. Water vapor. So you spread these around the solar system, you've got filling stations all around. When we come back, more of my interview with Peter Diamandis and how he's going to become the Bond villain of the solar system. We're back on StarTalk Radio.

Chuck Nice, my co-host. Yes. You're there. I am here. And we've been listening to Peter Diamandis. You need one of these folks in every culture, right? I believe so. Who sees where you are and says, no, I'm not satisfied with what you've done.

Right. I want to take us someplace new. Someplace new, like I own the world. Because I mined some stuff from asteroids, and now I own the world. And if you don't obey me, I will redirect this asteroid into your... And if you don't obey me, I will redirect this asteroid into your – so it's – I mean the whole concept of planetary resources, which is the name of his company that he co-founded, is – it's very future. And I mean it's extraordinary. Oh, by the way, in the previous segment, we talked about water on some of these asteroids.

Correct. It's not in these asteroids the way you find water in a comet. In a comet, it's huge chunks of ice, and you can just carve out a piece, and there it is. You've got water. Boom. This is water that is blended in with the minerals, so you actually have to extract it. You actually have to mine the water.

So when you take whatever it is that you're mining, what's left is the water. No, the water is what you're mining, because that's your rocket fuel for that kind of that kind of asteroid the other kind of asteroids are the the the heavy duty the heavy ones that have platinum i got you so it's either mine for precious metals or or pgm or mine for water listen to you pgm so platinum group metals yes you remember your chemistry and so so it turns out these asteroids you know there are millions of them in the solar system, and they're the size that they're those that cross our orbit.

And you could pick one of these asteroids, an average sort of PGM asteroid, it could have 30 million tons of nickel, one and a half tons of cobalt, 7.5 thousand tons of platinum. No way. At current value, that platinum comes out at $150 billion. $150 billion. So if you own an asteroid, do you own the world? Let's find out about asteroid owning. We go back to my interview with Peter Diamandis.

So there is the Outer Space Treaty and there's the Moon Treaty. And we in the United States are not signatories to the Outer Space Treaty. And the Outer Space Treaty does speak to the fact that a government can't own a celestial object. So is this a loophole? The government can't, but Peter Diamandis can? Doesn't say a person can't own a celestial object. So is this a loophole? The government can't, but Peter Diamandis can. Doesn't say a person can't own it. It doesn't say it. I don't see it in Article 5, Section 3.

Well, so the question is, can a private company own it? And ultimately, what is a celestial object? You know, not owning the moon, I can buy. Don't say I can buy. Use a different phrase. Not only moon you can agree with yeah you know owning the moon i can agree with but owning a 10 meter rock in space i mean would you draw the line and if you can't own the asteroid can you own the materials you extract from the asteroid just like you know you don't own the ocean but when you pull the fish out of it you you own the fish. So somewhere in there is a structure that will be defined over this next decade

because we're going to drive it to be defined in a way that ultimately allows for business to exist. Because if you can't have ownership, no one's going to go out there and extract materials. And the loser is humanity. Because the fact of the matter is, once you can extract these resources, everybody wins. Because it becomes cheaper, that drives new battery technology, medical technology, electronic technology, that we all benefit from. It sounds like that's the frontier of the new trillionaires. I think it is. I think that the first trillionaires will be made in space.

But as a result, it's upping the economic growth of humanity, not just any one individual. Spoken like a pure capitalist. I was about to say. Yeah, everybody wins. Some of us just win a hell of a lot more. Everybody wins, but I have a trillion dollars at the end of the day. So I think that the analogy with the fish in the ocean on the surface sounds good

because I take out the fish, more fish show up, right? I mean, that's an ecosystem. Because they're making each other. Yes. That's what life does. Right. You know, what's that song from Cole Porter? Birds do it, bees do it.

