Love, fear, greed, and asteroids (featuring Martin Elvis)

Daniel and Kelly chat with Dr. Martin Elvis about the promise and perils of space resources.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
When Spaniards first encountered platinum in Columbia, 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 twenty third
and twenty twenty four, the price for an ounce of
platinum was about nine hundred and seventy eight US dollars,

(00:29):
while silver was going for only about thirty one dollars.
We have found lots of uses for platinum and other
platinum group metals like palladium and rodium. 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

(00:50):
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

(01:10):
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 US really needs
that is either like rare or might be hard to get.
And three of the six platinum group metals are included

(01:33):
in the lists top three. So where can we get
more of these 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

(01:54):
can be found on Earth right now. And maybe you've
even heard that the first trillionaire will be the first
person who 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

(02:15):
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 doctor Martin Elvis. Welcome

(02:38):
to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle basist and I never
want to go to space.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
Hi. I'm Kelly. I'm a paris potologist 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.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
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?

Speaker 1 (03:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
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 have anything expensive in there? You know, there's a
bunch of old New Yorkers. You know what else is
somebody going to steal from me?

Speaker 1 (03:54):
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?

Speaker 2 (04:05):
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.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
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 Han 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

(04:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (04:46):
They probably don't have huge space worms inside of them.

Speaker 1 (04:49):
Yeah, I know as a biologist, I would be interested
in the space worms, but probably not so.

Speaker 2 (04:55):
Star Wars not a documentary.

Speaker 1 (04:57):
You're saying that, and the Martian not docum memories, 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.

Speaker 3 (05:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
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 tillionaire or quadrillionaire. Don't rain on that parade.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
Okay, I won't rain 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?

(06:02):
And here are some of the answers that they gave us.

Speaker 2 (06:05):
Probably asteroids that we could mine, but maybe also sunlight.

Speaker 3 (06:10):
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.

Speaker 4 (06:32):
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 birth found things
like food and organic life. That being said, I guess

(06:52):
the other valuable things in space would be water and oxygen,
and I suppose 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

(07:15):
unknown life out there, and maybe there are materials to
do amazing new things with.

Speaker 1 (07:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:43):
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 wanting to enrich ourselves
in other ways intellectually scientifically, I want.

Speaker 1 (07:55):
To believe that too, and I say, thank goodness that
there are not indigenous people living on those asteroids that
we want to be mining.

Speaker 2 (08:02):
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.

Speaker 1 (08:09):
So yeah, it does as a biologist, if there is
another instance of life out there, like you know, the
cases of evolution, there's an an equals too for us
to discover. That would be way more exciting to me
than platinum. But we'll just have to wait and see.

Speaker 2 (08:22):
But platinum is so shiny.

Speaker 1 (08:24):
It is so shiny, and it makes pretty jewelry. But
I'm guessing neither of us own platinum jewelry.

Speaker 2 (08:29):
I own zero platinum, that's correct, Yes, I can confirm that.

Speaker 1 (08:33):
So platinum is used in catalytic converters to clean up
automobile exhaust, so we might have some platinum in our cars.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
I have two electric cars, zero mission vehicles.

Speaker 1 (08:43):
Oh, I've got hybrids.

Speaker 2 (08:45):
But there might be platinum in some of the electronics.

Speaker 1 (08:47):
Actually, m hum, Okay, well you win the hippie contest
we just had there. You have more points than I do.

Speaker 2 (08:54):
All right, more Berkeley points from me that's right.

Speaker 1 (08:56):
All right, Well, let's go ahead and jump in and
chat with our experts whose last name is Elvis, which
is great.

Speaker 2 (09:03):
Is he gonna tell us all about what it's like
to build a heartbreak hotel in space?

Speaker 1 (09:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (09:16):
I got you back there, Kelly, got your back, Thanks, Daniel.

Speaker 3 (09:22):
All right.

