Gold actually is worthless but humanity has decided it has value. Whats actually valuable is food, water, housing, mental peace, low stress, moral standards etc.
Gold is a actually extremely useful, and has a ton of practical applications where it’s not used because of cost. Diamonds, which are supposedly abundant in asteroids, and quite plentiful on earth, on the other hand, can be manufactured in tool grade cheaply, and gem grade can be made for about $300/carat.
Yeah it’s super useful for semiconductors
It’s a good conductor, doesn’t corrode easily.
Gold price would lower until it’s the same price as it costs to mine and bring it to earth, if that’s at all lower than whatever it’s currently.
Not if I get to it first
And that’s exactly what every billionaire is thinking.
godspeed brownsugga
Blessings to you
On all that is Holy. That would be a helluvah strong astronaut name. I’d be like, “That’s my astronaut.”
It’s funny that people think the wealth from asteroid mining will trickle down.
If anything, it seems like an opportunity for billionaires to have indentured servants who are stuck in outer space mining until their term is up. That’s probably some of the reason they have been investing so heavily in prisons.
Oi, beltalowda
You may think that you are scared. But you are not. That is your sharpness. That’s your power. We are Belters. Nothing in the world is foreign to us. The place we go is the place we belong. This is no different. No one has more right to this. None more prepared. Inulada go through the ring. Call it there own. But a Belter opened it. We are The Belt. We are strong. We are sharp and we don’t feel fear. This moment belongs to us. For Beltalowada!
Given none of the supply chain and infrastructure to support mining and retrieval exists, it would need to be researched and constructed. That money would be invested in the market and flood down for tooling, manufacturing and manpower.
Once you have the rock, you’ll need to process it into usable materials.
Low price gold flooding the market may be bad short term, but there are processes that will benefit from cheap gold in manufacturing. The market will stabilize.
It is more than just magicing the rock to someone’s bank account in liquid currency. There is a lot of money they will have to put in up front before they would see a financial return.
In today’s age they’ll fill 95% of that supply chain with robots and automation. Even if it’s 40% less effective at retrieving the material, that will still probably result in better overall profit margins.
The one thing capitalism has proven to be excellent at innovating is wealth extraction. Giving more to one person in every way possible. By the time we have this infrastructure built blue collar workers will be largely redundant.
It happened to my industry (broadcast television)
It happened to my father’s industry (animation)
It happened to my step father’s industry (biotech)
It happened to my brother’s industry (manufacturing)
My sister and brother in law just saw their industries stop receiving funding (librarian and environmental scientist)
Don’t count on new fields creating news jobs anymore. That’s the way of the old world.
Whatever benefits having more gold would bring will only be given to the ultra wealthy who control that gold. Even if it brings the cost of phones down by 15% it won’t make a difference in how much the average person struggles. In fact, the resources consumed in retrieving and processing the gold will probably end up hurting most of our cost of living.
We need to work on our social sciences before any other science can bring anyone real benefit anymore…
We need to work on our social sciences before any other science can bring anyone real benefit anymore…
Well said. I have associate degrees only in Bio/Chem, and I was going to keep going but… why? To work for an evil pharmaceutical company? To work in the shitty corporate cannabis industry? To advise rich assholes on how to cut down our national forests in a way which makes it appear like it’s not the end of the world?
The only STEM career I’ve found which seems guaranteed to be ethical is the people who do wildlife surveys, finding endangered bees and whatnot to block bullshit luxury real estate. But going through all that education to aim for a single, specific, probably-not-very-common position doesn’t seem very smart.
And where do you think the majority of the wealth is going to be concentrated? Or do you think everyone on Earth will magically become a billionaire?
But mining makes everyone rich, right? Right?
Being rich isn’t having wealth. It’s keeping what has value away from anyone else.
Being rich means having a surplus of valuable commodities and capital.
In a modern capitalist system, the commodities are fetishized in order to inflate their received value.
