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And in the event I ever ask a truck driver about atmospheric science I will be sure to bear that in mind.
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Jan 13, 2016 06:39
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BrandorKP posted:And metric tons (MT) is what tonnes are called by people who actually engage in moving tonnes of whatever poo poo from point a to point b. 
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Jan 13, 2016 09:37
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People in the real world measure water in acre-feet. lol at getting mad at someone for using cubic feet.
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Jan 13, 2016 18:44
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I like kommunist central european terminology. A ton is a ton is a ton is 1000kg. When talking about weird and stupid non-metric tons, you specify that you are talking about e: the most important non-metric ton is, of course, the gross register ton to determine which u-boat captains get mentioned in the news during world wars 
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Jan 13, 2016 19:44
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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lol if you don't only use kg for all mass measurements
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Jan 13, 2016 20:20
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Replace the word tonne with megagram.
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Jan 13, 2016 22:09
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OwlFancier posted:Replace the word tonne with megagram. Mess up capitalization, be off by 9 orders of magnitude.
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Jan 13, 2016 22:35
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NihilismNow posted:Mess up capitalization, be off by 9 orders of magnitude. "Cause of patient death: extreme overdose of Ibuprofen, sufficient to crush thoracic cavity upon delivery"
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Jan 13, 2016 23:36
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Trabisnikof posted:People in the real world measure water in acre-feet. lol at getting mad at someone for using cubic feet. This poo poo drives me nuts. Goddamn government why are you measuring flow in cfs? Jesus christ. Imperial triggers my ocd.
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Jan 13, 2016 23:49
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OwlFancier posted:And in the event I ever ask a truck driver about atmospheric science I will be sure to bear that in mind. What will be the unit of measurement for wood pellets shipped from Jacksonville to Europe to be burned in a power plant? What will the unit of measurement for a UN draft survey on a coal load in Australia bound for China? blowfish posted:the most important non-metric ton is, of course, the gross register ton to determine which u-boat captains get mentioned in the news during world wars And you're onto the reason. I use GT (gross tons) actually (they replaced GRT, gross register tons). I also use NT (net tons) and DWT (deadweight tons). All these units have international definitions. That last one DWT is the amount a vessel can load to it's summer mark in metric tons. With the exception of US flag ships on the Great Lakes (which have some wonky regionalisms, below) the unit associated with commodities moved in bulk by vessel is metric tons (MT) It's on bills of lading, draft surveys, unit prices on the markets, reports of fuel oil burned, etc. Like GT replacing GRT, MT (metric ton) was the replacement for LT (long tons) as the unit and in all sorts of loving international treaties. Now OwlFancier I know you're dumb as a post from previous conversations. But yes an atmospheric scientist should loving be familiar with the usage of the term metric tons. Because it's the unit that fossil fuels like coal, are denominated in when they are shipped. Because vessel displacements are given in Metric Tons in hydrostatic tables, and things like Load Line Certificates refer to displacements denominated in metric tons. Edit: And a bunch of people in NOAA are going to be familiar with MT. blowfish posted:A ton is a ton is a ton is 1000kg. When talking about weird and stupid non-metric tons, you specify that you are talking about And all those still get widely used. And they get conflated! On the Great Lakes when people say gross tons they mean long tons. When they say net tons they mean short tons. Lets say you want to figure out how much carbon pollution the Koch Brothers are creating with the pet coke they sell at a particular terminal. Can't do accurately if you don't know this stuff. QuarkJets posted:lol if you don't only use kg for all mass measurements MT are handier when you are dealing with heavier things. In the field it's a bit easier to do a rough conversion of MT into the force unit I use most kN. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 06:40 on Jan 14, 2016 |
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Jan 14, 2016 05:55
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BrandorKP posted:Now OwlFancier I know you're dumb as a post from previous conversations. But yes an atmospheric scientist should loving be familiar with the usage of the term metric tons. Because it's the unit that fossil fuels like coal, are denominated in when they are shipped. Because vessel displacements are given in Metric Tons in hydrostatic tables, and things like Load Line Certificates refer to displacements denominated in metric tons. Besides refering to 1000 kg as a megagram, I'm also in favor of calling 1000 km a megameter, as in "LA is 3.94 Mm from NYC". That'll show those Yankees 
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Jan 14, 2016 06:20
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*in Seinfeld voice* And what's the deal with kilowatt hours??
