I think the author is overlooking the environmental aspect of mining asteroids for minerals. Currently huge levels of environmental damage are caused by mining for gold, platinum and other metals. To the extent that these mining activities can be moved "off earth" our planet's environment would benefit enormously. In this regard, a giant asteroid of gold would make us richer.
Getting large-scale mining operations in space, or any kind of industrial base for that matter, would require us to start fabricating things in space.
Getting something in orbit will always be expensive and prohibitive, even when space elevators are built, so there will be enough incentive to start building things in space.
And then you realize that sending material upwell to support orbital fabrication is uneconomical, while suddenly mining those materials from asteroids makes double-plus sense.
Orbital fabrication and mining are intertwined, but together they're the key to any long-term human presence outside Earth.
I've wondered how interstellar smelting would work. There would need to be centripetal force on the foundry station to keep metals flowing. Nearby ice could provide hydrogen and oxygen for propulsion and even heat for steam turbine electricity for the plant. Certainly there would be uranium present as well so fission would be an option, albeit more complicated.
Four/eight year military service spent policing/polluting the world could be replaced by short "tours" in asteroid belt operations.
The key to all of this would be constant launches and flow of material/labor, ideally with international cooperation. The high frequency of launches in itself is a safety feature - stranded crews would be able to expect fly-bys.
It would be expensive at first because we would essentially be ejecting many resources away from the planet. But the promise of heavy-industry eventually zoned outside of our natural atmosphere could be the [non-classical] incentive.
Rotation might be done with magnetic fields instead of ejecting ionized gas (water etc). And dirty fission power is very practical in space, where the inverse-square law can make it quite harmless.
Would the magnetic field be provided by an auxiliary station adjacent to the rotating foundry? Or could the structure propel it's own smelting vats somehow via the field on arms attached to a central bearing?
It would seem more efficient with a field rather than constantly ejecting usable material.
How is the inverse squared law applied to space fission? Ease of cooling?
> How is the inverse squared law applied to space fission? Ease of cooling?
If you double the distance, the radiation hazard reduces by a factor of four. This is why the Sun — an unshielded fusion reactor — hasn’t already killed everyone.
If you take a moment to think that through, in global terms, since pollution affects the entire planet, then we see that 12,000 rocket launches means we need to remove one busy airport from service, to break even on current pollution standards, which are already admittedly bad.
> Putting things into space creates a lot of air pollution.
Yes, rockets emit a lot, but in the overall, less than automobiles when taking into the frequency of use into account:
> Space shuttle fuel consumed in a launch: 3.5 million pounds. Gasoline consumed in one day in the US - 2,500 million pounds. In other words, one space shuttle launch is equivalent to about two minutes of gasoline consumption in the United States. [1]
If we use rockets more often, then this would become a larger component of overall pollution.
The Space Shuttle didn't burn gasoline or exhaust carbon dioxide, it burnt hydrogen and exhausted water. So it didn't create meaningful air pollution when launched.
Edit: actually it burnt both solid fuel and hydrogen, about 2.2 million pounds of the former.
burning hydrogen at high temperatures in the atmosphere can create a good bit of NOx. not so bad when there aren't many rockets being launched, but not something you want a lot of.
Ideally we could set up a mining operation that didn't require additional fuel from earth. That would be costly in CO2 if we used that as a measure.
However, after being set up all that would be required for getting gold to earth from space would be de-orbiting the gold. I'm assuming that recovering a de-orbited chunk of gold would probably be cheaper than mining and transporting that gold on the surface of earth.
While you are spot on to question the air pollution to get set up mining gold in space, it would require a really detailed analysis to figure out if it would be a net positive or negative for CO2 emissions.
It would also need to be considered what happens when humans can start re-fueling spacecraft in space. What would that do to the shipping industry where materials are prevalent in space and can be moved to earth with minimal CO2 from earth.
I think your forgetting the effects of mining on water quality. Acid mine drainage from mines is a significant problem worldwide and water doesn't just sit around[1]. The Ok Tedi mine is an example of a mine that has far reaching environmental consequences[2].
I am including down stream effects. Mines eventually drain into rivers, but that water does not then flow back up tributaries or after the land downstream all that much. On top of that major rivers have so much water flowing that it tends to drastically reduce the impacts from mines.
I love how Bloomberg immediately jumps to some market/chicago/hbs/wharton concept of wealth and ycombinator thinks of wealth in terms of actually prosperity that can be created.
From the article: "It’s because wealth mostly doesn’t come from big hunks of metal. It comes from the ability to create things that satisfy human desires."
I am failing to see much difference between this definition and your ycombinator definition.
It will likely increase technology on many levels.
The technical challenges and competition will change everything. Maybe some scientific platforms could hitch a ride at a heavily discounted price, for example?