But in a more socialized system, shared capital has the capacity to enrich everyone.
The big catch is that, under a more socialist economy existing in parallel with a capitalist media, poverty becomes associated with the public institutions while capitalism becomes indicative of education, independence, and success.
An individual might be wealthy with respect to historical peers under a socialist model, but still feel improvised relative to the elites and their horded private wealth. That they’ve got access to libraries and parks and subways and public housing doesn’t feel like wealth relative to the country clubbers who have more grandeous private versions of all of the above.
You’ll see this in Western depictions of Soviet states all the time. Small apartments, bread lines, and grumpy bureaucrats are slanted as rampant poverty. Meanwhile, homelessness and malnutrition and the lawless frontier are all just part of the Hero’s Journey on the way to glory.
It’s probably both. I wouldn’t call your friendly security guard wealthy.
#dontlookup
Great movie. I have a lot of friends in scientific community, I swear all of them have had a #dontlookup moment in their life
Hey, I’m game! Oversaturate the gold market and those at the top (including governments) would instantly be knocked down to regular people’s level financially!
That being said, if this ever happened, there would be new laws and standards implemented immediately in order for nothing to change… The game is rigged. If the top 1% begin to lose, they just change the rules…
I mean, they’d switch value systems. They’ve already done that by making “debt” as the unit of value.
No, that would make a few people incomprehensible wealthy while everyone else starved.
That’s where we currently stand.
Any way you slice it gold would be less-valuable.
Asteroid mining is good for resource gathering, not accumulation of wealth. And even then it’s much more useful for resource gathering for use in space than on Earth. If you can launch once, then mine, process, and use the resources without having to do more launches and landings it’s much more efficient. Then you’d start manufacturing in space to further reduce the amount of required launches.
It all depends on property rights and ownership. If few people hoard and control all of the resources and means of production that make the resources like gold valuable, they will continue to profit. Everyone else’s standard of living will continue to plummet in their efforts to control more markets (through wars, embargoes, trade agreements, etc.) and squeeze out the greatest amount of profits from everything and everyone.
Until property relations change, the property-less (and I don’t mean a single family homes….i mean machines and resources that create wealth) will continue to struggle to greater and greater degrees across the world.
More likely - whichever billionaire mined it (well, funded the mining anyway) would hoard it off the market to keep the value high and make them richer.
“The mine owners did not find the gold asteroid, they did not mine the gold asteroid, they did not mill the gold asteroid, but by some weird alchemy all the gold from the asteroid belonged to them!”
Bill Haywood
Exactly what they did with diamonds.
Until we got synthetic diamonds
The natural ones are still dug up by slaves and sold for a fortune, for some evil reason.
Because the people who can afford them love how they were obtained by putting the “rabble” in their place.
Everyone “being a billionaire” and having a huge pile of worthless metal won’t increase anyone’s standard of living to the same degree as nobody being a billionaire and nobody hoarding resources.
will there be advantages for daily life if gold is trivially affordable? probably, it’s a good material for many applications. and is extremely rust resistant.
Coating all exposed metals with gold would be trivial.
[Skip a few paragraphs of technical world building. ]
it’ll be an increments tech step without any changes in inequality and a minor change in the public quality of life.
If you coat steel with gold and there is even the tiniest scratch/void/… it will extremely accelerate the rusting. Galvanic corrosion is no joke. That’s why you use zinc for the job.
The chemistry behind that is magic to me.
Although I hope my assumption that there are so many applications for cheap gold is likely true, I’m assuming you’ll be able to come up with more uses
I think it’d be more than incremental. Any place used use copper could likely have the gold upgrade. That’s all your wiring in your house and the EV market, maybe plumbing, heat pumps, and electronics too.
The headache would be all the power grabs (durrr it landed near my country so it’s mine) and the capitalist machine taking forever for the means of manufacturing to lower the cost of finished goods via genuine competition.