Speaker 1 (09:22):
On today's show, we have doctor 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 costs of
this research. I personally appreciate Martin's work because I think

(09:44):
he's done an incredible job of drumming up loads of
excitement for mining space resources while still making clearer that
there's a lot of technological, political, and economic hurdles and
reasons why space mining might be tough. Asteroid ninety two
eighty three, 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

(10:08):
will determine our future in space. Welcome to the show, Martin, Hi,
good to be here. Good to have you. How's your
nay going?

Speaker 5 (10:15):
That's not very interesting, Actually it's all bureaucracy so far,
but this will help.

Speaker 1 (10:20):
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.

Speaker 5 (10:30):
I suspect, yeah, that's one of the things. But there's
other things to love about asteroids too, So okay, well let's.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
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?

Speaker 5 (10:46):
Heere is what you're totally 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 delays dinosaur killer type asteroids out there.
We found nine hundred and something of them, but it
only takes one, so we better find all of them, right,

(11:09):
and there are 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,

(11:30):
at least deliberately.

Speaker 1 (11:31):
That went well, amazingly.

Speaker 5 (11:33):
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 a 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.

Speaker 1 (11:48):
Oh good, good, So I reckon.

Speaker 5 (11:52):
We need to practice just a few more times to
make sure that wasn't an outlier.

Speaker 2 (11:56):
We don't want any of these asteroids to enter the
atmosphere and become hunks and hunks of love.

Speaker 3 (12:00):
Do we?

Speaker 5 (12:03):
Is that some kind of Elvis joke? Kind?

Speaker 2 (12:06):
That was my best Elvis joke. 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.

Speaker 5 (12:25):
That's right inside is really tricky. We know what the
surfaces like, what is made of for about a thousand
or two thousand 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 can
do is take a spectrum look at the colors of
an asteroids reflected sunlight, so it reflects sunlight like everything.

(12:48):
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 is
bound into clays.

Speaker 2 (13:00):
So it's a wet thing because it's absorbing light of
a certain frequency.

Speaker 5 (13:04):
Water at absorbs a particular kind of frequency of light
or wavelength of the 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 web Space telescope are trying to do
that for a few objects, but that's much too valuable

(13:26):
piece of equipment to spend a huge amount of time
and doing asteroids. Most astronomers think of them as vermin
of the skies, right, just a little bit of rock
get in the way.

Speaker 2 (13:35):
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
and development? Do they tell us that asteroids should be
made of the same stuff that the Earth is made
out of? Or different stuff?

Speaker 5 (13:48):
Ballpark? The whole solar systems 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 too, then we're more or less the same. Now,

(14:10):
all geologists and planetary scientists got really annoyed with there
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

(14:33):
to liquefy modest sized planets, including the Earth at first,
and even the normally the precursors of the asteroids called planetesimals.
They were like a thousand 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,

(14:56):
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 six thousand kilometers
beneath your feet in the core of the Earth.

Speaker 2 (15:18):
Right, Well, that's not very helpful. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (15:20):
Around the metal core is a pile of silicate rock,
which is kind of not interesting to me that 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 it's a bit that never got
hot enough, so it's still got the original composition of

(15:41):
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 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.

Speaker 1 (16:00):
That's lucky for us.

Speaker 2 (16:01):
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.

Speaker 5 (16:12):
There are icy moons that are pretty solidly water.

Speaker 2 (16:15):
What about Neptune and Urinus.

Speaker 5 (16:17):
Well, when they call them ice, we're not talking about
water ice.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
Oh, Astronomers have a different meaning of the word ice,
don't they, As we.

Speaker 5 (16:24):
Do with metals. The astronomer's periodic table says hydrogen helium metals,
So you know, we like to gloss over fiddly detailed
for convenience of some time.

Speaker 1 (16:36):
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.

Speaker 5 (16:54):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:01):
Recent talk yesterday's coffee.

Speaker 5 (17:04):
Yesterday's coffee.

Speaker 3 (17:05):
Mmm.

