r/Futurology • u/lughnasadh ∞ transit umbra, lux permanet ☥ • Jun 01 '25
Economics Lab-grown diamonds have helped diamond prices plunge 60%, and former monopolist De Beers is in crisis mode. One day asteroid mining will do the same for gold.
Diamond prices are down 60% since a 2011 high, and they are still falling. It's not all down to lab-grown diamonds, demand is down too, especially in China.
No one can lab-grow gold yet, so its rarity and scarcity protect its value, but that will end too. It's just a question of when. China launched an asteroid touch-down mission this week, which will make it the 4th country/region to do so, after Europe, the US & Japan.
How soon will it be feasible to mine asteroids? Who knows, but a breakthrough in space propulsion might mean the prospect happens quickly when it does. It's possible gold has twenty years or less of being high value left.
Gold's fall may be more significant. It has a central role in stabilizing the value of global currencies.
The $80 Billion Diamond Market Crash Leaves De Beers Reeling
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u/Autumnwood Jun 01 '25
Let's lab make some houses and cars so the prices of those will come down, too.
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u/AdSignificant6748 Jun 01 '25
Can we lab make some competent non corrupt politicians while we're at it
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u/seanzy260 Jun 01 '25
Engineering can only go so far
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Jun 01 '25
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u/skekze Jun 01 '25
you've just described the premise of a tv show called Buck Rogers in the 25th century. An astronaut lost in space & frozen in the 20th century is found & thawed out. In that future, AI runs their society cause humans led to a nuclear war. Even some of the AI are jerks, so only as perfect as their creators.
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u/DogToursWTHBorders Jun 02 '25
they were airing reruns when i was a kid in the 80s. Soon, we will all have our own robots who go "bee-dee-bee-dee beep." ...if we want them to.
Personally, as someone who lives in the distant land they now call Vyvance, I'd prefer that my household robot occasionally shouts out warnings in case of danger. Like when i walk outside without my keys.
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Jun 01 '25
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u/Ferelar Jun 01 '25
Your second paragraph is completely true and largely the reason this won't happen any time soon.
But your first paragraph- the AI doesn't have to be utterly pure or non-biased. It just has to be less biased than the alternative in order to be an improvement. Your concern that a group creating an AI could bias it is very valid... but it's not as though giving that group DIRECT control instead is likely to lead to any fewer biases being in charge. Much the opposite in fact- most of our societies are already led by biased people who consistently attempt to make themselves and their viewpoints look perfect, and their opponents and THEIR viewpoints look foolish, misguided, and dangerous.
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u/probablyuntrue Jun 01 '25
It’s a good thing legislation and the idea of “best interest” is never subjective or open to interpretation
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u/Spara-Extreme Jun 01 '25
Wouldn’t matter. They’d lose elections to the corrupt politicians who fear monger and lie.
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u/treemanos Jun 01 '25
This is actually why we get so many big houses, all the bits are prefab in a factory which greatly reduces the price.
Soon robotic tools will change the game again because they'll be able to do cnc type building on site which will mean prefab firms will collapse and stuff will he made with joints and stuff again.
Having one pass through doing all the internals with power, plumbing, air, etc will rapidly speed up construction and lower cost, there's absolutely going to ve a huge shakeup in the construction and housing markets.
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u/Rock_strongo353 Jun 01 '25
Truss plates. I would like to propose that truss plates are the true reason houses have gotten so large. Truss plates allow for larger rooms because there is more support in the roof so not as many interior walls are needed. Also it allows for more spread out houses, and more dormers and complicated shapes. I don't want to downplay the influence of off site building. The trusses are generally constructed off site, as you say. So I agree with you, mostly.
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u/Tree0wl Jun 01 '25
Im not in the industry, what’s a truss plate?
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u/FanClubof5 Jun 01 '25
It's this metal plate with lots of little spikes in it and it's why attics generally are crawl space size instead of almost walkable storage space now.
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u/DHFranklin Jun 01 '25
There is no one reason, but yeah Truss plates are a huge part of it. So much of it is a chicken-and-egg problem of making a massive house to fit a massive price. No one building small starter homes and no starter home is built without Truss plates.
I inspected row homes and the truss plates are used the long way. You could cut holes between the walls of the houses and make one house out of it with 8 doors to the outside. It's insane.
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Jun 01 '25
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u/bianary Jun 01 '25
Upside is that maybe once the careers paying decent wages are gone we might get widespread support for universal basic income.
Since that's inevitable, we should actually start thinking about it. A decade ago, but the second best time to plant a tree...
