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https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8BEYG6
Successfully mining the first type-m astroid in near Earth orbit changes everything about human wealth on the planet. We live in a gravity prison of resource scarcity where almost all rare elements are sequestered in the core of Earth when it was last molten. Nearly everything we have is what remains from astroid collisions. An m-type astroid is the remains of a core of a differentiated planetesimal from the early formation of Sol. It is that same gravitationally focused concentration of rare resources Earth has plenty, of but locked away completely out of our reach. There could easily be more resource wealth in one such object than all that humanity has ever accessed in the entire Holocene.