Speaker 5 (17:07):
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

(17:31):
to have to grow crops in orbit because it's ridiculously
expensive to take a salond 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

(17:53):
the initial exploration has been done, trials have been done.
If we get real space stations that replace the International
Space Station, which would be a lot cheaper to 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 calmdown,

(18:14):
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 the
moment you have to learn Russian and then spend two
years training for every mission. No a scientist can actually
afford to be away from their work for two years
because you completely get out of touch with where the

(18:36):
field's got to I'm sure you appreciate that.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
Can we go back to space hotels? Though? I feel
like I've been hearing projections that space hotels are ten
years away forever. When do you think we're going to
have the first like space hotel and people can actually
go and spend their honeymoon, you know, looking at the stars.

Speaker 5 (18:50):
I was pretty keen on Axiom Space because they seem
to be clued into the whole NASSA network and they
knew what was going on. They seemed to have a
good plan. I apparently very in financial difficulties right now,
so that's unfortunate. They were planning for like twenty thirty
to launch a module, one piece of a space station
that would start off attached the International Space Station, but

(19:11):
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 twenty
nineteen and presumably getting a little worse and getting people
really worried. Now if it breaks off, what does that mean? Hikes,

(19:31):
that's exaggerating. I don't know that that's going to happen,
but they're concerned. Let's see.

Speaker 1 (19:35):
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 soyez
having a hole in it that appeared to have been drilled,
and it was not clear if well the soyers was
being made. Somebody accidentally drilled a hole and then patched
it in a crappy way, like didn't do enough, and

(19:57):
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.

Speaker 5 (20:12):
That's just the case of somebody going crazy, right.

Speaker 1 (20:15):
That's right space madness.

Speaker 2 (20:17):
But the point is everything is harder in space. I
think running a hotel down here on Earth is a
pretty small margin business. Twenty thirty seems very optimistic for
having a space hotel. Are we talking decades and decades
into the future.

Speaker 5 (20:29):
I don't think so. I mean, if everything works with well,
even without starship, the SpaceX starship, which it should bring
the cost of doing things and getting to low Earth
orbit down by tenfold, we still have just with Folcan
nine and presumably with Blue Origins coming up their new
Glen rocket, that should enable access to space at a

(20:50):
much better price than people are currently paying. What the
guy's name, Jared something who just went up and did
a space.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
Walk, I don't remember his name, but yeah, they're.

Speaker 5 (20:59):
Paying tens of millions of dollars, maybe fifty million dollars
per person. That's kind of too much for a real market.
I mean, there's a billionaire market. That's great, but then
there's no reason to test to cost that much. I
think they're paying a premium for being first, and it
should come down to just a few million handfuls of
millions soon. So you know, I just opened that piggybank

(21:20):
and awhere you go.

Speaker 1 (21:22):
Yeah, so I'm still not going.

Speaker 5 (21:23):
You've read all about the dangerous holes that get drilled
in the side of.

Speaker 1 (21:27):
These things, you know that would be on my mind too,
But also I don't have the money.

Speaker 5 (21:31):
But there is a much bigger market for one million
dollars than for ten million. Dollars and so right, so.

Speaker 1 (21:36):
Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah. I can imagine some people saving,
you know, 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

(21:56):
somewhere else in space rather than shipping it from Earth?

Speaker 5 (21:58):
Even with starship, it's going to cost you a million
dollars a ton just pure water, and then you have
to put in a container of some kind, so it
probably goes up to two million dollars 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

(22:18):
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 the 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

(22:41):
better to go to the asteroid or the moon. There
are asteroids that are easier to reach and get back
from than the moon.

Speaker 2 (22:47):
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 asteroids and then you're bringing it down to
Earth or something. Craasies like that 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

(23:07):
business like greed.

Speaker 5 (23:09):
Well, this is sorry, How did I get onto that?
It's just my natural averice.

Speaker 1 (23:15):
You're in the US, so it's fascinating.

Speaker 2 (23:17):
If capitalism is really going to drive our exploration into space,
you see that as the future of this field.

Speaker 5 (23:25):
Well, yeah, the trouble is I wrote this for a
conference called Building a Space for 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
solves 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're really just going to reproduce

(23:47):
our civilization in space. You know, 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 an
or 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

(24:09):
the longer term, if we keep on growing our economy
the way we have for the past two hundred years
since the industrial revolution started, then in four hundred years
we'll have finished with all the resources of solar system
that are accessible. Because it's exponential growth and that runs away,
right you go one, two, four, eight, sixteen thirty two,

(24:30):
and very soon you're into big numbers.