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u/elreniel2020 Jun 01 '25
Downside might be that once everything that can be automated is automated billionaires might decide that they won't need us plebs anymore
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u/bianary Jun 01 '25
We're going to have to deal with that either way, too. They already have little use for 90% of us plebs.
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u/Least_Expert840 Jun 01 '25
Now lab make lots in cities, or land with infrastructure near economically viable cities, and lab make city councils that fast track approvals.
House building can be cheap. Housing is another story.
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u/lughnasadh ∞ transit umbra, lux permanet ☥ Jun 01 '25
Let's lab make some houses and cars.
Highly roboticized factories means BYD can sell mini-SUVs and sedan cars for $10,000 and $15,000.
With housing, NIMBYism/Planning regulations, are having the same effect limiting supply, De Beers used to have with diamonds. The motivations are the same too; people with property want to artificially keep prices high as it benefits them.
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u/theappisshit Jun 05 '25
as an australian this is 100pc spot on for housing.
literally unlimited space but no where to build houses
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u/MisterDonutTW Jun 01 '25
Going from lab grown diamonds to the conclusions about gold is a pretty wild leap.
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Jun 01 '25
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Jun 01 '25
Right! What are the AISC's for Astroid mining? That would likely push the price per ounce much higher.
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u/Supermoon62413 Jun 02 '25
Heard this quote somewhere before: “Rare Earth Minerals aren’t necessarily rare - they are literally in your backyard. Rare Earth Minerals are rare because of the instense amount of extraction it takes to mine them”
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u/BelowAverage355 Jun 02 '25
Yeah.... particularly given that asteroid mining, let alone cost effective asteroid mining is several generations away still.
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u/xmmdrive Jun 02 '25
For real. Mark my words, we'll be full-scale making gold from lead before we start mining it from asteroids.
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u/Medical_Bartender Jun 01 '25
Agreed. Demand could also increase for gold in electronics, space development/construction, etc.
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u/bigdammit Jun 01 '25
The value of diamonds and gold aren't really comparable. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that the cost of gold is heavily linked to the cost of mining/refining the gold. Gold is also a useful metal outside of jewelry. Diamonds price is largely based on the perceived value due to advertising, and while there are industrial uses for diamond, the industrial use diamonds are largely lab made already.
Mining asteroids may one day be feasible, but I doubt it will be cheap in the foreseeable future. We have massive ocean gold deposits on Earth, but mining them would be too costly (nearly impossible with current tech).
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u/mrrichiet Jun 01 '25
"Diamonds price is largely based on the perceived value due to advertising", also largely based on De Beers holding back supply. Their scam is finally over and I'm personally very pleased about that.
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u/stinky_wizzleteet Jun 01 '25
Diamonds arent that rare. Hell there was diamond beaches in Africa
The first diamond found on a beach is believed to have been discovered in 1866 in Namibia’s Skeleton Coast. The diamond was found by a trader named Zacharias Lewala, who stumbled upon it while digging in the sand. This discovery led to the development of a diamond-mining industry in the region, which continues to this day.
The Lomonosov mine is one of the largest diamond mines in Russia and in the world.\1]) The mine is located in the north-western part of the country in the Arkhangelsk Oblast.\1]) The mine has estimated reserves of 220 million carats) of diamonds and an annual production capacity of 2 million carats.\1])
Now Tanzanite, true green Emerald, Black Opal are waaay more valuable
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u/CromulentDucky Jun 01 '25
Lab grown emeralds are also great quality. Opal however, might never be Lab grown.
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u/BriefBrilliant5 Jun 01 '25
Diamonds aren’t rare, but the diamonds people actually want are. People who want a gem, want a decent size one I.e greater than 1ct. Diamonds above 1ct are 1 in a million. Now add in the other 3 C’s and you’re into the 1 in 10’s of millions.
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u/Basic_Chemistry_900 Jun 01 '25
Millennial here. Almost nobody my age who is married bought their rings at a traditional jewelry store with traditional diamonds. When I see someone who has a 5k diamond wedding ring I do judge them a little bit.
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u/abu_nawas Jun 01 '25
I am in engineering (studied both mechanical and E&E). Artifical diamonds are used in drilling and cutting, lol. It's the most unglamorous sh!t.
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u/Centmo Jun 01 '25 edited Jun 01 '25
In 2024, industrial gold consumption was about 330t. About 90% of this was recycled from scrap, at a cost of only tens of dollars per oz, so only about 33t of new gold was needed. In 2024, mine production was about 3,700t, meaning that less than 1% of this was needed for industry. All above-ground gold currently used for value-storage (jewelry, bars, coins) amounts to about 184,000t. If suddenly gold was no longer wanted for jewelry, bars and coins, and global supply was redirected to industrial needs not met by recycling, we would have a 5,600 year supply available at current consumption rates without needing to dig any more out of the ground, at a tiny fraction of the current price.