> The metal would have various industrial applications and make nice jewelry and dental fillings, but it wouldn’t spark a new industrial revolution, or dramatically bring down the cost of goods and services, or in general make human life much better or more comfortable.
There would be many new industrial aplications for gold alloys. I think abundance of gold could spark mini industrial revolution.
It would replace a lot of copper in electronics, gold has lots of nice properties for that application (it's used already for chip pins and in some space/avionics systems) except it's price precludes mass production use.
It's also inert, non-toxic and easily recycled - it'd be useful just for that.
Nah, copper is used for electronics because it has a lower resistivity than gold. It is just as easily recycled, we just don't do it because it is cheap.
They gold plate leads because gold doesn't corrode.
It doesn't matter much in the long run, but just want to squash out the notion that gold is a better electrical conductor. It isn't.
In fact, where weight matters, aluminum is often preferred over copper. While copper is more conductive, aluminum has a high conductivity:weight ratio (that is, you use a bigger wire, which can conduct more and weighs less than the same resistance on a copper wire).
Gold is the worst of both worlds. It is heavier than copper and only slightly better at conductivity than aluminum.
My thoughts went to corrosion as well. Rust (oxides, not the programming language) has a huge cost associated with it. Abundant gold could conceivably result in building materials that are much longer lasting. Certainly we could gold plate more things.
It would be used in addition to copper. Circuit boards are currently made out of copper for various reasons, I don't think you would use gold for PCB traces even if the materials were cheap. With copper you can use ferric chloride and simple photoresist to etch the board, with gold you would need something more powerful like aqua regia. Gold also has some undesirable properties like the various awful gold-aluminum intermetallics that it can form, and it suffers from poor solderability.
I think more likely we would see ENIG as a standard / default plating instead of HASL. Traces would continue to be made out of copper or aluminum depending on what you are optimizing for, plated with gold (over a layer of zinc or nickel) to protect them from corrosion, and with various tin/nickel/etc pads for solderability.
> We have an abundance of silicon, that hasn't sparked any sort of revolution around silicon.
...But it has? Think of all the things we make out of silicon and silicon compounds. Buildings, glass, countertops, tools, computers, etc...
If silicon were rarer we would surely not be making buildings and windows out of silicon compounds! Some of these do not have easy replacements. You can make buildings without silicon (many are made without) but without silicon we would have a hard time coming up with something like glass. Glass fueled a lot of our scientific revolutions, giving us glassware for chemistry, optics for microscopes and telescopes, etc.
Who can know how long it might have taken for us to discover the theory of gravity, cell theory, germ theory, or large chunks of chemistry without glass.
Another case in point, maybe a better parallel, is aluminum. Once it was more precious than gold and used in similar applications to gold and platinum. Then technology was developed to produce it more easily, and we started making things like wheels and then entire vehicles out of it.
So we already have the precedent of a precious metal becoming an industrial one, although I don't mean to suggest gold alloys would be good for the same applications due to its density.
The strength to weight ratio of aluminum was known long before we could mass produce it.
For example, Titanium is superior to aluminum in most weight/strength applications. If we could mass produce it, we'd not use aluminum anymore.
Carbon fiber is even better than Titanium. Again, if it were mass producible, we'd use it for everything.
I can point to materials that, if they were cheaper, we'd make everything out of them. That's because we've researched these materials and know that they have potential applications. Their availability hasn't been a factor in the research, not really.
Gold, AFAIK, doesn't have those same sorts of analogous usages. It doesn't have a "But if it were cheaper" sort of application. Maybe some electronics or nano-scale applications might benefit from it, but I wouldn't think it would be excluded from that research since you are talking about a tiny amount per component (after all, we still use gold to plate electronic leads today).
Titanium is strong but brittle, and carbon fibre (or the epoxy which bonds it) has problems at high temperatures. Even aluminium has challenges compared to steel of fatigue under stress or tension, being attacked by certain substances (especially mercury), of a lower melting point, and of bimetallic corrosion (when paired with copper wire in electrical applications: don't do that).
Abundance matters (iron, steel), ore processing (electricity and baauxite), but so too do material properties.
Worth noting that aluminium itself is abundant, it is the processing and refinment, before abundant supplies of electricity, which are difficult and proved limiting:
Fair point, but I still don't believe that just because something is more available, we'd discover more applications for it.
After all, we've used gold for tooth fillings in the past. That's a pretty high accessibility for everyone.
I could see the argument for materials (such as anti-matter) which are only synthesized in the lab. However, gold, while expensive, is also fairly common to researchers.
Take platinum as another counter point. Even though it is more expensive than gold, we still put it in catalytic converters for millions of cars.
