Asteroid 16 Psyche $10,000 quadrillion at today’s prices?

I read that the US space agency has now fast-forwarded its plans to send a rocket to the asteroid – bringing it forward to 2022. Psyche is made up entirely of nickel and iron, which are the exact same materials at the Earth’s core. This – as well as its sheer size – had led experts to believe the asteroid is actually the remains of a planet.

But the value of just the iron alone if the asteroid was transported back to Earth, would be $10,000 quadrillion. This would be enough to cause the world’s economy – worth $73.7 trillion – to collapse altogether. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the lead scientist on the NASA mission and the director of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, said.

This Lindy Elkins-Tanton does not have a clue how the economy works, and the law of supply and demand. Its worth $73.7 trillion is true only under today’s supply and demand. If it was to be brought here the price of iron and nickel would drop to the price of transporting it. Anyone who has bought gravel for their driveway knows that the delivery costs more than the aggregate does.

The demand for seawater is limited to the use we can put it to but is free for the taking, desalination cost is the collection of the water and the process of converting it to fresh water. If nickel and iron were to become as common as seawater the drop in price would only hurt the nickel and iron miners, who, I hazard, would quickly go into the nickel and iron transport business.

Lindy goes on to say “Could you kind of sit on it and hide it and control the global resource — kind of like diamonds are controlled corporately — and protect your market?”

It is true that the DeBeers only release a small quantity of the diamonds that they mine to keep the prices high. If they were to put them all on the market the price would fall like a rock, but the only part of the economy that would be affected would be those who sold them for and made them into jewelry. The rest of the economy would buzz right along.

However, I will believe it when I see it.

A friend, Jimmy Barbour, told me, “She works in science so it is quite possible she has never heard of a supply curve or how a supply curve would shift.” Maybe, but if she is going to spout off about economics maybe she should brush up on it.