It’s funny that people think the wealth from asteroid mining will trickle down.
Gold
Submitted 13 hours ago by InterestingUsername@lemmy.ml to [deleted]
https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/54ea5830-bd1d-45ff-abfb-e9a55a8929bf.webp
Comments
JackbyDev@programming.dev 4 hours ago
NottaLottaOcelot@lemmy.ca 2 hours ago
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.
7101334@lemmy.world 16 minutes ago
Oi, beltalowda
Inucune@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Given none of the supply chain and infrastructure to support it 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 marketay 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.
thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
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 color 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.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 3 hours ago
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?
gnutrino@programming.dev 12 hours ago
More likely - whichever billionaire mined it would hoard it off the market to keep the value high and make them richer.
vapordays@leminal.space 34 minutes ago
“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
MithranArkanere@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Being rich isn’t having wealth. It’s keeping what has value away from anyone else.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
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.
rangber@lemmy.zip 5 hours ago
It’s probably both. I wouldn’t call your friendly security guard wealthy.
Dryad@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
No, that would make a few people incomprehensible wealthy while everyone else starved.
modus@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
That’s where we currently stand.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
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.
RosaLuxemburgsGhost@lemmy.ml 8 hours ago
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.
TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 hours ago
#dontlookup
BeUnique@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
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…
Maroon@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
I mean, they’d switch value systems. They’ve already done that by making “debt” as the unit of value.
snoons@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
At least everything would be covered in gold then. Electronics would be cheaper too.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
They’d be cheaper to make.
youcantreadthis@quokk.au 10 hours ago
Then we kill all the billionaires and then they’re cheaper to have
rain_enjoyer@sopuli.xyz 12 hours ago
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
Eheran@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
There is no much specifically because it is expensive.
Zwiebel@feddit.org 11 hours ago
? Gold would be a big upgrade over copper
swagmoney@lemmy.ca 7 hours ago
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.
melfie@lemmy.zip 8 hours ago
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.
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
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.
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
wabasso@lemmy.ca 4 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.
DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
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 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. Consumer protections, walkable cities, good public healthcare, … And it does not involve the massive risks of trying to switch to a differwnt economic model that always collapsed before.
LePoisson@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
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?
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
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.
tackleberry@thelemmy.club 7 hours ago
True… There are lots of billionaires in Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Argentina
sangeteria@lemmy.ml 3 hours ago
This would be useful for tech reasons I think. Isn’t gold a better conductor than copper?
godsammitdam@lemmy.zip 3 hours ago
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.
DarkSideOfTheMoon@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
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
Doom@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
De Beers has entered the chat
Tiral@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
If you actually love your SO you need to save up 2 years salary for a ring.
someguy3@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
But think of the gold cable connectors.
StupidBrotherInLaw@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Monster Cable would have to find a new, useless luxury connection material. Platinum plated HDMI with carbon fiber strain relief boots.
Ismay@programming.dev 7 hours ago
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.
Virtvirt588@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
enought to make everyone on earth billionaires
How very thoughtful. Hope the present billionaires dont accidentally hoard it.
yermaw@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
Naw the new quintillionaires will let everyone have a bit. The biggest change will be adjusting to the new ten-thousand-dollar menu.
myster0n@feddit.nl 10 hours ago
And minimum wage remains unchanged
Danquebec@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
More like the one-hundred-trillion-dollar menu.
Hupf@feddit.org 10 hours ago
MoffKalast@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
And it’s all yours 😊
sonofearth@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
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.
LuminousLuddite@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
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.
username_1@programming.dev 12 hours ago
Can we send Putin, Trump and a bunch of African tyrants (whatever their names are) there? I bet they would be glad.
jol@discuss.tchncs.de 11 hours ago
Yes, like everyone in Zimbabwe is a billionaire.
Rubanski@discuss.tchncs.de 10 hours ago
The so-called Zimbillionaires
gnutrino@programming.dev 7 hours ago
FWIW this isn’t true, the $700 quintillion figure was an estimate of the total metal value (most of which would be iron as it happens) 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 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 and AFAIK wasn’t actually made by NASA just to round out the number of ways this is wrong.
FreddiesLantern@leminal.space 5 hours ago
Don’t look up.
TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Everyone being a billionaire is the same as no one being a billionaire.
Thebeardedsinglemalt@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Like I told the VP who marked every single email as High Importance…when everything is important, nothing is important
Akasazh@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Yeah like the influx of gold and silver from the Americas shook the European economy in the 17th century:
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
That explains why our economy is so shaken today!
This level of inflation amounts to 1.2% per year compounded, a relatively low inflation rate for modern-day standards, but rather high given the monetary policy in place in the 16th century.
Spezi@feddit.org 12 hours ago
DON’T LOOK UP!
Strider@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
I have to think of ‘don’t look up’ now.
chunes@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Making everyone on earth richer is how it’s supposed to work.
That it doesn’t is an indictment on our economic system.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 5 hours ago
It would make gold cheaper and more abundant for sure. But that doesn’t really mean too much. Slightly cheaper electronics, much cheaper gold jewelry, and Trump can build an entire tower out of gold if he wants I guess. Gold is important, but suddenly having an order of magnitude more wouldn’t mean we’re all an order of magnitude better off.
But really someone pointed out that only part of that asteroid is gold and the total value was calculated using the value of all the different metals in there. Iron (boring, it’s not THAT expensive as is), iridium (quite important for electronics), etc. If we managed to bring that whole asteroid into orbit and actually share the spoils equally between nations, a lot of different things would be slightly cheaper to manufacture. Not sure the effect would be too noticeable in the end though. We have a tendency to manufacture more shit than we need so cheaper materials would just facilitate that.
Prizefighter@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
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.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 6 hours ago
To be fair, that movie was about climate change, not really the asteroid
conartistpanda@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Tim apple fucked us good.
tackleberry@thelemmy.club 7 hours ago
…Because that is how Capitalism works.
MousePotatoDoesStuff@piefed.social 7 hours ago
Hopefully that’s just a joke and he understands that this is just to put the (literally) astronomical amount of gold on that asteroid in scale.
Boppel@feddit.org 12 hours ago
sooo… hiw does this work? does it “trickle down” or does it just “kaboom” into earth and we go the way of the dinosaurs?
Blurntout@lemmy.ca 9 hours ago
Plot twist asteroid density so low you try and throw a net around it and the whole thing dissipates into trace minerals
brownsugga@lemmy.world 50 minutes ago
Not if I get to it first
ScriptSage@lemmy.zip 10 minutes ago
godspeed brownsugga