Gold is researchable today. Maybe if it were more available we wouldn't exclude it from research due to cost. But that is a big maybe.
If silicon were as rare as gold, we'd still be able to say "Hey, this gets transparent when we heat it up" and "Hey, this doesn't really conduct electricity well". That is, we'd be able to see it and have the arguments of "if we just had a bunch more of this, we could make a lot of cool glass things". AFAIK, there isn't some application that exists like that with gold.
It is very malleable. It has a low melting point. It doesn't corrode. The best application I think we'd come up for it is something like using it for soldering like we use tin (it would probably do a better job there than tin does).
The entire technology revolution is based around the idea that "if we have more of something we find new applications"... You wouldn't have an iPhone if compute power was as rare as gold.
The whole article is written with the tone of someone who doesn't understand the concept of "unknown unknowns".
> Fair point, but I still don't believe that just because something is more available, we'd discover more applications for it.
I really don't understand why you would believe this. There are countless things we can make out of widely available materials like stone, wood, glass, steel, etc., because we've spent an enormous amount of time learning how to work with these materials. Researchers have budgets that they have to work with, so they don't use much gold, just enough to plate something that needs to be corrosion resistant or another similar use. Some researchers have large budgets, but who would research the application of gold to everyday purposes if you know that it wouldn't be financially viable?
> Take platinum as another counter point. Even though it is more expensive than gold, we still put it in catalytic converters for millions of cars.
Platinum has been variously more and less expensive than gold over the course of history. At this particular moment it is less expensive, ten years ago it was more.
> If silicon were as rare as gold, we'd still be able to say "Hey, this gets transparent when we heat it up" and "Hey, this doesn't really conduct electricity well".
If silicon were as rare as gold, we would not have:
- Windows
- Eyeglasses
- Microscopes
- Telescopes
- Cameras
Except for use by the extremely wealthy and well-funded, or perhaps in extremely inferior versions. There are some better substitutes we could make in the latter half of the 20th century out of plastics.
> It is very malleable. It has a low melting point. It doesn't corrode. The best application I think we'd come up for it is something like using it for soldering like we use tin (it would probably do a better job there than tin does).
You wouldn't stop using tin just because you started using gold :-) You would use something like 80Au20Sn.
But I think that just because you can't imagine a use for it, doesn't mean that someone else hasn't.
> I really don't understand why you would believe this. There are countless things we can make out of widely available materials like stone, wood, glass, steel, etc., because we've spent an enormous amount of time learning how to work with these materials.
Because, for general manufacturing, gold is sort of garbage. It looks nice and doesn't corrode. So that's cool. But it is extremely malleable (bad) and has a relatively low melting point (also bad).
So, what would you do with a gold thing that scratches when you look at it and melts at a slightly higher temperature than lead?
What daily application would you use it for? Wiring? Aluminum and copper are better. A Mylar type blanket? Maybe, IDK. Door handles? Possibly.
But I fail to see where else we might use it. You wouldn't use it for any sort of structural application. You MIGHT use it to plate the likes of steal beams/cables to keep them from corroding.
Glass isn't used for structural applications either. I think if gold were cheap we would coat a lot of things with it, for the corrosion resistance. We spend a lot of time already just worrying about corrosion.
It was a bad element to pick. I was just thinking of something abundant. Calcium or Sodium might have been better picks for "Elements that are abundant and also not really sparking any industrial revolutions."
> We have an abundance of silicon, that hasn't sparked any sort of revolution around silicon.
That revolution occurred 2000 years ago and then again about 500 years ago.
The ability to work with "glass" was a HUGE deal and actually remarkably difficult--it's one of the major technical advances of the Romans.
And then the application of glass to optics was another big technical jump--eyeglasses and magnifiers are a huge deal (starting around 1500 or so).
Magnified optics, of course, is the gateway to a lot of other scientific advances. Including, of course, photolithography--which enables the manufacture of the computer chip.
Working with silicon is probably second only to working with iron in terms of technical importance to society.
Hull cladding. Every ocean-going ship on Earth with a corrosion-resistant gold-plated hull.
Wires and electronic traces. Low resistivity, highly ductile, and again, high corrosion resistance.
Polycarbonate-gold astronaut sunglasses.
There is an asteroid-sized pile of potential applications, for which gold is currently ruled out due to the cost of obtaining sufficient quantities, while gold is strictly superior to some other material in all other respects. Subbing in cheaper gold does make us all richer. Most people have no idea how much money is lost every year to corrosion.
Interesting, but after giving it some thought (I actively research steel hull efficiency), doubtful. It's true that gold is highly stable in seawater when not in contact with other metals, however, put it in contact with steal and you have a fairly decent dissimilar metal reaction leading to galvanic corrosion of the hull over time. (1) Gold is very soft, so any impact with common marine debris (logs, scrap, buoys, etc.) may very will penetrate to the steel hull structure, which unless quickly repaired would lead to the above corrosion. In general, hulls are designed to account for 40-50yrs of service life corrosion before needing to be scrapped.
