I am a mining engineer with experience in iron, nickel, and now gold projects in the Australian outback. Mining is a process that we all accept happens to create items that we all use in our everyday lives. We are for the most part ignorant of what is actually required to produce enough gold to make a ring for your finger. I will explain the mind-boggling scale of the machinery, explosives, and processing to get what can be an entirely underwhelming amount of pure material out of the ground. When we are required to move millions of tonnes of waste for less than a single kilo of gold, mining an asteroid starts to look like a very attractive option. We have begun to automate the process of mining on earth, but these processes are highly dependent on gravity. What level of automation do we have? How could these processes be modified for a micro-gravity environment to be effective? Are there different technologies that could be used to mine the almost entirely metallic extraterrestrial objects? Is there a more effective way that we may not have considered?