Speaker 1 (24:32):
I thought. Our population so like the number of babies
that every woman is having globally is projected to fall
below replacement rates, 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.

Speaker 5 (24:49):
You would think so. And also there's some kind of
belief that 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

(25:12):
the land there is a bigger 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

(25:32):
number that still impresses him. He's really wanting that trillion here.

Speaker 1 (25:39):
He might get there.

Speaker 5 (25:40):
He might, He might, and so might mister Musk if
he doesn't mess up further.

Speaker 2 (25:45):
Who knows, But what's your objection to the number of
a trillion?

Speaker 5 (25:48):
If you imagine a trillion people living in working in space,
they can't be all on planets because there aren't enough
room on planets, So you have to be living in
these artificial space cities that are rotating cylinders, so you
stand on the inside of the wall of it. I mean,
if you feel one g gravity like Earth. But I
looked at I happen to have Handy just over there
on my shelf. As nineteen seventy seven study of these things,

(26:10):
And it turns out, although the illustrations show pictures of
greenery 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

(26:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (26:44):
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, okay, and we're back. One of

(27:10):
the other things that I wonder about when I look
at those rotating space stations so first of all, the
xterior 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
airlocks separating each of the different things, right, and so
if base is filled with junk, if something crashes one

(27:32):
of your windows, everyone's getting sucked into the abyss.

Speaker 5 (27:35):
Yes, absolutely, you've got to divide it into air tight sections.

Speaker 1 (27:39):
Yes.

Speaker 5 (27:40):
And as a bio person, 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 going
to be at least I would say ten or a
dozen sections.

Speaker 1 (27:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (27:58):
On the plus side, that will make it hargh of
any years there 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.

Speaker 1 (28:11):
Charles Kuqul would be very happy with this design.

Speaker 5 (28:14):
That's how it came up because he was talking about
his freedom engineering and his modular designed stuff. It's just
like the Titanic, only slightly improved, separate sections 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.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
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.

Speaker 5 (28:45):
Yes, indeed, because precursors of the asteroids were these planetesimals,
But then they weren't formed on random orbits, so they
tended to collide with each other and break up. And
so the cause the iron cores had got exposed. And
there's a mission on its way to sixteen Psyche called Psyche,
which is terrible idea confusion all around. You mean the

(29:08):
asteroid or you mean the mission or anyway Psyche is
about to see if sixteen Psyche, which is the formal
name of the asteroid, is made of solid metal, is
it really the core of a planet or planetesimal, a
little planet and if it is, then that there's huge
amounts of iron there, and iron in orbit could be

(29:29):
used for construction. For instance, you could build space cities,
or you could build giant telescopes. Oh Am, I letting
my astronomy show.

Speaker 1 (29:38):
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?

Speaker 5 (29:49):
To use them well 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 sixteen psyche should be rich
in platinum and palladium and other very expensive, rare precious metals.

(30:10):
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 elastic if I got it the right way round.
That is, if you sell more, the price stays constant
as opposed to declining. You've saturated the market or whatever.

Speaker 1 (30:29):
It's called okay.

Speaker 2 (30:30):
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.

Speaker 5 (30:47):
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 the 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

(31:09):
the crust, but then get recycled into the crust through
convection and stuff, or as geology things that happen.

Speaker 2 (31:15):
I don't know this, but it really is about access,
it's about where they are on the object.

Speaker 5 (31:21):
There's also the strategic thing that there are two places
which produce ninety 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 fifty million dollars a ton roughly, so you don't

(31:42):
have to bring back ten 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 going to get paid for it. So whether that's
true is another business case. And I don't know that.

Speaker 1 (31:54):
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?

Speaker 5 (32:03):
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 that most of those are in what
orbits that come near to the Earth, and they're cleverly
named near Earth objects. They're not always near the Earth,
but they do come near the Earth at some point.

