Hubble Captures Photo of Asteroid Worth 70k Times the Global Economy

Again, journalism is so horrible these days.

1) The picture in this linked article is not the Hubble picture, which is here:

https://imgur.com/a/UwD49Dr

2) The value claimed obeys no known concepts of supply and demand.

3) There are 7.5 billion people on earth, not 7.5 million.

> If NASA miraculously managed to bring the asteroid back, sell it, and split the earnings between all people on Earth, each of 7.5 million us would get approximately $1.3 billion.

Was there some kind of extinction event I’ve missed?

The real space colonization value though comes from carbonaceous chondrite asteroids which we know contain volatile compounds rich in carbon, nitrogen, etc. Japan found gas from the sample they retreived and the US got so much gas it blew up the sample container.

We know that there are huge amounts of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons floating around in space but until now weve never gotten to touch any of them.

The obsession with nickel iron asteroids eludes me. People still think a lunar economy will be an aluminum economy despite the fact that apollo astronauts brought back iron ore as good as any you could find on earth.

This appears to be an artist's concept image. See NASA Solar System Exploration site (https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/as...).

I am not an astronomer, but I'm pretty sure a picture with this kind of detail would not show stars in the background because the image of the object would wash them out. Also it just looks like it's painted.

There is also millions of times more gold and platinum in there than has ever been mined.

Amusing thing about gold is that all the gold thus far mined arrived in meteorites, after the Earth's crust froze; and most has been dissolved in and then precipitated out of water at some point. (Strictly speaking it doesn't exactly dissolve, but it's hard to understand the difference.)

Also, gold telluride looks enough like fool's gold that it has been mistaken for it and used to make sidewalks and fill potholes -- that were later mined, after somebody noticed the fool's gold there was twice as heavy as it should have been. (Keyword "calaverite".)

The headline isn't too stupid, it's the follow up that's dumb, talking about the massive value being distributed.

All that would happen is the price of those metals would rapidly approach $0. There wouldn't be inflation or massive wealth, it would just obliterate scarcity in specific metals.

Wow, it even signed the "photo"

Well, that’s gonna cause some massive inflation ;)

actual paper: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/abb67e

It was discovered by an Italian astronomer in 1852.