Can Form 8865 Mining 2023-2024

Music this episode is supported by 23andme. Have you ever spent a little too much time on the internet and decided you really want to see what living on another planet might be like? Well, I've got some bad news. If you thought the San Francisco housing market was out of control, you're not gonna believe what a townhouse goes for on Mars. The components of your average one-story house weigh somewhere around 100 tons. Considering it costs a minimum of ten thousand dollars per pound to shoot something to space, a Mars move would cost roughly two billion dollars. But maybe the answer to cheap space construction is already out there. The most practical way to build stuff in space is to do it with other stuff in space. And until they open the first hardware store outside of Earth's gravity well, our best bet is asteroids. So, what is an asteroid? Billions of years ago, Earth and the other planets began to condense. Dust became rocks, and rocks became building blocks of planets. Most of these were knocked into deep space or aggregated to become our solar system's planets and moons. But a few hundred million never got big enough. Asteroids are essentially little chunks of proto-planets that never made it. Millions of these, about four percent of the mass of the Moon altogether, are trapped in a belt past Mars where Jupiter's gravity keeps them from condensing. But thousands of asteroids cross Earth's orbit, so why not catch one and mine it? If that sounds like the plot of your thirty-second favorite Bruce Willis movie, you've got a point. But mining asteroids could actually be in our future. So why would we want to harvest tiny proto-planets? Because they're full of interesting stuff. When large planets like...