Even educated fleas do it. So yeah, they make more of themselves. But if you start mining an asteroid and say, no, I don't have to own it, but maybe I can extract the resources, one day there's no asteroid left because you just extracted the whole damn thing. And what do I care, though? I got $50 trillion now. But he makes a good point. Do you care who owns a rock, a rock in space of which there are countless millions of them. I mean, that's a whole other frontier of space law, for example.

Maybe one day we'll do a show on space law and find out what the leading thinking is all about. Absolutely. And something tells me no matter what it is, Dick Cheney will own a piece of it. I'm just saying. I'm not being political. You're just saying. That guy's into everything. Not only if it could be wield like, wielded in war scenarios, you know.

You know, I mean, it does bring the question. Carl Sagan posed one of the original questions. If you could deflect an asteroid, and we get to more of that in the last segment, might you be able to, if you deflect it out of harm's way, might you deflect it into harm's way? to, if you deflect it out of harm's way, might you deflect it into harm's way? And so, yeah, I mean, there's a whole, the law, legal aspect of this and what would constitute a crime, you know, if you have access to things that could then become a weapon. A space crime. I love it. Space law.

Oh my God. That's awesome. And then you might have to put them in one of those two-dimensional jails that flitters through space like they did in Superman. Okay, you're giving me a chubby right now. I'm telling you that right now. You're listening to StarTalk Radio. More on mining asteroids when we come back. We're back on StarTalk Radio. Joining me is Chuck Nice.

Hey, he's a nice guy. And we've been commenting on my interview with Peter Diamandis, founder of the XPRIZE and co-founder of the Asteroid Mining Enterprise Planetary Resources. And he's up there in that last clip talking about everybody benefits, but I become a trillionaire. I become a trillionaire. I put those words in his mouth, but he agreed that that would be the consequence. And let me tell you, not only did he agree, he agreed gleefully. Gleefully. But if there are that many asteroids, maybe everyone can become be the consequence. Oh, and let me tell you, not only did he agree, he agreed gleefully. Gleefully. But if there are that many asteroids, maybe everyone can become a trillionaire.

Yeah, exactly. And we'll have inspation instead of inflation. Is it a new Chuck word of the day? Yeah, inspation. It'll be a billion dollars for a double Frappuccino. Well, if you're a trillionaire, you can't count your billions. Is that the rule? That's the rule.

Steve Neal, I don't have those problems. Who was it? John Rockefeller? One of those big fat cats from 100 years ago. If you're a billionaire, you can't count your millions. You can't count your millions. And one day I had $1,000 just like all at once. And I said, if this is just a factor of 1,000 rule, if I have 1,000, would it matter if

I dropped a dollar on the street? And it actually didn't. Right. It was an interesting fact. It's true. It's like, plenty left. Here, you can take that. I'm not even going to bend down.

And so just imagine that at the billion or trillion dollar level. Oh, a billion dollars slipped out of my pocket. Look at that. I just dropped a billion dollars. Someone get that for me. Let the homeless folks pick it up. That's what you're doing. You put like $450 billion in a homeless dude's cup.

So Chuck, a few weeks ago, where were you when the asteroid hit Russia? Chelyabinsk in the Urals. I was being fascinated by the entire thing online. Wasn't it amazing? I thought it was just absolutely incredible. I was fascinated that everyone had a forward-pointing camera to check everything out. It's so cool because everybody in Russia is such an awful driver that they all have dash cams.

And so like 50,000 people caught this on tape. I'm thinking that Rodney King incident would have been discovered 20 years earlier. You know, we could have been through that. Absolutely. Let's find out about, if you're going to be mining asteroids, you might also be able to deflect them. Let's see what we can say about that.

While you're on the asteroid, you ever thought about maybe deflecting one? Yeah, so that is... I mean, why don't you make yourself useful for a change? I'll try. That is a side benefit of what Planetary Resources is doing because... Because you're only going to the asteroids that come nearby, right? Anyway, which are the dangerous ones, if you might think about it. So once every 100 million years, data shows, we get a dinosaur extincting event. Yeah, and that's pretty...

