> Ceres does not currently have a space gas station on the surface.

Golly gee whittakers, really? I had no idea! Well that changes everything!

Obviously we'll need to build infrastructure. My point is that it's a worthwhile investment. You obviously seem to disagree, which is fine, but if all you're going to do is be needlessly condescending then this conversation is probably not worth continuing (but eh, it's a Sunday morning and I ain't got much else better to do, so why not? Happy to be condescending, too, if that's how you'd like to conduct this particular discussion).

> Also raw ore amounts don't mean anything without refining capacity. There's roughly zero of it currently anywhere off the surface of the Earth.

Golly gee whittakers, really? I had no idea! Well that changes everything!

> you'll spend billions to mine precious metals which will cease to be precious thus lose their monetary value.

Good. That's the whole point. These precious metals have vast industrial uses that are much more viable if they're, you know, not-so-precious. So what if the price of the metals themselves drops? The wealth you've created from these invigorated industrial processes will more than make up for it.

If you really did want to prevent this you can artificially restrict the supply, like diamond mines already do to keep diamond prices unnaturally high. I feel like that's pretty myopic, though.

> Kick up dust on an asteroid and it goes into orbit around it and takes potentially centuries to settle.

Then catch it, which is a thing, that you can do. The hard part is then putting that dust somewhere else (you'll probably want to compact it, and then put it back on or in the asteroid - tricky, but not impossible).

Or let it orbit free. Yeah, it's harsh on the equipment, but you can indeed build equipment to handle that (lunar and Mars missions already have to do this, albeit to a much lesser extent). I think you're overestimating the ability for that dust to really "orbit" anything besides the Sun; you do recall that asteroids have very very low escape velocities, right?

> That all just makes the venture more difficult and more expensive.

Which is offset at least somewhat by the lack of gravity making it much easier to dig tunnels (you don't have to worry nearly as much about structural supports) and get ore out of the asteroid (you're not fighting gravity).

> The differences between crossing the Sahara to find gold and looking for it in an asteroid are when you cross the Sahara there's air at the destination.

Golly gee whittakers, really? I had no idea! Well that changes everything!

> You can't really be taken seriously when you sort of hand wave the challenges doing anything in space.

Nowhere did I say that doing things in space is easy. All I'm saying is that they're possible and worthwhile to at least consider doing. You can't really be taken seriously when your only response boils down to "la la la YellowApple's stupid this will never work never mind the decades of research that has been done and continues to be done for this exact venture". Everything is "prohibitively" expensive until someone actually does it; I'm calling for us as a species to figure out how to do it, and a lot of the answers are right in front of us, and with some development can even be relatively affordable when considering the economic gain alone (let alone the scientific gain and the improved probability of our species surviving some catastrophe on Earth).

Like, if your main objection is "but but but it'll cost billions", we're already burning trillions in the US alone (public and private) on far more fruitless ventures. What have we got to lose by diverting some of those trillions to asteroid mining instead?

(To be clear, I don't expect you or anyone else to take me seriously, either. I don't even take me seriously. But I do have a select few strong beliefs, and the strongest of those beliefs is that humanity must expand on a permanent basis beyond Earth or else it is doomed to perish. It probably won't happen in my lifetime, but it absolutely must happen)