Are any of the rocks/dust from the moon or any planets used in day-to-day life? Do think they will be in future?

Question: Are any of the rocks/dust from the moon or any planets used in day-to-day life? Do think they will be in future?
- Keywords:
  dust,
  moon,
  rock
Asked by balletshoes1998 to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 16 Mar 2012.
- Leila Battison answered on 16 Mar 2012:
  
  So far, we’ve only been able to bring back rocks from the moon. These are just like the rocks on earth only with less water in them. So they are intersting to scientists but not much use to most people.
  
  Some meteorites that fall naturally to earth tell us about the rocks that make up mars and the asteroids. It looks as though many asteroids have lots of rare elements on them that we use in computers and phones, so maybe if we run out of them on earth, we can mine them from the asteroids!
- Adam Stevens answered on 16 Mar 2012:
  
  No way!
  
  The rocks we have from the moon are worth incredible amounts of money. Apparently there was a bit of a black market for them and lots have gone missing from the warehouse in america where the apollo rocks were stored. I also heard a story about a guy that got some for his research but ground them down and rolled around on his bed in the dust like some kind of mad evil villain. But that might be made up.
  
  We don’t have any rocks from other planets apart from meteorites from Mars. The recent mars meteorite was selling for about $100,000 just for 1kg! So I doubt that will find its way out into day-to-day life!
- Karen Masters answered on 18 Mar 2012:
  
  They’re quite rare right now, so we don’t use them for anything other than to study the planets and the solar system.
  
  I have read about ideas to mine the Moon or asteroids in the future. I’ll be interested to see if that ever happens.
- Nazim Bharmal answered on 19 Mar 2012:
  
  We don’t use the moon right now for anything commercial on in day-to-day life apart from science.
  
  But people have the idea to mine for a particular kind of helium (which is rare on Earth) and that we think is common on the moon: Helium 3. We can use that helium for nuclear reactors, and then we probably would never run out of fuel again.
- Catherine Rix answered on 20 Mar 2012:
  
  I’d love to have some Mars rocks to use in my work. At the moment I have to use Mars analogue rocks. These are rocks collected from places on Earth that have something in common with what we think rocks on Mars will be like.