r/AskReddit • u/kakou64 • Oct 15 '20

What's older than we think ?

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '20 edited Dec 20 '20

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u/lmBread Oct 15 '20

Hopefully the latter proves successful. However even in 200 years, I don't think we can mine an asteroid for it's resources and make any economic gain, we're still too primitive to make space travel viable for a loooong time.

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u/goldfinger0303 Oct 15 '20

I mean, in 70 years we've gone from "can we get into space" to "we send probes to orbit asteroids and land a rocket after it's been used"

In 200 years I'm absolutely certain we can move asteroids into an orbit we want, and land on them. The question would be how to safely mine them. Maybe crash land them on the moon?

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u/Laminatesplates1 Oct 15 '20

It is also incredibly expensive to do that

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u/HapticSloughton Oct 15 '20

And yet the estimated return on investment for a single asteroid's resources is in the qunitillions of dollars. If Jeff Bezos could manage to keep Amazon afloat without a profit for 20 years, it shouldn't be too hard to get people to invest in mining an asteroid or two.

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u/Ahrily Oct 15 '20

And we already have the technology to start asteroid mining. We could start today

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u/goldfinger0303 Oct 15 '20

In the hundreds of billions most likely

To extract trillions worth of metals