(32:24):
They're only ten or twenty thousand of those that are
reasonable size, like because 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

(32:46):
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 two hundred or so candidates, and
you would go to the biggest one because that obviously
gives you the most payoff and start mining it. Extracting

(33:11):
platinum from these asteroids, although they're rich in platinum, that's
still grams per tone, so a fraction of an ounce
per ton, a small fraction of an ounce per ton,
So it actually takes quite a bit of clever chemistry
to extract that platinum and the other metals there, like palladium.

Speaker 2 (33:29):
And even before you extract it from the ore, how
do you get the ore? I mean, you have to
deliver some mining equipment to this asteroid.

Speaker 5 (33:37):
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
and see what it's made of that way, or of course,
my favorite method is X ray fluorescence, which is because
I'm an extra astronomer, so I naturally think of that.
And the Sun's X ray from the Sun hit the
surface and that excites the atoms to emit and part

(34:00):
killar energies of X ray wavelengths, and and you can
tell what it's made of from that, and it's particularly
good for heavy elements like iron and platinum and on. Anyway, however,
you done it. You've done that 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

(34:21):
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 one fifty pickup. So
that's pretty hefty, you know, seriously. But then you're backing
that F one fifty up to the rose bowl and saying, okay,
I'm going to start digging and taking away the stadium

(34:44):
and get extracting the valuable bits from it. It's like Yeah,
let's say that's optimistic or a minimum. So you have
to get at least two tons, probably ten tons at
least before you can get serious about mining.

Speaker 2 (34:57):
But the mechanics of mining, like the technology the robots
that we have here on Earth, apply at all. Or
is it completely different problem to get the ore off
the surface and into your processing pipeline.

Speaker 5 (35:09):
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

(35:30):
solid iron or not. If you're after the iron, it's great.
You can just chop it into pieces and here's a
chunk and you take it home.

Speaker 2 (35:38):
Sorry, how do you chop solid iron into pieces in
space with a saw? I mean they do that in
my garage all the time.

Speaker 5 (35:49):
Yeah, of course you do. But you have to worry
that different problems come up. I mean you have to
have to use special vacuum grease to keep it and
you'd have to have some way of cooling yet 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,

(36:12):
do some little tests, and there's going to be a
lot of learning on this.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
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

(36:38):
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.

Speaker 5 (36:51):
I would think we're the kind of the beginning of
the wedge where commercial interests so if you start doing
things we've had our first round of asteroid mind companies
that were all very famous for a short while and
then they're fifteen 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

(37:13):
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 this, first of all, we're
going to know a lot more about the whole asteroid
population in ten years time, and that's not an arbitrary time.

(37:35):
The telescope now just starting up in Chile, which is
the Verira Rubin Observatory, and 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 are particularly working
to make sure that they can see asteroids which have

(37:57):
come up as look like stars, but they move, which
stars don't. So then now you know it's a little
rock in the Solar System going around somewhere, and by
tracking how our fasts moving and exactly which way it's going,
you can get its orbit, and we will get the
colors of this thing, and you'll be able to tell
for sure if it's just a boring, stony asteroid made

(38:18):
of silicate rock. And that's all the ones we know
now that are near the Earth, eighty five percent of
just rock. And that's not very interesting toward capitalist anyway,
we have rocks here are if you're a geologist, that's
very different. Right.

Speaker 1 (38:35):
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. So

(39:08):
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 Lawicki, who
was one of the big guys at Planetary Resources, and
he helped get some of the US laws on the
books to try to clarify what's allowed with these asteroids.

(39:28):
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 two hundred 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

(39:49):
it up and sell it? What are you allowed to
do in space?

Speaker 5 (39:51):
Okay, the Outer Space Treaty of nineteen sixty seven says
you cannot own any celestial body or part thereof right,
no one can, no country in particular, So that's still true.
But the Act of Congress that Chris Lackey helped move
along said that, yes, but if you pick something up
from a celestial body, including the Moon, and it becomes

(40:15):
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 no. And the same with the Japanese samples of

(40:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (40:49):
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.

Speaker 5 (41:00):
Okay, I don't know the legal definition of sample. Do
tell me.