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Jan 14, 2016 07:35
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rudatron posted:*in Seinfeld voice* And what's the deal with kilowatt hours?? 3600 KJ just doesn't have the same ring to it.
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Jan 14, 2016 07:37
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computer parts posted:3600 KJ just doesn't have the same ring to it. I think you mean 3.6 MJ. Seriously, new 3.16 megasecond's resolution. Mega-prefix for everything.
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Jan 14, 2016 08:45
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CombatInformatiker posted:Besides refering to 1000 kg as a megagram, I'm also in favor of calling 1000 km a megameter, as in "LA is 3.94 Mm from NYC". That'll show those Yankees once there was this kid who swore one day he was gonna get people to use stupid metric units Mm Mm Mm Mm Mm Mm Mm Mm Mm Mm Mm Mm Mm Mm Mm Mm
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Jan 14, 2016 11:31
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Your silly base 10 number system is inferior to the base 12 system.
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Jan 14, 2016 14:07
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I'd like to go back to the asteroid mining and resource devaluation for a moment. Plentiful ores from asteroids won't necessarily crater the price because it would open up new uses. For example if gold were no longer rare it could be widely used as a superior conductor. Picture a gold alloy replacing copper wire in motors or even transmission lines.
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Jan 14, 2016 15:21
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WorldsStrongestNerd posted:I'd like to go back to the asteroid mining and resource devaluation for a moment. Plentiful ores from asteroids won't necessarily crater the price because it would open up new uses. For example if gold were no longer rare it could be widely used as a superior conductor. Picture a gold alloy replacing copper wire in motors or even transmission lines. Copper has a higher conductivity than gold. Gold is a more inert material though, which is useful. I don't think that the reactivity of copper is a major problem with wires for power, cable, and telephone lines, though.
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Jan 14, 2016 15:25
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WorldsStrongestNerd posted:I'd like to go back to the asteroid mining and resource devaluation for a moment. Plentiful ores from asteroids won't necessarily crater the price because it would open up new uses. 1.) New uses for rare elements will arise after, and only after, the price goes down by a significant amount. 2.) Asteroid mining for use on Earth will not instantly crash prices for the same reasons that opening up a new conventional mine does not instantly crash prices. I have no clue where people (I'm not refering to you) get this ludicrous idea from, but for some reason they seem to think that mining asteroids will depress prices to a point where asteroid mining is no longer profitable – as if the seller of asteroid-mined materials were unable to set a lower bound on the price. To quote Charles Babbage, "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." 3.) I really hope that asteroid mining for use on Earth will work out in the future, because a) every ton(ne) of material mined from holes in the ground less is beneficial to this planet, and b) it would be loving awesome. 
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Jan 14, 2016 15:49
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WorldsStrongestNerd posted:I'd like to go back to the asteroid mining and resource devaluation for a moment. Plentiful ores from asteroids won't necessarily crater the price because it would open up new uses. For example if gold were no longer rare it could be widely used as a superior conductor. Picture a gold alloy replacing copper wire in motors or even transmission lines. In a lot of cases it depends on the metal. Most valuable rare metals are also soft and dense, rendering them useless for any construction purposes. Nobody's going to build skyscrapers or jet airplanes out of platinum or iridium no matter how cheap they are. They're just not suitable for the task. There are relatively few situations when some engineer has lamented that rare element X would be perfect for his construction job if only it weren't so expensive. Platinum might have a use in passivating coatings, for example platinum-coated steel for corrosion resistance. Even a thin layer of platinum would add a lot of weight, though, and there would be a trade-off versus current technologies. My general impression is that fans of asteroid mining are way overselling the potential economic value of it, while underselling the technological difficulties involved. That's understandable since they need investors, but I will remain skeptical of the whole enterprise for a long time.