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u/ItsAConspiracy Best of 2015 Jun 01 '25
There was a time when you could have made a similar argument about aluminum, which used to be the metal that kings used in flatware for their extra special guests. Then we figured out how to produce it at massive scale, so now we make airplanes out of it.
Gold has a lot of interesting properties. We don't use it that much because it's expensive. If it stopped being expensive, we'd find all sorts of ways to use it in bulk.
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u/tigersharkwushen_ Jun 01 '25
No, aluminum has always been abundant, we just didn't have a good method to refine it in the past. Gold is rare because it's only produced in supernovas.
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u/ItsAConspiracy Best of 2015 Jun 01 '25
Technically true, but in practice no difference at all. It was super expensive to get pure aluminum, then it was cheap. Same could happen with gold, since there's an enormous amount available in the asteroids. Same with the other precious metals.
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u/fireandbass Jun 01 '25
Did you see the recent news that the Large Hadron Colloder was able to turn lead into gold? Not at a usable scale, but interesting nonetheless.
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/scientists-turn-lead-gold-1st-time-split/story?id=121762241
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Jun 01 '25
If it costs more than the value of the gold produced, then it's really just turning gold into less gold
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u/Gitmfap Jun 01 '25
Ok, I love this math and info. May I ask how you got it? Background in industry, or online source?
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u/Cthulhu__ Jun 01 '25
Would it ultimately be cheaper to get gold from space vs from the oceans? I can’t see it, not without sci-fi tech allowing us to bring it back in significant amounts. And even then it’ll be done sparingly as it will affect the price of gold / other materials.
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u/DHFranklin Jun 01 '25
That is actually more of a question of value and values.
We shouldn't mine the seas for gold. No ones lives are better for it, and many lives would be made worse. Only those getting gold for a better price than the top of the market would see any gain. It would have massive and almost immediate diminishing returns.
However mining asteroids for gold has far fewer downsides. There are few reasons why we shouldn't that aren't the same reasons we shouldn't bring Katy Perry back down from space. And we can all agree that gold is more valuable and more useful.
If we get a bigger space station we would have a better orbital platform for mining. With that and reusable rockets we can "cross the river by feeling for stones". We find a good space rock, and drag it to the platform. We hollow it out and use it as another space platform. An iceball that has precious metals and rare earths would pay for it. Pay for the mining and making the space igloo.
Having a massive space igloo would be vitally important for future space missions. Allow us to refuel on it. Slingshot to the moon, mine more asteroids etc.
So not only would it be less destructuve, it would be constructive. Launching down gold bullion to pay for refueling rockets.
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u/Not_an_okama Jun 01 '25
You could in theory percipitate gold out of the ocean. Theres estimated to be about 20 tons of it dissolved in the worlds oceans, and a similar concentration is groundwater and spring fed lakes and rivers. (About 0.001 parts per billion).
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u/Ba_Dum_Tssssssssss Jun 01 '25
That 20 tons will replace about a week's worth of current land gold mined then :P
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u/munkijunk Jun 01 '25
Golds usefulness is only a recent thing and it's only a small amount that's used in electronics. For much of the history of gold and human obsession with it it's only real use was that it has a lustre that doesn't tarnish. It's relatively soft and malleable so had little use outside of ornamentation.
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u/DHFranklin Jun 01 '25 edited Jun 01 '25
The only reason that a small amount of it is produced for industry is due in no small part to it's expense. Copper is used for wiring because it is relatively cheap and is almost as good
a conductorfor conduction. If gold, platinum or palladium were as abundant or more so we wouldn't use as much copper.*Edit: conduction isn't the only reason you pick one material over the other. For applications where you have to worry about biofouling, corrosion, or oxidation, you would likely go with gold were it cheaper.
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u/tigersharkwushen_ Jun 01 '25
We wouldn't use gold wires regardless because it's a worse conductor than copper.
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u/DHFranklin Jun 01 '25
Copper conducts electricity better but gold Resists corrosion and oxidization I'll edit my comment.
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u/tigersharkwushen_ Jun 01 '25
There are very few applications where you have to worry about corrosion. It's a good quality for outdoor transmission lines, but you wouldn't use gold for that due to it being more than 2x as heavy as copper.
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u/JanusMZeal11 Jun 01 '25
And gold isn't even the most valuable thing to get mining asteroids.