Speaker 1 (41:03):
I don't have it memorized, but it's something to let
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 collective for profit. They
were collective 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

(41:23):
you collected one of those giant asteroids and said this
is all mine.

Speaker 5 (41:27):
Well, I think there's a difference between tay. 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 I wrapped 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 is being put in a bag, right,
it's all yours. You might even mine it so it

(41:48):
doesn't exist anymore at all. And you could destroy to
celestial object, but you never claim to own it. You
only hold the product. So you can see the horrifying
loops that space lawyers will be getting into.

Speaker 2 (42:02):
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
and the like. You could say, oh, 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.

Speaker 5 (42:23):
It keepts even more complicated. There are no such things
as mining rights therefore, because you can't only celest your
body in any way, say they market as mine for
mining purposes. So without those rights, you're going to get
a lot of sketchy behavior going on, right because people
will start spying on you to see where you're going,
and then maybe they'll try to jump the claim and

(42:46):
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. There could then be rustling of asteroids.
You've found the right asteroid, but somebody else rushes there
and put a little rocket motor on the inside of
it and pushes it goes off into some orbit that

(43:08):
they know but you don't. You've lost your asteroid and
they've got it. And finally, this piracy, which is just
just intercept your inning guts 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 Outer Space Treaty,
spying is actually encouraged. You're allowed to visit other people's

(43:31):
facilities in space, and you're not allowed to not say no.
In fact, really.

Speaker 2 (43:35):
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 an eye
gear and people want to protect their interests and we
sort of understand the dynamics of the space economics.

Speaker 5 (43:50):
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 is. Space mining is like
if you wait too long, there'll have been a free
for all, and people have established positions and they aren't

(44:11):
going to give those up lightly because it cost a
lot to get them. So it's a very tricky job
to get the whole international regulation right.

Speaker 1 (44:20):
Where are we now? Are we too soon? Is it
time or have we missed the right time frame? Where
are we?

Speaker 5 (44:26):
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 that all these issues are first going to arise.
And right now, of course, NASA has the Artemis of
Courds with thirty something other space agencies, and that's great
and they're all going to work together, etc. Except they

(44:48):
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 out US Space COPUOS.

Speaker 1 (45:01):
I never remember congratulations. I can never remember the acronym.

Speaker 5 (45:05):
Oh, some of us have great talents in these areas.

Speaker 1 (45:09):
It's true.

Speaker 5 (45:10):
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 and I'm definitely on board with it, and that

(45:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (45:41):
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

(46:02):
moving forward?

Speaker 5 (46:03):
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?

Speaker 1 (46:08):
What are those?

Speaker 5 (46:09):
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 there's essentially no seasons on the Moon. The Earth
is tilted over twenty three and a half degrees, and
that's so sometimes the sun is very low in the
sky all the time. That's winter, and sometimes it's very

(46:31):
high and at summer. Great the moon instead is tilted
one and a half 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 fourteen days on the rest of
the moon, and then comes back up and stays for
a long long time and then disappears. That's just it's
going behind some distant mountain on the south Pole. And

(46:55):
so you can map out where these places are. And
there are no places that are really one hundred percent
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

(47:15):
you can get mighty something percent in a few small places.
Ninety percent of 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 add radiators and

(47:36):
so on. Anyway, but there are only a few of
these places, like really a few.

Speaker 1 (47:41):
I think it was like one billionth of a percent
of the moon surface.

Speaker 5 (47:44):
Tiny, tiny fraction of the Moon's 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
one hundred yards wide. So everyone will want to land
there and put their solar panels there, And because there

(48:08):
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 thirteen hundred eate
sites where Artemis three, the first human lander for fifty years,
will land thirteen sites the Chinese have mapped out I
think nine and three of them overlap. Three or four

(48:31):
of them overlap, So already there's a pretty decent chance
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 sharp rock, which could
damage the next spacecraft over. That's definitely a no no
on the Outer Space Treaty.