That's bad. That's bad news. But every 100 years, we also get hit by an asteroid large enough to survive atmospheric reentry and big enough to wipe out sort of, say, a city. Right, as what happened in Tunguska in 1908. And Tunguska was in the middle of no place. Had it been, you know, Moscow or New York, there would have been millions of people dead. Can we see that asteroid coming towards the Earth and deflect it just a tiny bit?

Ultimately, that'd be pretty important. Okay, so he's thought about this problem. Yeah, yeah. So deflection, you know, you've got the military guys who say blow the sucker out of the sky. Right. You know, and I've said this many times,

you know, in America, we're really good at blowing stuff up and we're just less good at knowing where the pieces will land. Right. In fact, that was treated in Armageddon and Deep Impact, those two movies from the 1990s.

Yes. Where they wanted to blow the sucker out of the sky. And what happened? They just had two pieces that just came down again. And, you know, we suffered for that. So, whereas I think a deflection movie just would not have been interesting, perhaps. It's because everyone looks at it as it goes by and they go, wow, that was pretty. And then that's it.

End of movie. End of movie. And who's the president? Morgan Freeman. Morgan Freeman. Morgan Freeman. Absolutely. He's been on this friend of this show. It's a bit of a memory. That's right. He was on our show and I was just impressed

that here's like a black president and then the end of the world is coming. I got it. Is that what happens? Every time Black Panther takes office, bad stuff happens. We got to destroy the Earth now. There's a brother in office. We got to destroy the Earth.

It's that simple. Do you have any creative ways you might want to deflect an asteroid? You know, I've thought about this. Somehow I knew you had, and I was a little scared to ask you because I'm afraid what the answer will be. I have two theories. Okay. One I don't think will work is what I call the bowling theory, and that's where I just wave my arms very violently, like, please move. And it listens to you.

Yes, okay. Yeah, okay. Next idea. The other is, why couldn't you just attach a rocket to the asteroid, fire the rocket in a vector that pushes the asteroid while it's still going in the same direction and just make it veer a little bit off course. Okay. I mean, I love your usage of the word vector there. That's very geeky of you.

That betrayed the fact that somewhere in your life, you had a physics class, all right? Well, I mean, deflection is essentially that. That's one variant of an inflection. You detach some propulsion mechanism to it. By the way, you could try to speed it up too. Then it will cross

where Earth was before Earth gets there. Oh, see, now you're thinking way outside the box, mister. We can do that. We're coming up to our last segment

of StarTalk Radio. We're talking about asteroid mining, deflection, and all the ways the solar system can serve our greedy needs. We're back on StarTalk Radio.

I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson here with Chuck Nice. That's right. We've been listening to my interview with Peter Diamandis, founder of Planetary Resources. Planetary Resources. And I bumped into him at a conference, and I said, I whipped out my microphone, and I said, sit down. So you ambushed this dude.

Yeah, totally. Actually, he wanted me to give a talk at his conference. He owed me one big time. Oh, okay. All right. That's how that quid pro quo works. Anyhow, so one of the issues is the economics of such a thing. He wants to lasso an asteroid, mine it for its resources that are otherwise rare on Earth.

Right. What happens when the rare becomes abundant? Yes, he ruins my 401k. That's what happens. Fine, let's find out. Technology is a scarcity-liberating force, right? And it's always been that case. Technology allows us to take that which was scarce and make it abundant.

And the same thing here. So will I buy puts on the platinum market before I go out to capture an asteroid? Sure, absolutely. There was announced recently, I don't know if you saw this, a ceramic of, I think it was palladium, that was the highest strength to weight ratio material ever created. You can't possibly do something with palladium or platinum or rubidium in volume because it's way too expensive and way too rare. So you make this stuff abundant. So the question is what could we do if if these rare earth metals, if these platinum group metals were in fact abundant in nature. You know we're going to go out and dock with these asteroids,

characterize them, tag them, begin to prospect them, and we'll probably do the prospecting on the asteroid as it's in orbit around the Sun.. And we'll probably do the prospecting on the asteroid as it's in orbit around the sun. And then we'll extract the materials and just bring those materials, which might represent just a few percent of the weight of those asteroids, and bring those back to the Earth.