I miss being naive and thinking “technology will save us”. But technology advancement without social progress only leads to the entrenchment of unjust systems.
All those tech and infrastructure sectors will improve, but whatever possible quality of life improvement will be compensated by worse socioeconomic divide.
I’m tempted to tell about a science fiction book where that happens (not with gold asteroids but other tech) I’m currently writing that chapter, although the metaphor in my version is more obvious: Its a generation oNeil cylinder in a multicentury journey, originally set as a solarpunk utopia, it has degraded after a century and now they have heavy industries sapping energy that was meant for lighting and heating. That results in regular frosts and the poor struggling while those who can afford it can get electric heating (sapping more energy). The individualistic solution works for an individual but makes things worse for all and only benefits those wealthy who live in another part of the cylinder that’s unaffected by the energy drain.
I take your point that tech advancement without social progress can go awry. Automation replacing jobs at too rapid a pace feels like a very real threat to me right now. Maybe I’m biased by the last century where tech either lessened inequality or at least raised the standard of living for everyone, even if disproportionately applied across the population.
But yeah since tech advancement is accelerating, it seems more likely society will be unable to keep up.
it’s insane, how automation is a threat. under and sane society it’ll be seen as a good thing. why do those things if we don’t have to… wait, we set up our entire civilization so individual productivity is tied to your inherent right to life? WHY TF DID WE DO THAT??? just so the most unproductive people can cheat the system and live like gods.
It’s funny that people can understand every person having a lump of gold won’t improve their standard of living, but at the same time refuse to understand that owning a piece of a factory or a company they work at also does not directly change the standard of living. Reducing the fraction of the factory output that goes to the owners instead of the workers could. This can be done directly with raising the minimum wage or indirectly via taxes. But in the end, even the most pessimistic calculation I was able to make on how much the owners take was only about 50% of the output. Probably more like 30%.
So the billionaires owning too much is IMO a distraction. Pushing politicians to implement policies that would improve quality of life would have much bigger impact on peoples lives. Consumer protections, walkable cities, good public healthcare, social safety nets, better education, reforming how stock market works, … And it does not involve the massive risks of trying to switch to a differwnt economic model that always collapsed before.
Perhaps it’s the modern obsession with fairness. People don’t want to even consider that in reality they may have better quality of life in an unfair system (where billionaire kids get everything on silver platter) than in a fair system. Because in reality, system change, fending off corruption, laziness, authoritarianism, etc. have large costs.
Why do we even need owners in the first place? We don’t need to be beholden to the borgeousie and have a class that owns the means of production and gets rich off the labor of others while all they have to do is spend their money and not do any work.
Like employee owned businesses can be a thing.
It’s not like we’d have to upend our whole society, just change how employees are compensated, give them some equity in the company they work for and bring up individual incomes. Also tax the ever loving fuck out of profits (or revenue it’s arguable which is better) after a certain threshold so the only way to get more money is to reinvest and grow the business. Same with individual wealth taxes.
Nobody needs to be a billionaire. Companies don’t need to constantly push their profit up quarter after quarter. We don’t need to be beholden to the shareholders just because they have a bunch of money and own stock, we should be the shareholders ourselves.
We need solutions to issues like capital allocation, keeping money circulation speed relatively constant and many many more. Capitalism is one solution to these problems. Perhaps not the best one, but the only one we know can work.
Capitalism is the cause of those problems. Last I checked the people hoarding money in off shore accounts weren’t exactly keeping money circulation speed constant. Well, perhaps constantly zero in that case.
owning a piece of a factory or a company they work at also does not directly change the standard of living. Reducing the fraction of the factory output that goes to the owners instead of the workers could.
Would workers owning the company not reduce this fraction to zero?
It would. Eliminating the HR would reduce the overhead from HR to zero. Eliminating the tax office would reduce money spent on that to zero. But these things fulfill a function. Could it be done better? Maybe. But why risk on maybes when that’s not the biggest problem we have with society at all. Not even in the top 10 if you ask me.
