Killer Asteroids and Manna from Heaven: psst! c'mer! I gotta steal of a deal for ya!

From spacedaily.com,

A space rock capable of sub-continent scale devastation has about a one in 1,000 risk of colliding with Earth early next century, the highest of any known asteroid, watchers said on Thursday.

The rock, 2004 VD17, is about 500 metres (yards) long and has a mass of nearly a billion tonnes, which - if it were to impact - would deliver 10,000 megatonnes of energy, equivalent to all the world's nuclear weapons.

ok ok ok

But as George Thorogood says, "let me slide it on you people" (again, ok ok ok, I know I am grossly misquoting the Dawg and taking it way out of context, but that is how I have always heard it and interpreted it and I like that turn of phrase!)

There are approximately 40,000 known asteroids of 1 kilometer in size (that's eight times the size of the killer asteroid mentioned above for you non-scientists). About 7% are mostly iron-nickel with a strong presence of the valuable platinum metal group.

That's almost 3000 (known) mother lodes, each with billions of tons of the raw ore needed to make steel.

and from worldsteel.org

World crude steel production for the 61 countries reporting to the International Iron and Steel Institute was 94.7 million metric tons (mmt) in January. This is 5.0% higher than for the same month of 2005.

For those following my China monologue, China accounts for 30% of that production

Billions of tons of ore per asteroid. Three thousand of them. All to feed an annual steel market measured in the millions of tons.

Wanna get rich?

I prefer to think of it as the beginning of the Thousand Years of Peace associated with the Second Coming.