[meteorite-list] Total Number of Meteorites?

From: Darren Garrison <cynapse_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed Dec 7 11:28:00 2005
Message-ID: <2p2ep1pebb5eeutptbpdh61vjoij9chtom_at_4ax.com>

On Wed, 7 Dec 2005 15:39:25 +0100, "Martin Altmann" <altmann_at_meteorite-martin.de> wrote:

>It's amazing also with the ordinary desert stuff. If you are not living near
>a desert, blue ice field or a site, where once a meteorite was found, you
>can get out of the door and run around for the rest of your life with your
>detector, you'll find gold and silver, but no meteorite. And this stuff you
>can buy cheaper now than many other consumer goods! So cheap, that some
>hunters even let their chondrites in desert, as the transportation costs
>wouldn't justify to pick them up.

We have two different meanings of "value", though. One meaning is "the cost of all materials and
labor plus a small profit". The other is "how much someone is willing to pay for it". As an
example, take the very common iPod. I'm sure that, looking at all the components involved, the
production of a $400 iPod probably costs around $300 or so at least. So obviously it wouldn't make
sense for them to sell one for lower than that price (unless it was a "give away the razor sell the
blades" or some other loss-leader situation). I wouldn't mind having an iPod. But I wouldn't pay
more than $100 for one that has the features of the $400 models. That doesn't mean that I'm unaware
of what the production costs of an iPod must be. I simply don't value an iPod at more than $100.
Now, I'm not going to get a $400 iPod for $100 because Apple has millions of people willing to pay
$400. But what if they ran out of people willing to buy an iPod but still had millions of them in
stock? Sooner or later, they'd sell me one for $100 to get rid of it.

It looks like the meteorite situation is similar to that now. You could go out into the deserts of
Morocco yourself, spend several thousand dollars in supplies, and come back with a couple of small
unclassified ordinary chondrites for your trouble. But nobody is going to be willing to pay you the
hundreds of dollars a gram in cost for those pieces, even though that is your cost for getting (the
"value") of the pieces. The supply of "ordinary" bulk unclassified NWA meteorites is larger than
the demand from the number of collectors, so sellers are having to give those
$400-iPod-for-$100-prices.
Received on Wed 07 Dec 2005 11:32:19 AM PST