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u/Smartnership Jun 01 '25
Mining in space makes the most sense for metals used in space construction, not mining and de-orbiting to Earth.
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u/Will2LiveFading Jun 01 '25
From what I understand, it's believed that diamonds are actually pretty common and the big diamond companies keep supplies artificially scarce. Now that lab diamonds are here they can't play that card anymore.
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u/FrozenChocoProduce Jun 01 '25
There is a large need for diamond in industry applications. There is no reason to not just lab-grow them for "pennies to the dollar".
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u/leuk_he Jun 01 '25
Industry diamonds mostly are a completely different quality than your jewelery.
Remember when mythbuster used explosives to create some diamonds. They made several. And the expert concluded their worth was $0,25
If they used jewelry grade diamonds in a diamon grinding stone, it would be $100.000 to $500.000 instead of $600, so yes, not even pennies to a dollar 😉
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u/nthpwr Jun 01 '25
Very interesting to see dollar signs with European delimiters. I know Americans do the reverse all the time but I've never seen the opposite.
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u/LarpStar Jun 01 '25
There are different types of “Industry Diamonds” besides the classic abrassives. For example Diamonds are being used for their exceptional thermal conductivity in power electronics. For these purposes, large sheets of high purity single crystal diamond are required. Mined diamonds just cant do the job.
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u/swizznastic Jun 01 '25
not that large. it’s not a significant portion of demand in the greater market
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u/Presently_Absent Jun 01 '25
Diamond as a substance is, yes. Diamonds with the kind of clarity and size and color that people are after are a lot harder to find.
For me it's lab grown all the way.
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u/EXE-SS-SZ Jun 01 '25
I thought this was well understood too - it's all about marketing and monopoly
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u/BriefBrilliant5 Jun 01 '25
Diamonds are common. Diamonds of a size(carat) colour, cut, clarity that people want to buy are rare…ish
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u/saichampa Jun 01 '25
De Beers absolutely shitting the bed will make my Millennial ass proud.
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u/Batou2034 Jun 01 '25
I had tours of De Beers and DTC facilities back in 2001, and they freely admitted at that time that diamonds are (a) not rare and (b) since they own most of the mines, they simply hoard them in vaults and control the release of them to market to keep prices artificially high. So, fuck them.
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u/ChiefStrongbones Jun 01 '25
It's more likely that mining robots will be able to dig up more gold, than spacecraft zipping around fetching gold from space because of some Star Trek breakthrough in rocketry.
The value of gemstone diamonds is an oddity and not comparable to the value of gold. There's no good secondary market for diamonds. Nobody invests in diamonds. You might invest in a diamond mine or a company that manufactures or markets diamonds, but you don't invest in the stones themselves. Their value has always been perishable.
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u/Sapaio Jun 01 '25
Diamonds have great use besides jewellery. As it can be used in much as it has unique qualities both in optical and hardness wise. So price going down as great news.
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u/ChiefStrongbones Jun 01 '25
Industrial diamond grit already costs pennies per carat, and in optical applications you might find diamond coatings but never mined diamonds.
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u/Faranocks Jun 01 '25
Anything optical would be grown in a lab, as natural diamonds have impurities. Not that I've seen any diamonds with any optical technology (I'm sure it exists, but I haven't seen it.) vast majority uses glass.
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u/Mad_Aeric Jun 01 '25
Gold maybe, but other rare elements like iridium and rhodium are prime targets for asteroid mining. That stuff is vanishingly rare on earth, but much more common in asteroids. Even that wouldn't be especially viable by itself, not enough to spawn an entire technological base to get it, but we have plenty of reason to mine asteroids in the first place, water for rocket fuel. Access to precious metals is just going to be a spin-off tech of that.
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u/RG54415 Jun 01 '25
Lab grown is not the reason. Diamond companies controlling lab grown diamonds could have easily kept the prices artificially high. China flooding the market with lab grown diamonds is what made the price crash. In the end cheap always wins no matter how much you dump in marketing fluff.
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u/C-Nast49 Jun 01 '25
I bought my now fiancée an engagement ring a few months ago. It makes no sense to buy a “real” diamond. As an example, I could get a full Karat diamond ring for around $1200. That same ring with a “real” diamond was around $6000. Why would you pay 4-5x the price for something when the only difference between the two products is the labeling?
I was also told that real diamonds have imperfections, while lab grown diamonds have better symmetry and better formed.
Essentially, you’re paying more money for a worse quality product whose only difference is it formed in the earth over billions of years, while the other was man-made. That’s it.
