>>14134927As a geologist I gotta speak up. When Earth was still molten anything heavier than iron fell into the core. A process called differentiation. On asteroids this process of differentiation is a lot smaller in scale. Which means accessing the heaviest metals is much much easier than trying to mine Earth's core. One single Asteroid can have so much platinum, iridium, indium .... insert extremely rare earth metal here .... that it dwarfs all those elements ever mined here on Earth. In one single asteroid.
Then you get crazier shit like asteroid 16 Psyche which is the exposed core of a planet which undoubtedly exploded in the Asteroid Belt after some collision. It's nothing but metal. If we mined that sucker it would be more of every metal on Earth ever mined in history. It's value is incomparable.
THAT is why asteroid mining is not only feasible it is inevitable.