Speaker 2 (48:52):
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 like what it would
be like. Like have you ever read science fiction that
tackles these questions in a way that you think is
insightful or realistic? You know? For example, there's the show
on Apple TV called four All Main Kind where they
talk about a lot of these issues and they even,
I think, try to redirect an asteroid and all this

(49:14):
kind of stuff. Have you seen anything realistic and impressive
in that category?

Speaker 5 (49:18):
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. They and the Americans go to the
Chinese base and destroy it and the vice versa, and
I don't know what kind of mess they get into

(49:39):
after that. But yeah, there's another what was that other
science fiction movie which was mostly terrible and got panned.
But when they get 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 the so on, with big Neon figures, and

(50:03):
then they get into a fight with the neighboring base,
which belongs to some other country. I don't know which.

Speaker 1 (50:10):
Brad Pitt was in this, right, his dad had like
lost his mind on some spacecraft and he was supposed
to Oh what was it called?

Speaker 5 (50:18):
Right? Could be yeah, but.

Speaker 1 (50:20):
I remember he went up the elevator and there was
an RB sign and I thought that could be pretty accurty.

Speaker 5 (50:25):
Yeah. I thought that was the first time I've seen
that in a science fiction movie. You know, although if
you go back to two thousand and one, we all
remember that had PanAm as they shuttle and the Hilton
was in the space station. Another thing they got right,
which apparently Arthur C. Clark didn't like, but Sanley Kubrick
insisted on, was that when they land on the Moon,

(50:47):
they have this giant thing that opens up and they
come inside out 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 skylight on the Moon that are
one hundred yards across and they open into huge spaces
underneath call lava tubes, which is where you probably want

(51:09):
to build your base. So actually, maybe that was a
super smart idea of mister Koprick's.

Speaker 1 (51:15):
I guess that wouldn't necessarily save you all the trouble
of worrying about regalis and rocks getting blown, because you'd
still probably do that on the way down if.

Speaker 5 (51:22):
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.

Speaker 1 (51:28):
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 ask people like how many
years until we figure this out? Because those kinds of
questions depend on your political will and blah blah blah.
What are you looking for to happen to show that,

(51:49):
like we're taking this seriously.

Speaker 5 (51:51):
Sore several things ares actually surveys for asteroids that I've
already talked about, and there's another one that's going at
It's a NASA mission will look for very dark asteroids,
particularly called the Near Earth Objects Surveyor, which can find
huge amounts more water than we currently think is out there.
So there's government surveys. There'll be some replacement for the

(52:12):
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 were talking about.
Are the mining companies that are starting up again. What
astro Forge is a particularly busy one. They are very active.
They have a test some of their equipment in orbit

(52:33):
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 that 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 that Chinese who
want to land there by twenty thirty. NASA keeps saying

(52:56):
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 twenty thirty. Yeah, but you

(53:18):
know that sort of stuff is happening that will spur
a lot of this legal stuff, I suspect.

Speaker 1 (53:23):
So are you overall feeling optimistic? What do you think?

Speaker 5 (53:27):
I'm getting a lot older than I was when I
started this, and so I'm not so sure I'm going
to see much of it.

Speaker 1 (53:32):
It never moves as fast as you want it to.

Speaker 5 (53:34):
Yeah, but it could happen.

Speaker 1 (53:37):
I think it will happen eventually. I just want to
see it happen peacefully.

Speaker 5 (53:41):
But ucefully and hopefully with a good ethic going forward,
so we don't actually run out of space resources in
four hundred years.

Speaker 2 (53:49):
Well, as much as it's going to make everything more complicated,
I'm really hoping for a bunch of surprises. Hoping when
we get out there and we test out these asteroids,
we discover weird stuff in there that doesn't make any sense.
We'd learned something new about this system, and that might
upend some startup companies plans for extracting the platinum, but
that's my preference.

Speaker 5 (54:06):
I like that, And in fact, I had a high
school student, I'm an undergrad who made a list of
meteorite minerals, minerals that are found only in meteorites, not
on Earth. They had like seventy of them when they
finished the list, So there are strange things out there
that we do not know.

Speaker 1 (54:22):
That seems like an exciting note to end on to
be 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.

Speaker 5 (54:34):
Thank you so much. Great fun.

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