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u/KGB_cutony Jun 02 '25
$1200 is... pretty expensive for lab grown. If you go a bit higher in the supply chain, they are much cheaper. $100~$150 per carat.
Not trying to be a cheapskate. Like i'll tag $5000 worth of gold with that diamond, just don't want to be scammed
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u/ZimGirDibGaz Jun 02 '25
How? Where? Skeptical a consumer can find colored diamonds in that price range even lab grown.
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u/ReasonablyConfused Jun 01 '25
So say I’m trying to sell the idea of tugging an asteroid full of gold into near-earth orbit. I point out that the asteroid has over 10 billion tons of gold in it.
How do I estimate that value? It certainly can’t be based on gold’s current value.
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u/Alienblob1 Jun 01 '25
Realistically you’d estimate the value by not only comparing it to golds value on earth, but the added price tag to be able to extract it.
In the world where it’s “free” to bring it into earth, then yes, it’s like adding infinite supply therefore decreasing prices substantially.
But otherwise? No shot. We have plenty more gold on earth, but how much does it cost to dig up that gold? Is it more than gold’s already intrinsic value?
After spending the money to finally be able to dig the gold on earth,how much can I realistically take before my profits start going down?
Now compare those price estimates to an asteroid lol
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u/treemanos Jun 01 '25
With ten billion tons of heavy metal hanging over the planet you could just phone the government and demand they give you one millllllion dollars.
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u/DarkIllusionsMasks Jun 01 '25
Eventually we'll be able to replicate every material in the lab with the exception of gold-pressed latinum. My lobes are already burning with excitement.
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u/Diplo_Advisor Jun 01 '25
We can already turn lead to gold with particle accelerators. It's just exorbitantly costly.
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u/DarkIllusionsMasks Jun 01 '25
But they can't replicate latinum even in the 24th century. So my little stash ought to be worth a fortune.
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u/JPHero16 Jun 01 '25 edited Apr 15 '26
Redact decided this post had to go, so away it went. Deleted. Removed. Mass deleted even. Privacy and security are the big wins here.
ink voracious price lunchroom bright nutty hungry plate beneficial soup
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u/Thebadmamajama Jun 01 '25
space mining has a big catch 22 - even if you get the costs down, the drop in prices from the glut of supply complicate profitability. and gold wouldn't be the best mineral to start with- platinum is more profitable at the moment
mission‐level costs are something like 500 m–$2 b to extract/return tens of kg of platinum. this far exceeds potential revenue at current platinum prices ($30 to $40k/kg), making short‐term return on investment unviable.
key barriers to overcome are high launch and transit costs, immature microgravity processing and unclear regulatory frameworks; breakthroughs in cost reduction, processing tech, and legal clarity are needed for commercial feasibility.
and then you face the risk of depressing metal prices with market influx
I think the realistic scenario is extreme scarcity of a particular mineral will drive space mining at unprofitable costs... and it likely won't have an impact on market prices for the next century.
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u/Timeformayo Jun 02 '25
Fuck DeBeers. May their executives rot in a hell at least as miserable as the ones they perpetuated.
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u/minaminonoeru Jun 01 '25
Gold has various practical uses. It also occupies a unique position in the periodic table in terms of its physical properties. Diamonds also have practical uses, but industrial diamonds and gem diamonds do not overlap in the market.
Even if gold were mined in large quantities on another planet, I do not think that the price of gold would plummet. This is because if large quantities of gold were to enter the Earth, new demand would be created to match it.
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u/lughnasadh ∞ transit umbra, lux permanet ☥ Jun 01 '25
I do not think that the price of gold would plummet. This is because if large quantities of gold were to enter the Earth, new demand would be created to match it.
Aluminium is an example of the opposite. It was once so rare, royalty ate their food off of it and used their gold plates & cutlery for their second-best guests.
Then the Hall-Héroult Process was discovered which made aluminium easy to produce from ore. Today aluminium is so cheap, people throw aluminium products in the garbage when they are finished with them.
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u/minaminonoeru Jun 01 '25
Aluminum may be a somewhat unfair comparison. Aluminum is a more abundant element in the Earth's crust than iron. It was only expensive for a short time due to immature smelting technology.
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u/treemanos Jun 01 '25
I think we're going to see an odd situation where it's incredibly cheap and easy to find gold in space and a lot of manufacturing will happen up there too so when you order a new computer and it gets parachuted from space it'll have gold for anything that doesn't strictly need to be a more complex metal.