However, this comment made me ask the question of whether or not gold is a good antifouling agent to prevent marine growth. After all, we've all seen shiny non-fouled gold being pulled from ancient ship wrecks. I really can't find much data on gold preventing marine growth, but if successful, cost-effective, and non-toxic (as copper is), that would be a major savings in terms of fuel efficiency for ocean-going vessels.
I actually thought the steel skin would be covered with in insulator layer, such as paper, fiberglass composite, or plastic sheeting, and the gold bonded to that. Punctures and crushed panels would then be detected by changes in capacitance. And now I'm imagining arcs from improperly grounded inner hulls, so maybe that's not the greatest idea for gold.
But if gold resists the barnacle adhesive even a little bit, that's already a major win.
As a consumer I can buy gold leaf for around $10 per square meter.
Estimates that I have seen are that the big cargo ships are around 400 meters long and 50 meters deep. I'm not sure their surface area, but let's call it 60,000 square meters. (22,0000 for each side of a wall of those dimensions, and some amount for the bottom. So to gold plate it is a half-million dollars. https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-fuel-a-cargo-... estimates $130,000 per day for a ship under power.
If gold plating worked, lasted, and didn't leave damage, someone would have figured out that it was worthwhile to do already. So if you deal with it professionally, by all means look into it. But I wouldn't be too hopeful.
In fact gold leaf is 0.1 microns. Standard aluminum foil is 0.016 mm = 16 microns. So 160 times thinner, or about 2 orders of magnitude.
When used to gild buildings in air, it typically lasts 40-50 years. Of course a ship's hull in water is likely to be a much more hostile environment...
>> When used to gild buildings in air, it typically lasts 40-50 years. Of course a ship's hull in water is likely to be a much more hostile environment...
But gilding is a purely ornamental technique. It's not there to defend the lower layers from elements.
they are also ignoring the fact that gold makes a small portion of the astroid. it has heaps of platinum, and other valuable metals which could revolutionize the things we do. I bet it also has heaps of silver, which I am told is better than copper just much more expensive
> Surely lowering the price of precious material will make everyone better off, they'll just stay the same relative to each other?
They won't stay the same relative to each other if anyone's current wealth is more related to the scarcity of the precious material in question than anyone else, which is guaranteed to be the case for any precious material.
That only really applies to prestige uses; to go with the De Beer analogy a 500 carat "jewel" diamond goes for $50 million, yet some researcher needing an artificial diamond optic lens the size of a dinner plate can get one made for just a couple million.
That's a special effect of the diamond marketplace where diamonds aren't really “precious materials” but authenticatable natural diamonds are precious collectibles. (That is, it is the provenance and not the material that is precious.).
But the dynamics are the same so long as the supply glut is in things interchangeable with what is precious (e.g., diamonds that, down to the De Beers microetching, are indistinguishable from the ones that people place value on.)
Hmm, what is an element it found in vast quantities in accessible asteroids would spawn a fundamental transformation? Platinum group metals? Uranium? Phorphorus? Rare earths?
Both silver and gold would be pretty good candidates for unlocking some great upgrades to both industrial and everyday items (silver is the most conductive metal, gold is an excellent conductor that's virtually rust free).
Lithium and cobalt are a major cost for Li-Ion batteries, tanking their price could transform the world with cheap(er) energy storage.
Gold is an OK conductor, but aluminum is nearly as good while being much lighter. Corrosion isn't really a problem for it either. (Aluminum corrodes very quickly, but that doesn't impact it's conductivity or strength)
Platinum is used for a lot of catalysts and we would surely benefit if it was a lot cheaper. Things like splitting water for energy storage could become much more attractive.
> Rejoice, people of Earth! News outlets are reporting that NASA is planning to visit an asteroid made of gold and other precious metals! At current prices, the minerals contained in asteroid 16 Psyche are said to be worth $700 quintillion -- enough to give everyone on the planet $93 billion. We’re all going to be richer than Jeff Bezos!
No one ever thought it was going to work this way.
> enough to give everyone on the planet $93 billion
In the words of Syndrome: "When everyone's super... no one will be" Poverty is relative wealth, so if everyone's wealth increased by the same amount, the poverty line would be exactly the same.
If you gave everyone on earth 1kg of gold simultaneously, it would actually make the poor poorer since it would devalue any of their current golden possessions to near zero.
I'm pretty sure giving everyone 1kg of gold would just devalue gold, not devalue their other possessions (unless those possessions could be made much cheaper with gold).