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Jan 14, 2016 17:40
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Deteriorata posted:In a lot of cases it depends on the metal. Most valuable rare metals are also soft and dense, rendering them useless for any construction purposes. Nobody's going to build skyscrapers or jet airplanes out of platinum or iridium no matter how cheap they are. They're just not suitable for the task. There are relatively few situations when some engineer has lamented that rare element X would be perfect for his construction job if only it weren't so expensive. Platinum has an enormous number of potential uses that it's currently just too damned expensive to use for (or at least, so damned expensive it makes those things very costly): fuel cell generators, mass production of hydrogen, targeted anti-tumor drugs, medical devices, fiber-optics. The other platinum group metals can either be used similarly, or usefully added to platinum to give it more useful material properties.
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Jan 14, 2016 18:26
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I'm not going to discount the fact that an abundance of platinum group metals would increase their practical applications, but bear in mind that the catalytic and most other useful properties of e.g. platinum are interface or surface effects, and therefore do not necessarily depend much on the price of bulk platinum. In your list, the applications with the highest platinum load are fuel cells / hydrolysis catalysts, and even there the cost of platinum, while not insignificant, is not a major component of cost. Automotive fuel cells typically have 100g of Platinum at most, and realistically closer to 30-50g, which is ~ $1-3k, not majorly significant to the overall cost of a fuel cell vehicle. For hydrolysis, the overwhelming component of the cost is, by far, the thermodynamically required energy. Where platinum or other rare metal thin films have useful optical, electronic, or magnetic properties, they are already used without much hesitation, and do not present a cost barrier due to the extremely low quantities required.
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Jan 14, 2016 20:13
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I think mining water and setting up a system to refuel, boost and maintain satellites makes more sense as a first step. All else being equal mining water ought to be easier than metals and it'll have a knock-on effect on basically everything else we want to do out there. It's still massively complicated and requires so much technology we don't have yet - but it would be useful and valuable and something we can build on.
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Jan 14, 2016 20:22
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I agree that asteroid mining as a means of obtaining materials for use in space makes a lot more sense than mining for terrestrial return.
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Jan 14, 2016 20:27
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CombatInformatiker posted:2.) Asteroid mining for use on Earth will not instantly crash prices for the same reasons that opening up a new conventional mine does not instantly crash prices. I have no clue where people (I'm not refering to you) get this ludicrous idea from, but for some reason they seem to think that mining asteroids will depress prices to a point where asteroid mining is no longer profitable – as if the seller of asteroid-mined materials were unable to set a lower bound on the price. To quote Charles Babbage, "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." If there's one asteroid mining company/state. But look at the oil industry today, everyone invested a ton while prices are high, and they find themselves continuing to operate those projects even if the project as a whole is no longer profitable because the marginal costs are still below the price of oil. If a handful of companies are able to complete asteroid mining projects within a few years of each other, they may find themselves in the same situation.
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Jan 14, 2016 21:11
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Morbus posted:I'm not going to discount the fact that an abundance of platinum group metals would increase their practical applications, but bear in mind that the catalytic and most other useful properties of e.g. platinum are interface or surface effects, and therefore do not necessarily depend much on the price of bulk platinum. In your list, the applications with the highest platinum load are fuel cells / hydrolysis catalysts, and even there the cost of platinum, while not insignificant, is not a major component of cost. Automotive fuel cells typically have 100g of Platinum at most, and realistically closer to 30-50g, which is ~ $1-3k, not majorly significant to the overall cost of a fuel cell vehicle. For hydrolysis, the overwhelming component of the cost is, by far, the thermodynamically required energy.
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Jan 14, 2016 21:32
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Saint Fu posted:Platinum is used in huge quantities in oil refining processes, primarily in the improvement of gasoline octane and production of plastics precursors. But again that's for chemical catalysis. For that you want surface area, not mass. A little goes a long way. The cost of the platinum for catalysis is a minuscule part of the total cost of the gasoline or plastics. Reducing the cost of platinum 100-fold won't have any impact on the product cost.
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Jan 14, 2016 23:46
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Looking at today's mineral consumption rates as a model for our mineral consumption rates after we've increased mineral supply by an order of magnitude (or possibly much more) is really not a great approach. How many products and ideas were strangled in their infancy due to a lack of affordable access to uncommon elements? This question is impossible to answer.