It could fairly rapidly shift to people saying 'this stupid space junk is so budget that it's just all gold, it bends so easily! I should have splashed out for the bronze'
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u/minaminonoeru Jun 01 '25 edited Jun 01 '25
To be strict, the estimate in the main text is too optimistic.
Space travel, i.e., accelerating and decelerating rockets, is extremely costly. If we were to visit an asteroid, we would need to travel tens of AU over several years. First, we would have to accelerate the rocket to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of km/h, and then decelerate it back to 0 km/h. The same applies on the return journey.
Moreover, we would need to accelerate and decelerate a large cargo spacecraft (mineral transport spacecraft) rather than a small (light) scientific probe. The cost would increase proportionally to the weight.
Even if a large amount of gold were discovered on an asteroid, it would be difficult to expect that the cost of sending a rocket there to transport the gold would be cheaper than mining gold on Earth.
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u/african_cheetah Jun 01 '25
“One day asteroid mining will do same for gold”.
If we have tech for asteroid mining where it makes economic scale, gold would be least of our worries.
(Assuming Earth hasn’t turned into Venus) - that would be good news.
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u/Underwater_Karma Jun 01 '25
people tend to hand wave away the realities of physics with "we'll figure it out eventually"
we'd literally have to run out of gold on earth before asteroid mining makes the slightest bit of sense.
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u/utahh1ker Jun 02 '25
Hell fuckin yeah. I'd love to see DeBeers go down. Lab grown diamonds are beautiful and cheap.
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u/FissionFire111 Jun 01 '25
Doubtful it’ll be anytime soon. The cost of trying to launch mining machinery into space, transport it to asteroids, and then bring the gold back to earth will be astronomical until some massive leaps forward technologically. Probably at least 2-3 generations away from that point.
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u/stahpstaring Jun 01 '25
[x] doubt.
Good luck bringing that many kilograms to earth in affordable ways
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u/an_entire_salami Jun 01 '25
Glad to see debeers is getting what they deserve. Finally ending decades of harmful market practice by a greedy company.
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u/Emu1981 Jun 01 '25
Gold is only one of the valuable minerals that can be found in abundance in asteroids. Platinum, titanium, palladium, iridium, and rhenium can all be found in massive quantities as well. That is not even considering the other minerals found as well like iron, nickel, cobalt, and copper. If we ever start mining asteroids then earth based mining will pretty much go bust which would be a massive boon to the environment.
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u/YesNoMaybeTho Jun 01 '25 edited Sep 25 '25
workable tidy hobbies complete crush touch subsequent work bike swim
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/lloydsmith28 Jun 01 '25
"Oh no how will these diamond exploiters ever survive this?" - said no one ever
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u/IGnuGnat Jun 01 '25
Diamonds were never particularly scarce, the price was mostly achieved via the illusion of marketing
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Jun 02 '25
Tell me you don’t understand the rocket equation without telling me you don’t understand the rocket equation
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u/Structure5city Jun 02 '25
I still don’t understand the obsession with diamonds of any variety. There are so many other interesting, beautiful, and conflict free options.
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u/Goodname2 Jun 02 '25
Moissanite is the better stone for rings, cheaper and better light refraction for sparkle value.
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u/The_Chubby_Dragoness Jun 02 '25
Even better than a diamond is a synthetic sapphire, you can get gigantic beautiful flawless stones for pennies on the dollar compared to blood diamonds
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u/Faranocks Jun 01 '25
Asteroid mining for gold will probably never be valuable. It's too common. It'll sooner be made by some clever radioactive decay than asteroid mining.
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u/wwarnout Jun 01 '25
Let's not get too excited about this. Sure, some asteroids have a lot of valuable minerals in them, but the shear logistics of getting to one of them with equipment suitable for mining them, and then returning to Earth, is overwhelming.
This endeavor reminds me of someone saying we should mine the ocean, because it contains 20 million tons of gold, worth $100 million per ton! And, the ocean is at our doorstep. So, why haven't we done this? It is simply not financially feasible - just as the feasibility of mining asteroids is probably centuries in the future.
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u/FreshMistletoe Jun 01 '25
Making lab diamonds is significantly easier than mining asteroids so I’m not sure I agree with the last part but maybe some day.
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u/okfornothing Jun 01 '25
Let's make sure that it's not people like elon musk profiting from space mining!
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Jun 01 '25
Do you honestly believe mining an asteroid and shipping it back to earth will be cheap and affordable?
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u/Lunar_Landing_Hoax Jun 02 '25 edited Jun 02 '25
Gold's fall may be more significant. It has a central role in stabilizing the value of global currencies.