There is a story about one of the worlds richest man Mansa Musa making a pilgrimage to Mecca and handing out so much gold that he devalued it for about 10 years. And supposedly the Spanish plunder of the new world devalued both gold and silver for centuries.
Also remember people saying that in the early 1980's cocaine was essentially worthless in Bimini because it was being used as a staging point in the drug trade.
At the core, wealth is actually time. Wealthy people have more of their time to purpose. Poor people have less.
If we suddenly get a lot of new resources, we should ask how does that impact people's time, and those answers will indicate meaningful changes in wealth.
Just as examples:
The CEO making millions, but also working non stop, could be fairly poor in the basic sense. Slave to the job. One can make the argument they want to do that, etc... and once family, other basics are factored in, that argument may not be as easy as one might think.
Close that next deal, or attend the soccer game?
Another example may be someone who has very little financially, but maybe lives lean, has few dependencies. They may just not need too much, and have lots of time to purpose. That person is fairly wealthy, despite a low net worth.
Only in nominal terms, and assuming that a significant portion of the world holds any gold. In real terms, everyone would be 1kg of gold richer.
Think about it this way: what if we gave everyone in the world a brand new iPhone. It's true that the resale value of an iPhone would decrease, but would the world really be poorer? I think that's a very hard argument to make.
An iPhone is more useful than a raw hunk of gold, though. You are comparing a raw material with a processed good. The value of gold (and basically all raw materials) is tightly coupled to its supply; not as much with iPhones.
If everyone in the world got 1 kg of gold, it would be as if everyone on earth got 1 kg of aluminum... that is to say, you would have a hard time turning that gold into something more useful than a paperweight. You would probably be able to take it to the nearest scrap metal recycling plant and get a few bucks.
Consider: You have $100. I have $1000. We both get +$50 worth of gold. So you have $150 and I have $1050. You increased your welth by 50%, but I only increased my wealth by 5%. So yes, if you had no money, you actually did earn purchasing power.
Let's consider another example: The poor person probably has $0 invested in gold. So if anything, it hurts people in the middle class, who might have let's say 5% of their wealth in gold, which is suddenly worthless. So the poor person has actually increased their buying power compared to the middle class, and the rich (who probably have so much money in real-estate and stocks that any gold investment is minuscule) are unaffected.
> it would actually make the poor poorer since it would devalue any of their current golden possessions to near zero.
It would make people whose wealth is disproportionately stored in gold poorer. Same as if a company hands out a bunch of shares ex nihilo -- the existing shareholders are screwed. The people who had no shares and now have some shares are richer, despite the shares being devalued.
If the poor are heavily invested in gold, then plonking a bunch of gold into the economy will make them poorer, but I don't think they are.
This has some good explanations of basic economics.
However, the real importance of mining asteroids is that it would make it possible to build colonies in space that could potentially hold far more than the present population of Earth.
Right! The easiest and most productive use of space metals is, in space. To build habitats, more mining equipment etc. It costs so much to lift metals into orbit, once they are there its dumb to drop them down to Earth again. At least not until all the space purposes have been satisfied.
Gold is quite dense, I wonder if you could use this asteroid to build shielding for long-term habitats. I imagine you'd still need something stronger to provide the structural elements, but for managing radiation aboard space stations this gold might be quite useful
How would this get divvied up? Someone corrals this thing, tows it into some kind of earth orbit, then auctions it off by the ton. How do they get it to the customer?
Re-entry vehicle or something else like shielding ton ingots in special thermal tiles and have it crash into deserts somewhere?
Imagine if copper wire were replaced with cheaper gold wire?
Hilarious (and a bit scary) to think that in the near future a random company could haul a massive gold asteroid to Earth and completely destroy the global economy.
Probably similar to how the Spanish conquistador's precious metals haul from the New World decimated the economy of Spain: massive supply/demand imbalance.
I assume the grandparent is making a (quite funny) joke about destroying the global economy by virtue of the delivery of the asteroid destroying the Earth.
Yeah, that wouldn't happen. Though maybe it would bring down the cost of certain scientific equipment. Countries like India would probably suffer since they "invest" heavily in gold.
Bugger the economy, if you can move asteroids that large around, you have planet-destroying energy at your disposal. And more military power than any nation state - comply with our demands or accept this kind gift of a reentry-speed 10-ton block of gold through your ceiling...
Gold conducts worse than copper. (It's the #3 best conductor) Copper is the #2 best conductor. The one metal that conducts better than copper is Silver.
A heavy asteroid might have a lot of Silver in it for all we know.
The property of gold that I like the most is that you can hammer it into such a thin film that it is transparent to some wavelengths of light..