The people just getting paid just for owning something don’t seem to be contributing anything useful, and they’re using that wealth to make bad long-term decisions on our behalf. We can’t fix all the other stuff without the power to do so.
You say that like we’re not trying to push politicians for walkable cities and healthcare and stock market reforms. Guess who hates all that stuff?
Because they are not gonna hate losing their ownership of the companies even more? Like it’s still significantly easier to push for reforms than completely toppling the economic system.
I don’t think we need to topple the system to make progress. But they can’t keep that wealth and power if we intend to live in a better world. Letting rich people write policy is a bit like letting the fox guard the henhouse. I’m not saying off with their heads, but we should set a practical cap on how much one person can own and at a minimum overturn Citizens United.
I am skeptical about a cap, but the rest is definitely true. Letting them have too much influence on policy is the issue.
Lmfao the billionaires are why we can’t have nice things, they put their finger on the scale all the time for their own benefit.
True… There are lots of billionaires in Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Argentina
This would be useful for tech reasons I think. Isn’t gold a better conductor than copper?
Nah, copper has better conductivity. Gold is better with corrosion resistance and it doesn’t char when making contact. That’s why it’s used to plate terminal contacts, like the ends of hdmi plugs, and switch contacts. Silver is the best.
The biggest value of this meteor is not gold it’s iridium and ironically it’s what we need to explore more other planets because iridium melting point is way higher. Also high precision electronics needs it
De Beers has entered the chat
If you actually love your SO you need to save up 2 years salary for a ring.
At least everything would be covered in gold then. Electronics would be cheaper too.
They’d be cheaper to make.
Then we kill all the billionaires and then they’re cheaper to have
With gold bullets and a gold guillotine. I think they would like that.
Gold plated isn’t actually hard I think I could to that in my bathtub but would it hold an edge?
Best I can do is a can of krylon
Maybe the blade would have to be replaced on every use, but the weight would still do its job.
… actually, maybe the blade wouldn’t even need to be replaced.
I’ll believe you I don’t kn9w about this stuff I think I sharpened a kitchen knife once and my dad was making me he said I did a bad job and I tried to use that knife later I think he was being too nice
i suppose i could duck it, but is gold more conductive than copper or silver? i thought gold was used because it resists oxidation but not because of its conductivity.
edit: yeah so tldr my hunch was right. but they’re all pretty similar in conductivity.
https://www.samaterials.com/blog/top-10-metal-conductors-of-electricity.html
yeah, after impact, quite evenly. last time it happened, it was called iridium anomaly. there’s not that much gold in electronics and other platinum group metals are more useful from material engineering perspective
There is no much specifically because it is expensive.
there’s not much because it can be plated real thin and more is not necessary
The accountant vs the engineer
? Gold would be a big upgrade over copper
Would it? Perhaps it wouldn’t oxidise as fast, but copper is more conductive.
yes for corrosion resistance and ductility. no for hardness, electrical and heat conductivity. you can’t use gold or its compounds as catalysts where copper makes sense
For what? Gold is a shit conductor compared to copper.
You are wrong , Fry-man
It’s not shit, it’s top 3 behind silver and copper. But those oxidize and gold doesn’t. So a gold coated silver core is what you want.
I stand corrected. Idk why I thought it was a better conductor
Gold coating for connectors is nice. For everything else it doesn’t really matter, you get an oxide layer that prevents further oxidation.
It has ~70% the conductivity of pure copper, it’s not “shit”
But think of the gold cable connectors.
Monster Cable would have to find a new, useless luxury connection material. Platinum plated HDMI with carbon fiber strain relief boots.
All “rate” metals are pretty common in space. Hell, all the lithium we’re gathering is from asteroids falling on earth.
The most rare material in the universe is … Wood.
And common sense
Common sense is like deodorant, the people who need it most don’t use it.
