I hope palladium and other PGM become worthless so catalyst converters are ok to own
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.
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?
Not if I get to it first
And that’s exactly what every billionaire is thinking.
godspeed brownsugga
On all that is Holy. That would be a helluvah strong astronaut name. I’d be like, “That’s my astronaut.”
Blessings to you
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.
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.
“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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
#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
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
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
No. If it were as cheap as steel, we wound make whole packages from it. Completely new things. We already use thicker and more gold plating where the cost is not as much of a factor, like space, medical and military stuff.
i think of gold more as a premium lead. we’d for sure coat insides of cans with it, instead of tin if it was so cheap, but it’s weaker than steel. radiation shielding would be another one, ever heard of ancient lead used for radiation shielding for high sensitivity experiments? gold has none of these problems. gold ammunition, gold piping for chemical industry instead of nickel alloys, as long as it’s not too heavy. it would also cause all sorts of new problems with recycling
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.
or you can use slightly thicker copper. but sometimes you can’t, and that’s when silver is a slight upgrade
i heard that microwave parts for satellite use are made this way: first you start with aluminum, for structural and weight reasons. then it’s plated on inside (where microwaves are) with thin layer of zinc, then with copper. you can’t plate copper on aluminum directly. copper is there to conduct microwave current, but silver is slightly better, so there’s a layer of silver to conduct most of it, and copper handles the rest. then it’s topped with gold, and normally there’s a layer of nickel between copper and gold, but it’s a big nope for microwaves, and silver is alternative. it’s a very thin layer, so thin that it doesn’t conduct a lot of current, it’s there only for corrosion resistance
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”
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
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
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.
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
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.
It’s not, but its main benefit is that it didn’t tarnish or corrode. Copper is the second most conductive metal, with silver actually being the first.
Ea-nāṣir and his low-quality gold…
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 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.
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.