Bringing down precious metals to Earth isn't the main point of developing space mining tech, e.g. mining a golden asteroid. The mined materials would be useful for bootstrapping other space based projects. With the right mining tech in place, it would be better to build anything that's going to be strictly used in space, well, in space. Earth's gravity well is much less of a cost factor if you don't have to send up manufactured items.
They'd probably keep it a secret if they manage to succeed (and slowly dole it out as per need and sell it at high present costs); of course unless a rival manages to do so as well and threatens "publicizing" the fact.
edit: The article does seem to cover this situation kind of.
How much metal will they realistically be able to bring back from an asteroid? I don't know anything about this but it seems improbable that we'd go from being able to bring home a few moon rocks right to 700 quintillion dollars worth of gold.
"There is a lot of gold right here on Earth that has not been dug up! Because it is pretty deep underground or whatever. The relevant supply of gold is the stuff that can be extracted economically, not just the stuff that exists. The same thing is even more true hundreds of millions of miles away in outer space. You cannot just send a big dump truck to Psyche 16, shovel some loose gold nuggets into it, and drive it back to your house."
It is quite expensive to send material to an orbit around earth. A quick search says $22.000 per kilo. The price of gold per kilo is about $45.000. So wouldnt it make more sense to keep the gold in the orbit and use it to build things in space? Also the potential energy of the gold has to go somewhere when it enters the earth's atmosphere resulting in additional warming.
Why should it be quickly radiated away? What makes the heat different from the energy that is already stored in the atmosphere? In total it would be the energy of a large asteroid being smashed on earth. (energy conservation)
It does not matter whether it is gold or anything else. Any material is more valuable in space than on earth because you have to transport it to space. So you could mine an asteroid for 2 kg of anything and it would be as valuable as 1 kg of gold on earth.
I don't know, what would they do with a kg of gold in space? I think the only raw materials that would be worth anything in space today is like water, rocket fuel, oxygen, hydrogen etc. We generally only send finished goods into space, like satellites. Raw metals would only be valuable to keep in space if you had some manufacturing capability there. Also I think we are really really far away from doing something like manufacturing a satellite in space. So in general, I don't think that "2 kg of anything" in space is worth 1kg of gold on earth.
That presumes supply and demand are equivalent. In situ and on Earth are effectively two distinct, and poorly arbitrageable, economic domains.
In gold boom towns, say, as in the California and Alaskan gold rushes, gold nuggets or dust were used in everyday commerce. But at a sharp discount to their value elsewhere.
See also drug value to farmer vs. street, or prices of oil at wellhead vs. end-user, especially in early days (say, 1859-1930).
Some perspective needed. According to [1], Earth absorbs 3.85e24 J/year from the sun. One kg of mass falling to Earth from infinity (i.e. at escape velocity, 11.2 km/s) has kinetic energy (mv^2)/2 ~ 6.27e7 J.
So you would need to drop 6.14e16 kg/year on Earth to match the solar contribution. Something minor like 1000 metric tons (1e6 kg) per year would only contribute 1.63e-11 of what we get from the sun, or roughly 0.0005 seconds worth of sunlight.
The article's reasoning is mistaken. Nobody knows whether or not reducing the price of gold to $1/ounce would make us much richer or not - because nobody is currently spending serious time thinking of what one could do if gold cost $1/ounce.
Just wondering which central bank is the first to conclude that it actually is useless and stupid to keep gold reserves and decides to dump their gold to the market first. After which, obviously, we see a crash in gold price rarely seen in the world history. And actually start doing something useful with the unique yellow metal that we collectively have decided that is better to be hidden and not used...
The Bank of England in the 2000s? The Swiss National Bank in the 2000s and again in the 2010s? Central banks sell gold all the time, there isn't some bubble about to burst once a single central bank sells its reserves.
Even if the central banks did sell all their reserves, sure, it would be a shock to the gold market and professional commodity traders would notice, but it wouldn't vastly change the availability of gold in the long term. The central banks have maybe 20% of the world's mined gold in their vaults. Most of it is already being used in jewellery or industrial applications.
Hey, at least we could fix soldering. 80% gold, 20% tin is the best solder.[1] Very strong, no whisker growth. Often used inside ICs, and for some avionics boards.
I'm sure we could come up with a lot of use cases for abundant gold. The idea that cost effectively extracting resources from space does not make humanity richer is incredibly backwards. Extracting more resources, using those resources more efficiently and offering more services is absolutely necessary to increase our economic productivity and therefore grow our economy.
Only if it's a net gain in resources. There is currently a massive cost in resources and pollution for everything put into, or retrieved from, space. Hopefully that will change, though I doubt it'll ever reach 1-to-1.
I'm not a physicist yet without something like fusion as a miniaturized propellant I don't see how it can ever be wiser to mine asteroids than try to live more sustainably on Earth first.
