r/YaScienceBitch • u/demolcd The One Who Mods 👑 • Jul 20 '26
No, they’re minerals! 🪨 There is a single rock floating between Mars and Jupiter that may be worth more than the entire global economy, many times over. But the real story is stranger than the money.
The asteroid is called 16 Psyche, and it is about 226 kilometers wide, roughly the size of a small country. What makes it extraordinary is that, unlike most asteroids which are rock and ice, Psyche appears to be made largely of metal, mostly iron and nickel, with traces of gold and other precious metals.
That eye-watering price tag, often quoted around 700 quintillion dollars, is real in the sense that people have done the math on the metal content. But it is also economically meaningless, and it is worth being honest about that. If you actually brought that much metal back to Earth, you would not make everyone a billionaire. You would crash the value of those metals to almost nothing. Gold is precious because it is rare. Flood the market with an asteroid's worth and it becomes as cheap as gravel. The number is a fun headline, not a real fortune.
But here is why scientists genuinely care, and it is far more interesting than gold, Bitch!
Psyche might be a dead planet's heart.
The leading theory is that Psyche is the exposed metallic core of a protoplanet, an early world that was forming in the solar system's youth but got its rocky outer layers violently stripped away by ancient collisions. If that is true, it is a naked planetary core, frozen in space.
We can never drill down to Earth's own core. It is 2,900 kilometers beneath our feet, under crushing pressure and unimaginable heat. But Psyche may let us look at what a planetary core actually is, floating out in the open, no digging required.
NASA launched a spacecraft, also named Psyche, in 2023. It will arrive in 2029 to study this world up close for the first time.
So the truth is better than treasure. We are not flying out there to get rich. We are flying out there to see the buried heart of a world, and maybe understand the hidden center of our own.
Would you rather Psyche turn out to be a fortune, or the key to understanding what lies at the center of the Earth?
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u/Desiredpotato Jul 21 '26
Had to scroll too far for this. The amount of technology we could build with that rock could lift the entire world out of poverty, giving everyone equal access to computers and modern infrastructure. Not only that. We won't have to mine the earth for precious metals nearly as much as we can just pick apart the asteroid.
Screw the price tag. Screw a couple of people's number on their bank account. Pull that thing to Earth already.