WHAT CAN WE DO WITH A CAPTURED ASTEROID?

Asteroids could provide us with rare resources

- PAUL M. SUTTER

Asteroids have more than enough gold, and other precious metals, to provide a few lifetimes’ worth of fortunes. But there are plenty of other reasons asteroids are valuable. But how do we get these metals from faraway asteroids? Perhaps the best way is to bring the space rocks to Earth. Most of the metals we use in our everyday lives are buried deep within our planet. And we mean deep: when the young Earth was still molten, almost all of the heavy metals sank to the core, which is pretty hard to get to. The accessible veins of gold, zinc, platinum and other valuable metals instead came from later asteroid impacts on Earth’s surface.

Those asteroids are the fragmented remains of almost-planets, but they contain all the same mixtures of elements as their larger planetary cousins – and you don’t have to dig down into their cores to get it. But the main problem with asteroids is that they are far away.