Space economics is… counterintuitive. A while ago I read a blog ranting about how pointless it was to mine He3 from the moon for fusion. A brief summary:
* We don’t have fusion reactors
* If we did, we could mine fuel from the gas giants’ atmospheres
* He3 is so poorly concentrated in the Lunar regolith that the easy way to extract it also produces high purity silicon and oxygen
* Turning that silicon into ingots and firing them at the Earth, you can generate more power from electromagnetically decelerating them then you would get from the fusion of the helium, and this is a perfectly sensible way to generate power because of the relative depth of the Earth and Moon gravity wells
* You can then burn the silicon instead of coal, and this is absolutely fine because the ash is sand instead of a greenhouse gas. You can also bring oxygen from the Moon to burn it with so you won’t run out of oxygen on Earth to breathe.
Unfortunately I can’t find the post whenever I’ve tried searching for it.
America isn't useless because it takes so much effort to bring everything from England?
If you can create solar panels from asteroid materials and use water as propellant, it's relatively easy to move materials around in the solar system. You operate on asteroids so you never need high thrust. Delivery takes time though.
Does harvesting materials add more court-side seats to the lakers game? More materials just shifts the currency to location and proximity to things that cant be duplicated.
There's also supposed to be a lot of platinum and things near it in the periodic table, which are all very important catalysts. I think the person who wrote this article is massively underestimating technological effect of making a part of the periodic table more affordable for scientists to play with.
Making it more abundant doesn't necessarily make it more affordable. You need the costs of extraction to be low, because if you want platinum, you can recycle and mine it here, it is just expensive. So the question is only whether it is more expensive to do it here or on an asteroid.
Nobody wants to bring off earth resources down into the gravity well. Every bullion of pure ore up there is worth that and all the fuel necessary to bring it up there.
Make machinery and spin habbitats from that stuff, if you like your planet, put a ring on it.
While the asteroid will of course never be worth the quintillions it's worth on paper, there's no doubt it will be worth something. Otherwise, why are people still spending money to dig up gold out of the earth?
But gold isn't that interesting. The only reason it's valued the way it is, is because everybody has agreed it's valuable. But there are many other rare metals and minerals we can mine from asteroids that would be immensely useful. In smartphones and other electronics, for example.
At the moment, rare earth elements are often mined in terrible destructive ways, sometimes under atrocious circumstances. Fairphone is the one phone company that's trying to do something about it, but on their own, they're not going to have a lot of impact. Off-world mining would allow us to leave our Earth intact while still enjoying the smartphones and other electronics that these materials enable.
Apparently desert sand is no good for making concrete, because it's been smoothed and rounded by the wind. I'm guessing moon sand wouldn't have such a problem. Although you'd have to solve the problem of re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. How practical are space elevators?
> The only reason it's valued the way it is, is because everybody has agreed it's valuable.
The only reason why gold is valuable is because it is easily and arbitrarily divisible, can be worn as a status symbol to advertise your wealth, and it has a goldilocks scarcity where the amount you have to carry to do human-scale business is not smaller than a dime, but also not heavier than a large cat.
The last is becoming less and less true with as population size grows (I can't buy a 5-pound bag of sugar with gold), but the slack is taken up by fiat.
It does have some pretty unique properties e.g. ductility - imagine gold foil as cheap as aluminium foil. I'm sure we'd find plenty of uses from that alone, not least better heat shielding.
There’s loads of palladium, molybdenum and ruthenium in asteroids. Gold is much rarer. (Even-numbered elements are more common than odd-numbered elements on a celestial scale.) Pd, Ru and Mo are very useful in chemistry and industry — alloys containing less than 1% Mo go for a premium due to their improved durability. Pd is the king of catalysts. Among other things, it’s key to fuel cells and catalytic converters. Ru is a little less interesting, but it does improve (even more than normal) corrosion resistance in Ti and support extremely-high-temperature nickel superalloys, as might be used for e.g. exploring Venus.
> this example shows that real wealth doesn’t actually come from golden hoards. It comes from the productive activities of human beings creating things that other human beings desire.
Good call. I don't know where I was going with that. Cost, price, value, and wealth.
Are there better examples for illustrating the differences between these kind of distinct terms?
Less convertible collectibles like coins and baseball cards (that require energy for exchange) have (over time t): costs of production, marketing, and distribution; retail sales price; market price; and 'value' which is abstract relative (opportunity cost in terms of fiat currency (which is somehow distinct from price at time t (possibly due to 'speculative information')))
Wealth comes from relationships, margins between costs and prices, long term planning, […]
Are there better examples for illustrating the differences between these kind of distinct terms?