Okay, so in summary, it will have an effect on the free market trade, but that's not a bad thing. No, it's a great thing. In fact, that's the way science works. You know, genome sequencing used to cost a billion dollars. Today, it's $1,000 and dropping. Energy, over the last hundred years, the cost of food has decreased 13-fold.

The cost of energy has decreased 20-fold. The cost of transportation. So we're spending a smaller fraction of our paycheck on food than ever before. Ever before. And you know, the cost of transportation. And it's not hurting our calorie input either, apparently. But you know, think about it. The cost of communications has dropped a thousand fold. So that's what technology does. And hopefully if we do our job right, these metals that are valuable for society will get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Yeah, I mean, he's right. I mean, you can't argue that.

But he didn't answer your question. What are the economic ramifications? And I say they're disastrous. No, no, here's what happens. Because you're thinking myopically on this. I probably am. Okay, so here's your 401k. You got investments in platinum.

Right. And Diamandis, boy, brings back a zillion tons of platinum. Okay. Platinum is now 50 cents a pound. A ton. A ton, okay. Okay, it's 50 cents a ton. But what happens is at that price, people find more things to do with platinum that previously would not have been needed or thought of or dreamt of.

And so now the demand for platinum rises. And so, yes, the per pound is less, but it's not a finite resource anymore. Right. It's essentially unlimited. Think about, suppose you were in the battery business and you said, I don't want to make a more efficient battery. They'll last longer. And people won't buy my batteries.

People won't buy my battery enough. But what happens? You make a more efficient battery and all a sudden, everything runs on batteries now. You just put out why I am no longer in the battery business. No. It's just that the demand for batteries has gone up because every portable device was conceived knowing you can get an inexpensive battery to put in it that will last a long time. So the proliferation of the element will cause more use for it. Well, we can't guarantee it, but history shows that that's what goes on with it, that people get inventive because these materials have interesting properties, in some cases unique properties, and you have to go to them for that property.

Then you have creative people say, oh, this has good conductivity or insulation or it works in circuit boards. Now we'll have a whole other generation of circuit boards that are cheap. You buy, oh, you need a computer for this morning, and then you toss it. Do you realize there was a day when few people had cameras and those who did, it was a major investment? True. And now- Everybody has one in their phone. Everybody has one in their phone and sometimes they don't even use it or they don't even know how to use it.

Right. And we went through a phase where cameras were disposable. True, true. So, yes, things can get cheap, but that doesn't mean that they leave us. Right. They proliferate. And I think the history of this has been good, not bad. Well, you settled it.

I'm putting all my money in unobtainium. Unobtainium. And it turns out science fiction writers, however, they never say nice things about the future. You ever notice that? No. They always think science is going to, like, technology is going to go out of, you know, oh, my God.

It always goes haywire. The nanobot, the virus. I guess that's what makes the good storytelling. But in fact, these discoveries make for beautiful futures, not for miserable ones. That is true because I would hate to live in a time where there was no cell phone or Twitter. Way back. Yeah. So, I mean, just look at things that have transformed.

The printing press, light bulbs, automobile, refrigeration, computers. These are things made available by materials never before exploited in the ways that they had. Chuck, we got to call this to an end. Oh my gosh. Parting is always so sweet, sir. You've been listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson with Chuck Nice.

We've been talking about mining asteroids in an interview with Peter Diamandis. I tweet at Neil Tyson. You can find me there and love to have you as a follower. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio, brought to you in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation. As always, I bid you to keep looking up. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology