Thread:Talk:Mining Asteroids/Rubble Pile Variable for Mining Asteroids/reply

The trouble is that gold and platinum doesn't come in nuggets. Depending on the kind of asteroid, you could be looking at solar disk abundance of the elements. Which is to say you would need to process much larger amounts for a given quantity of gold. At best you could sort out metal grains from some asteroids, but you would then be looking at the same scale of processing to extract the valuable metals from the mostly iron and nickel grains.

We seem to have been extremely lucky to have geological processes that concentrated various metals on earth.