It’s funny that people think the wealth from asteroid mining will trickle down.
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.
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.
Don’t look up.
I have to think of ‘don’t look up’ now.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
You say that like we’re not trying to push politicians for walkable cities and healthcare and still market reforms. Guess who hates all that stuff?
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.
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?
True… There are lots of billionaires in Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Argentina
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.
So they agree the universe has abundant resources and the ultra wealthy on earth are just resource hoarders who don’t want to share those resources which directly causes poverty.
We should take all of the world’s billionaires, load them into Bezos’ dick rocket and send them in the general direction of this asteroid.
No, that would make a few people incomprehensible wealthy while everyone else starved.
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.
That’s where we currently stand.
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.
FWIW this isn’t true, the $700 quintillion figure was an estimate of the total metal value (most of which would be iron) based on the asteroid being similar in composition to nickel-iron meteorites. As it happens we actually think it’s a fair bit rockier than that these days. There’d still be vast amounts of metal there but less than initially thought and it would be harder to mine and process with the extra rock.
Also the estimate was just multiplying the mass of each metal by its current market price, which isn’t how any of this works anyway.
Gold is already worthless, main purpose of gold is that its shiny and pretty, less than 1% of gold mined gets used for electronics and stuff. The rest ist accessoires. The only reason gold costs something is because people think that it is worth something.
Gold does have practical value. It doesn’t oxidize or tarnish at standard temperature and pressure, it is soft enough to beat into shape with a hammer and it can be rolled out incredibly thinly. If it were as common as iron, we would see it used everywhere. Gold sewer pipes, gold roofing, even gold foil to wrap your sandwich.
If I remember correctly, even its conductivity is higher than copper. Maybe in an alternative reality, we’d be using gold cables
It’s not, but its main benefit is that it didn’t tarnish or corrode. Copper is the second must conductive metal, with silver actually being the first.
Gold plated contacts are fairly common on various cables and plugs, it doesn’t take much gold.
Used a LOT for connections in spacecraft and satellites because of its high conductivity/no corrosion properties
Welp, time to crash that meteor into the Earth, right?
I could see them attaching rockets to it to try this. Or maybe move it into earth orbit to mine it.
If they brought it to the surface what happens when it goes through the atmosphere? Does gold “burn”?
Does gold “burn”? Not in the common sense, but it can both melt and vaporise (at about 1000 C and 3000 C respectively). It can also form stable oxides, and is probably more likely to do so when condensing from a liquid or vapour state mixed with air. So the answer is twofold: A lot of the gold would melt vaporise before precipitating as very fine particles that are spread with the wind, while an amount of it would likely form oxides in the process. The result would be a bunch of gold and gold oxide dust spread over a vast area, probably taking years before all of it reaches the ground.
Not if that size is accurate. gold price at 10^5 EUR/kg, a quintillion being 10^18, makes 10^13 kilos, at ~20000 kilos per cubic metre 5*10^8 cubic metres, or a block of 1000x1000x500 meters (~ sphere of 1km diameter), and that’s only for a single quintillion, and assuming it’s all gold, no rock. Nothing of that size burns up on atmospheric entry
Thanks for doing the math. I was wondering if some portion of the gold burns off. Also does it kill us all on impact?
I just got home to use a proper calculator instead of estimating in my head, and with 700 quintillion (as per the screenshot / meme), and gold density less “roundabouted”, at 19000 kilos / cubic metre, this would be the same as a solid gold sphere of 8.9 kilometres in diameter (3rd root of 700 is 8.88 - and wow, my rough estimate of 1km for 1 quintillion was spot on! :)
And yes, that would absolutely be a planet killer asteroid. I don’t see how anything but primitive life forms on Earth could survive that: https://www.space.com/asteroid-apocalypse-how-big-can-humanity-survive
To be honest I don’t know (also not OP) but if the gold is one solid chunk there might be chance that it will function as a large enough heatsink that it wont “burn”… But then again it’s probably not just one chunk… So some of the outer layers might “burn” as you say, but the gold atoms are not lost. That would require a nuclear reaction… Instead some of that gold would turn into liquid, and some would turn into gas. In this state it might reach with other elements in the atmosphere, but if it doesn’t it will turn back into solid form again when it cools. In that case the result would be microscopic gold clumps spread over a huge area.
Motherboards used gold before. Recyclers make a good profit finding old motherboards just for the gold.
Many motherboards still use gold components.
Being shiny and pretty is the least worthless thing you can be
A lot of people live their entire lives only being shiny and pretty and have a pretty good go of it.
Yes, and you’re making my mental gears turn. The only reason gold is worth something is because some regulatory power says it’s worth something. As soon as they say it’s not worth something that will be the end. As for now, some thieves go to Costco with stolen credit cards and they buy thousands of dollars of gold bars to resell. 😡 For that and many other reasons, I think gold should be demoted to the worth of arid dirt.
Gold is a valuable catalyst in chemical industry, and has value as a very efficient conductor that is very malleable and corrosion resistant. Sure, most of its market value comes from people wanting to put it in jewellery and other decorations, but it’s objectively far, far, more valuable than most other materials.
Gold is more useful than copper or silver. If there were enough of it, it would be used as a coating because it doesn’t oxidize, and in connectors and wiring due to it’s low electrical resistance. It’s commercial value is the reason it became the monetary standard.
…Because that is how Capitalism works.
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.
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.
Look up a movie called “Don’t look up” which has a similar story regarding a situation like this. I’ll say human greed has no bounds.
To be fair, that movie was about climate change, not really the asteroid
Tim apple fucked us good.