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Jan 15, 2016 03:43
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:If there's one asteroid mining company/state. But look at the oil industry today, everyone invested a ton while prices are high, and they find themselves continuing to operate those projects even if the project as a whole is no longer profitable because the marginal costs are still below the price of oil. If a handful of companies are able to complete asteroid mining projects within a few years of each other, they may find themselves in the same situation. The price of oil was artificially inflated through a cartel. When the cartel collapsed, so did the price of oil. The same happened to potash in 2013. Asteroid mining is no different in this regard than any other commodity production with high investment costs. I'm not saying that the price of platinum couldn't collapse like that of oil, but that there's no reason to think that asteroid mining will do that any more than opening a new mine on Earth.
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Jan 15, 2016 08:50
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Humans constructing an orbital industrial chain is a big dream of mine. Asteroids is a good first step but like Anosmoman says mining water is probably the biggest priority since it's one of the most expensive materials to bring into space. Mining actual materials and bringing them down would be important though because resource scarcities will only intensify over the next hundred years but an industrial chain capable of constructing the landing vehicles for these materials in space would increase efficiency and reduce pollution on Earth, mining rare earths is incredible dirty. Increasing efficiency in production and power generation while reducing pollution would be the biggest advantage in the long term from an abundancy of these materials.
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Jan 15, 2016 09:12
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Demiurge4 posted:Humans constructing an orbital industrial chain is a big dream of mine. Asteroids is a good first step but like Anosmoman says mining water is probably the biggest priority since it's one of the most expensive materials to bring into space. Mining actual materials and bringing them down would be important though because resource scarcities will only intensify over the next hundred years but an industrial chain capable of constructing the landing vehicles for these materials in space would increase efficiency and reduce pollution on Earth, mining rare earths is incredible dirty. Increasing efficiency in production and power generation while reducing pollution would be the biggest advantage in the long term from an abundancy of these materials. It would be funny to have space transports that are essentially glorified heat shields with enough engine to point them at a particular desert/island and that just get handed out to whoever wants the scrap metal for free once you've unloaded the cargo 
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Jan 15, 2016 09:53
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Morbus posted:I'm not going to discount the fact that an abundance of platinum group metals would increase their practical applications, but bear in mind that the catalytic and most other useful properties of e.g. platinum are interface or surface effects, and therefore do not necessarily depend much on the price of bulk platinum. In your list, the applications with the highest platinum load are fuel cells / hydrolysis catalysts, and even there the cost of platinum, while not insignificant, is not a major component of cost. Automotive fuel cells typically have 100g of Platinum at most, and realistically closer to 30-50g, which is ~ $1-3k, not majorly significant to the overall cost of a fuel cell vehicle. For hydrolysis, the overwhelming component of the cost is, by far, the thermodynamically required energy. GM sold 9.9 million vehicles in 2014. If these were all hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and the price of platinum crashed to nothing, then by your own numbers GM would reduce manufacturing costs by $9.9 - $29.7 billion dollars a year. $1,000 - $3,000 worth of platinum in a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is equal to about 3-9% of the average price paid for a new vehicle today. Those numbers don't look insignificant to me at all, and that's a single application in a single company.
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Jan 15, 2016 12:06
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Deteriorata posted:But again that's for chemical catalysis. For that you want surface area, not mass. A little goes a long way.
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Jan 15, 2016 15:15
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OtherworldlyInvader posted:GM sold 9.9 million vehicles in 2014. If these were all hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and the price of platinum crashed to nothing, then by your own numbers GM would reduce manufacturing costs by $9.9 - $29.7 billion dollars a year. $1,000 - $3,000 worth of platinum in a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is equal to about 3-9% of the average price paid for a new vehicle today. Those numbers don't look insignificant to me at all, and that's a single application in a single company. How much is the platinum required in every car's catalytic convertor for the past couple decades worth? Seems like a smarter way to measure realistic price reductions.
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Jan 15, 2016 16:18
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Morbus posted:Where platinum or other rare metal thin films have useful optical, electronic, or magnetic properties, they are already used without much hesitation, and do not present a cost barrier due to the extremely low quantities required. A lot of people who write hysterical articles about the scarcity of materials used in microelectronics do not understand this. The amount is really small. Solar cells are slightly different because they necessarily must be large area devices and not tiny chips because unconcentrated sunlight isn't very energy dense, but still the amount of material used is not that much. I think the people who write the hysterical articles are thinking that the material inputs to making a computer chip or surface mount capacitor are the same as building a car or a bridge or a nuclear power plant or something.
