Comment on Gold
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 7 hours agowill 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.
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
wabasso@lemmy.ca 6 hours ago
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.
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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.
Eheran@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
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.
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 44 minutes ago
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