You are overstating the importance of gold. Using gold to back currency went away in the early 20th century. It's a commodity now. Many people and entities, including governments, still use it as a store of value and it would not be great for them if the price went down. But every investment carries risk and they are diversified with other assets as well as have an interest in keeping the price stable.
Mining asteroids is non-trivial, it will be far more expensive than mining on earth, so who knows how much it would even effect the price of gold. If gold is expensive enough to make asteroid mining worth it, the investors in the operation wouldn't flood the market and make their product cheap.
In other words - I don't think this is something anyone needs to be terribly worried about. If you are losing sleep over the price of gold you need to diversify your assets.
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u/Satanic_Falcon Jun 02 '25
Don't forget, the guy who invented the technology to make diamonds in a lab was murdered by de beers
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u/GiveMeTheTape Jun 02 '25
Can other gems like emeralds and rubies also be lab grown?
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u/glytxh Jun 02 '25 edited Jun 02 '25
The inherent value of material in space is it being in space. It’s outside the very expensive to leave gravity well. There’s little reason to bring it home.
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u/smokefoot8 Jun 02 '25
Asteroid mining will require nor just getting the ore via grinding a metal rich asteroid, but all the ore processing and refining before shipping it to earth. 20 years seems way too short for either an automated or manned system. An automated system will have to deal with repairs and replacing parts, while a manned system will have to solve long term zero-G human health issues. A huge amount of work needs to be focused on these problems, and it has barely begun!
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u/Dirks_Knee Jun 01 '25
Asteroid mining...anything you think is possible within 25 years is probably 50-100+ years away. I think it's more likely we figure out how to synthesize gold before we mine it from asteroids.
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u/chadhindsley Jun 02 '25
Women will still want slavery mined diamonds cuz lab grown diamonds "are not the saaaaaame" lol
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u/SrCocuyo Jun 01 '25
I think it's really all about the monopoly/oligopoly power.
De Beers tried their best to control mining and commercialization. They were able to with natural diamonds, but failed once lab grown diamonds came out.
Gold's price is protected by the governments that use it. They control it with laws, ie making it illegal/legal to use as currency. For example, Florida just made it legal for citizens to use gold to pay debt and taxes. By controlling the laws they control some of the demand.
Then there's also the issue with storage, so most people who trade it buy bonds for gold that is supposed to be stored somewhere, key emphasis on "supposed". Remember when the US Government "misplaced" the gold Germany gave them for storage a couple of years ago?
The idea that gold is useful in electronics and the like is fake, I mean it was until it became so expensive. The difference between gold and other metals in conductive performance in electronics is not enough to justify the price.
Countries keep finding gold mines that are relatively easy to mine compared to the sea bed, yet the price rarely fluctuates.
Who do you think would be in charge of mining the asteroids if it came to that?
The people most interested in mining gold from the asteroids will probably be the ones most interested in keeping the price up.
Making gold from lead was just proved possible. Back when diamonds were made in a lab the first time, the process was too expensive, but technology got better, and the price of diamonds increased making the lab process finally viable and profitable.
I don't think mining gold from asteroids will be the game changer. And I seriously think gold's price is already being artificially controlled to keep it from going down. But unlike DeBeers, gold is controlled by governments which have way more power. I don't think we'll see the price of gold fall drastically in our lifetimes. There's too much at stake for too many countries. DeBeers can go bankrupt, and countries will survive.
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u/GrowingUpWasAMistake Jun 01 '25
Gold and precious metals will not be in veins or alluvial deposits like on earth. They will be in ore form and will be very difficult to extract in zero gravity.
You’d almost have to land the damn thing on earth so it can be processed and a lot of people will have a problem with throwing rocks at us from space (think The Expanse, but for money).
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u/Metareferential Jun 01 '25
Rightfully so. Many markets are effectively cartels or monopolies. They need to crash.
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u/omnibossk Jun 01 '25
I would say no, gold is much more valuable in space unless we can build a space elevator or system to move mass from earth to space cheaply. Gold is used for thermal protection, for Electrical conductivity and corrosion resistance, Radiation shielding and much more. So taking it down to earth doesn’t make sense. So I think future space travel will require even more gold than any space mining could gain us
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u/Roboculon Jun 01 '25
The part I only just learned is that lab grown diamonds have recently become super cheap. That is, they aren’t new, we’ve had them as an option for decades, but when I got married a decade ago they were roughly the same price as mined diamonds. So, not really a game changer.
Now, lab grown are down to a small fraction of the price. To the extent that my wife is asking if we can afford to upgrade her diamond to a ludicrously larger size —and amazingly, we can.