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Jan 15, 2016 17:31
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OtherworldlyInvader posted:GM sold 9.9 million vehicles in 2014. If these were all hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and the price of platinum crashed to nothing, then by your own numbers GM would reduce manufacturing costs by $9.9 - $29.7 billion dollars a year. $1,000 - $3,000 worth of platinum in a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is equal to about 3-9% of the average price paid for a new vehicle today. Those numbers don't look insignificant to me at all, and that's a single application in a single company. You're making two big assumptions - that platinum would be literally free, and that all of GM's vehicles would utilize it in such high quantities. There's always going to be a cost of transporting the material, and I suspect that alone is going to cut into your "$10 billion savings" quite heavily.
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Jan 15, 2016 18:02
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OtherworldlyInvader posted:GM sold 9.9 million vehicles in 2014. If these were all hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and the price of platinum crashed to nothing, then by your own numbers GM would reduce manufacturing costs by $9.9 - $29.7 billion dollars a year. $1,000 - $3,000 worth of platinum in a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is equal to about 3-9% of the average price paid for a new vehicle today. Those numbers don't look insignificant to me at all, and that's a single application in a single company. I never said it would be insignificant, and, again I don't want to discount the obvious fact that abundant platinum would surely in some way increase technological applications of that metal. $1-3k per vehicle is obviously significant from a business point of view, since its a few percentage points off the final vehicle cost. But a $1-3k drop in price per vehicle is not going to dramatically change what kind of cars we all drive. Fuel cell technology faces a lot of barriers to adoption right now, and the price of platinum is not a major contributor to those barriers. Same goes for most catalyst applications: If there are presently some barriers to widespread adoption of a Pt catalyst process, dropping the price of Pt is not likely to change that. My broader point is that the bulk properties of Pt are, as far as most people know today, not exceptional. The applications of platinum generally involve surface/interface effects, or its incorporation into thin films/nanostructures. For these applications, the overall cost is not super sensitive to the cost of platinum. Meaning that the difference between today's platinum prices and free platinum for everyone would be welcome but undramatic price reductions, not order-of-magnitude price drops that fundamentally transform what applications are feasible. There is always the obvious caveat that, when something super scarce becomes abundant, new applications may arise that nobody even bothered to consider before because lol at making a structural alloy with 40% platinum by weight. Anywaym I was mainly responding to the post saying that existing applications like water hydrolisis or fuel cells might see much greater adoption. I really can't think of any obvious blockbuster applications of bulk platinum. It's loving heavy, with unexceptional mechanical properties other than its ductility. Its corrosion resistance is often complicated by its catalytic properties. It does not have particularly interesting electrical or optical properties. The magnetic properties of Pt alloys are very useful for some applications (magnetic recording films in HDDs are ~50% Pt and Ru by weight), but for bulk magnets they outclassed by other materials. I'm sure there is something that would benefit from cheap bulk platinum, but its not obvious. I guess if a suitably hardened Pt alloy could be made, it might exhibit good high temperature properties for turbine blades or something? Although Rh or Ir or other metals might be better, and the ductility and catalytic properties of Pt might be problems so I dunno
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Jan 15, 2016 19:01
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Well, asteroid mining can target other materials such as the Ir you mentioned. One bonus effect from making raw materials cheaper would be watching libertarian gold hoarders' heads explode as the price of their limited-availability rock solid wealth store drops like a rock and listening to the jewelry industry squirming as it tries to soften the blow from shifting to some previously uninteresting metal and pretending it has always been super rare and valued.
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Jan 15, 2016 20:06
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blowfish posted:listening to the jewelry industry squirming as it tries to soften the blow from shifting to some previously uninteresting metal and pretending it has always been super rare and valued. Diamonds are not rare at all and it's been possible for a long time now to create synthetic ones that are of a quality and purity in excess of natural ones. Hasn't slowed the gem industry much. Marketing is powerful.
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Jan 15, 2016 20:15
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Phanatic posted:Diamonds are not rare at all and it's been possible for a long time now to create synthetic ones that are of a quality and purity in excess of natural ones. Hasn't slowed the gem industry much. Marketing is powerful. ~natural~ ~earth~ gold, the new trend for rich hipsters
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Jan 15, 2016 20:54
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