> NASA estimates this belt to hold $700 quintillion of bounty. That’s about $100 billion for each person on Earth.
Something this article doesn't say is whether that's the economic value that would be unlocked by bringing all that stuff back to earth, or just a naive calculation of (total quantity of rare earth metals in astroid belt) x (current spot price for said metals). Given the astronomical (ha) value listed, I'd assume the later. But of course, no one could expect the price of anything to remain stable when you're dumping orders of magnitude greater quantities of it onto the market, so a more realistic analysis of the actual economic opportunity would be helpful.
Something this article doesn't say is whether that's the economic value that would be unlocked by bringing all that stuff back to earth, or just a naive calculation of (total quantity of rare earth metals in astroid belt) x (current spot price for said metals). Given the astronomical (ha) value listed, I'd assume the later. But of course, no one could expect the price of anything to remain stable when you're dumping orders of magnitude greater quantities of it onto the market, so a more realistic analysis of the actual economic opportunity would be helpful.