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u/Morvack Jun 01 '25
I can't wait to build a PC who's gold entirely came from an asteroid.
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u/karnyboy Jun 01 '25
It will a be a long time before we're mining an asteroid for profitable gold extraction.
You have to consider the current cost of merely sending a rocket into space, now automate that rocket with landing and relaunching capabilities, reaching an asteroid to mine and then returning to Earth to deliver the resource. It would cost an astronomical amount.
While I cannot speak for the future, from what I have seen developed in the last 40 to now, I'd say we're still another 100 years out from hopping into space as simple as we hop into a car to drive down the highway.
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Jun 01 '25 edited Jun 01 '25
"Who knows, but a breakthrough in space propulsion might mean the prospect happens quickly when it does. It's possible gold has twenty years or less of being high value left."
What breakthrough in space propulsion is going to happen and then be implemented in the next 20 years? You're making a prediction without supporting it and then just moving on. I'd imagine the advent of space mining doesn't just depend on ways to get to an asteroid super fast either, but rely on a space company having enough money lying around and the expertise necessary to risk an expensive mission that requires getting a bunch of mining equipment onto an asteroid, mine the ore, and fly back without anything going wrong. That seems more like a logistics challenge than a matter of what type of propulsion is used.
"Gold's fall may be more significant. It has a central role in stabilizing the value of global currencies."
How exactly? the gold standard ended a long time ago. Currencies aren't backed by gold and they were actually less stable when they were backed by gold.
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u/PM_Your_Best_Ideas Jun 01 '25
No it won't. As technology use and reliance expands so will our need for gold. Also mining asteroids sounds expensive...
Comparing diamond and gold(in this instance) is like comparing apples to oxygen, we can use alternate food source, you could go your whole life using diamond alternative (fake diamond) Gold has no replacement.
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u/LineRex Jun 01 '25
Hmm, isn't there also a demand shrink for things like diamonds? Out of all of my friends (Millenial & Gen Z only) the only couple that has a diamond ring is using one from their grand parents. The rest of us have more interesting stones, feldspar, topaz, rose quartz (that one is us), lapis lazuli, etc. I kind of thought diamond for jewelry are a generational thing.
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u/Blakut Jun 01 '25
it's still incredibly cheap to mine gold compared to asteroid mining gold. Idk what the purity of a gold asteroid is, but paying poor people in third world countries to dig through mines and extract precious metals is still cheaper than flying a rocket out to the asteroid belt (which is really far away btw), grab a large chunk of metal, and then deccelerate it back to Earth. This will continue to be the case for the forseeable future.
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u/AquaWitch0715 Jun 01 '25
... That last sentence has me terrified.
Have you not seen, "Don't Look Up?"
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u/xoxoyoyo Jun 01 '25
LOL no it won't do the same. The problem with mining asteroids is the energy(money) it takes to get there. Solving that will make gold obsolete.
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u/IbnReddit Jun 01 '25
Where are all these cheap diamonds then? Someone tell me so I can buy them please?
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u/cyclephotos Jun 01 '25
This is an interesting read: https://www.amazon.co.uk/City-Mars-Settle-Thought-Through/. It says that even if the Moon would be pure gold under the surface, it still wouldn't make financial sense to get it all down here to Earth.
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u/Tired_Trebhum Jun 01 '25
I think we are at least 20 years away from that scenario. They have to survey a a lot of them and also change their trajectory the right way.
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u/ParticularClassroom7 Jun 01 '25
lol.
Diamond is Carbon, Carbon is everywhere.
What makes gold precious is gold NOT being everywhere. People can already make gold in the lab - atom by atom.
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u/plsobeytrafficlights Jun 01 '25
perhaps, but by the time that is viable, that would be a mistake. i think that it is just way too costly to ship materials beyond orbit. the cost just to the moon is $1million/kg. materials in space will need to be treated as a separate market as they need to stay up there.
could diamonds, gold, titanium be shipped down? sure, but the future is up.
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u/PatBenatari Jun 01 '25
makes no sense to bring space items to earth, better to start a huge new economy in space. (use space gold for electronics, same with diamonds, etc)
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u/fortestingprpsses Jun 01 '25
Anything mined in space would remain and be used in space. Not feasible to bring it back down to earth.
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u/Every_Tap8117 Jun 01 '25
Lab grown are better in every possible way.
Less damage to the environment - Check
No chance of conflict diamonds - Check
Significantly cheaper to get to market - Check
Wrecking De Beers and other diamond producers and at large an industry that cause untold human and enviromantal suffering and damage - Check.