j4k3

M-type astroids are the differentiated cores of planetesimal bodies from early in stellar formation.

So here is the thing ~~in a nutshell~~. When any object in space gets large enough, gravity will eventually make it round. As part of this process, heavier elements like metals will start to be drawn towards the center as the surface deforms. If the object is ever molten, gravitational differentiation will be stronger with almost all heavy elements collecting at the center.

If you have never heard about this idea, it is likely conflicting with your intuitive grasp of resource extraction on Earth. So here is a basic breakdown. The surface of the earth is the light garbage that floats. If you know welding, it is like flux. If you know metal casting it is dross. If you know neither, I'm sorry I'm out of analogies ATM and going with light stuff floats. Alright, so the heavy elements humans have access to on the surface of Earth are only what has come from billions of years of collisions from meteors after the Earth formed the continents and a solid surface. As tectonic subduction happens at the ends of some continental plates, vulcanism is triggered mostly by the water moisture that is trapped in these plates as they subduct into the core of the planet. This hot fluid can dissolve most heavy elements and cause a small fraction of them to rise back closer to the surface. These solidify to form the veins we typically mine to access, or the material dissolves into an ocean that evaporates and contains a viable concentration in the sediment.

This cycle of heavy elements is the true basis of resource scarcity that underpins all of human economics and the modern world. However, this scarcity paradigm only exists on the surface of a planetary gravity prison like Earth. During early stellar formation of Sol, the elemental distribution was nearly uniform.

Now I am likely conflicting with your understanding of the planets in the Sol system and their distribution. So here is the thing, most of the material starts falling from a mostly homogeneous cold cloud into a gravity well that begins to form. This process is largely temperature dependent and the heat energy present can be too high to allow lots of stuff to glob together while calm and close enough to affect other stuff. Eventually stuff gets big enough to start digging a well in gravity pulling an ever larger area onto its slopes. Once the pressure gets high enough deuterium starts fusing in the first phase and creates a counter pressure blowing back against the material falling towards it with not not even close to enough pressure to stop the collapse. As pressure increases, regular hydrogen fuses too and a star is born. The solar wind from the star evaporates volatiles pushing them further away, but the actual key factor is the ice lines of the stellar wind. At a given distance the temperature of particles decreases to the crystalization point of elements and these solids coalesce easily.

Earth is an extreme anomaly in this instance. I strongly believe the moon forming Theia collision theory with the additional eccentric speculative view that Theia was likely a first generation moon of Jupiter, thus the reason Earth has nitrogen and water that match the isotopic signature of Jovian objects, but that is wildly unproven nonsense from daydreaming too much. Jupiter is near the stellar ice lines for these elements, and such a collision explains Mars and Venus without equally baseless speculation about them being Earth like at any point and magically acquiring elements that should have sublimated and been blown away in the early stellar nursery. Plus models indicate Jupiter had a first generation of moons that was destroyed, and this is the most likely source of a late rogue object the size of Theia with the right isotopes to satisfy why Venus and Mars are unlike Earth without wild Earth centric biased speculation. So anyways that is the basics of why the planets appear so different. The light stuff gets blown away by the star and only the heavier stuff remains within the gravity well of a planet close to the star. Like you may recall Mercury has a very large metal core.

Back to the surface of Earth. We are locked out of most heavy elements the Earth possesses, but any m-type astroid is already an object that has been concentrated – from what was the average homogenous distribution of materials in the coalescent stellar nursery, and whatever the mass of the planetesimal object was with its timeline of formation before or was obliterated in a large collision or passed within the Roche limit of some much larger object causing gravity to tear it to pieces.

This type of object could easily contain more heavy element wealth than accessed in all of the Holocene. The main problem is the cost of access and extraction. The benefit is not actually from recovering the material on Earth. The real benefit is that having more wealth and resources outside of the planet than on the surface will create the finances to build large space colonies. No joke, we live in a hellish gravity prison of resource scarcity. There are multiple large m-type astroids already in near Earth orbits.

So you're probably a pessimistic miser type like evolution requires for species survival, and saying 'so what, rich people go to space and nothing changes,' but that is not well thought out either. The thing with space habitats is the atmosphere is not available to anonymously tax everyone. In a space habitat, radiating heat into space is the major constraint. Heat becomes currency that is far more egalitarian than wealth on Earth. Also waste is a worse issue by many orders of magnitude. The solution is that human will be forced to research and develop our final age of technology – biology. Biology is a technology once it is fully understood to the point where all life and phenomena are merely an engineering corpus. We are centuries away from this technology. We still have not managed to produce life from precursors and have only scratched the surface of basic discovery in biological systems. Heck we're still discovering new cellular organelles in humans, when eventually we will make them. This biotech future is as far off or further than the Han Chinese or Romans are from the present stone age of silicon, but it is the future we get to eventually. A lot of the timeline depends on how we transition to AGI government. That may take decades or centuries, but it will happen eventually, likely amidst great opposition and turmoil while done in secret. Like once real AGI exists, regardless of how culture views it, anyone that defers all decisions to an AGI will have an advantage no one else will match. Politicians and corporate leaders will use it. The only real question is how well it is presented to an evolution derived lifeform where survival dictates fractional adoption of anything new and is extremely temperamental using ignorance and stupidity as a tool in a Gaussian distribution of intelligence. Tribalism and dogma are very unpredictable and we are all subject to these biases.

Anyways we are close to a major disruption in the timeline. It is potentially catastrophic too as it will make all of Earth's economic systems obsolete in an extremely short amount of time and unrivalled wealth held by the fewest number of individuals in history. Wealth so great that wealth itself becomes meaningless. It will be the most expensive endeavor ever tried. The number of attempts may be numerous, but that one achievement will make the present insignificantly tiny afterwards. Most humans will eventually live in cislunar space a millennia after.