For concepts as intrinsically fundamental to economics as these are, the agreement and understanding of what they are, even amomg economists, is surprisingly poor. It's not even clear whether or not "wealth" refers to a flow or stock -- Adam Smith uses the term both ways. And much contemporary mainstream 'wealth creation" discussion addresses accounting profit rather than economic wealth. Or broader terms such aas ecological wealth (or natural capital). There's some progress, and Steve Keen has been synthesizing much of it recently, but the terms fare poorly.
A key issue is that "price‘ and "exchange value" are ofteen conflated, creating confusiin with use/ownership value.
Addressing your terms, "cost" and "price", and typically "value", indicate some metric of exchange or opportunity cost (or benefit). Whilst "wealth", as typically used, tends to relate to some store or accumulation. In electrical terms (a potentially, so to speak, useful analogue) the difference between voltage and charge, with current representing some other property, possibly material flows of goods or energy.
The whole question of media for exchange (currency, and the like), and durable forms of financial wealth (land, art, collectibles) is another interesting one, with discussionnby Ricardo and Jevons quite interesting -- both useful and flawed.
And don't even get me started on the near total discounting of accumulated natural capital, say, the 100-300 million year factor of time embodied in fossil fuels. The reasons and rationales for excluding that being fascinating (Ricardo, Tolstoy, Gray, Hotelling, Boulding, Soddy, Georgescu-Roegen, Daly, Keen).
You are correct that all value (and hence wealth) is relative, and hence relational.
180 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadThere are bigger fish to fry in terms of the environment.
Getting something in orbit will always be expensive and prohibitive, even when space elevators are built, so there will be enough incentive to start building things in space.
Orbital fabrication and mining are intertwined, but together they're the key to any long-term human presence outside Earth.
Four/eight year military service spent policing/polluting the world could be replaced by short "tours" in asteroid belt operations.
The key to all of this would be constant launches and flow of material/labor, ideally with international cooperation. The high frequency of launches in itself is a safety feature - stranded crews would be able to expect fly-bys.
It would be expensive at first because we would essentially be ejecting many resources away from the planet. But the promise of heavy-industry eventually zoned outside of our natural atmosphere could be the [non-classical] incentive.
It would seem more efficient with a field rather than constantly ejecting usable material.
How is the inverse squared law applied to space fission? Ease of cooling?
If you double the distance, the radiation hazard reduces by a factor of four. This is why the Sun — an unshielded fusion reactor — hasn’t already killed everyone.
Yes, rockets emit a lot, but in the overall, less than automobiles when taking into the frequency of use into account:
> Space shuttle fuel consumed in a launch: 3.5 million pounds. Gasoline consumed in one day in the US - 2,500 million pounds. In other words, one space shuttle launch is equivalent to about two minutes of gasoline consumption in the United States. [1]
If we use rockets more often, then this would become a larger component of overall pollution.
[1] http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2000-10/973014746.Es.r....
Edit: actually it burnt both solid fuel and hydrogen, about 2.2 million pounds of the former.
Ideally we could set up a mining operation that didn't require additional fuel from earth. That would be costly in CO2 if we used that as a measure.
However, after being set up all that would be required for getting gold to earth from space would be de-orbiting the gold. I'm assuming that recovering a de-orbited chunk of gold would probably be cheaper than mining and transporting that gold on the surface of earth.
While you are spot on to question the air pollution to get set up mining gold in space, it would require a really detailed analysis to figure out if it would be a net positive or negative for CO2 emissions.
It would also need to be considered what happens when humans can start re-fueling spacecraft in space. What would that do to the shipping industry where materials are prevalent in space and can be moved to earth with minimal CO2 from earth.
It’s extremely centralized which makes things terrible for those close by, but that does not extend over all that much of the earth.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_mine_drainage [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ok_Tedi_environmental_disaster
I am failing to see much difference between this definition and your ycombinator definition.
I am failing to see how this title represents the engineering concept of wealth.
https://geology.com/minerals/gold/uses-of-gold.shtml
The technical challenges and competition will change everything. Maybe some scientific platforms could hitch a ride at a heavily discounted price, for example?
There would be many new industrial aplications for gold alloys. I think abundance of gold could spark mini industrial revolution.
It's also inert, non-toxic and easily recycled - it'd be useful just for that.
They gold plate leads because gold doesn't corrode.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_con...
It doesn't matter much in the long run, but just want to squash out the notion that gold is a better electrical conductor. It isn't.
In fact, where weight matters, aluminum is often preferred over copper. While copper is more conductive, aluminum has a high conductivity:weight ratio (that is, you use a bigger wire, which can conduct more and weighs less than the same resistance on a copper wire).
Gold is the worst of both worlds. It is heavier than copper and only slightly better at conductivity than aluminum.
I think more likely we would see ENIG as a standard / default plating instead of HASL. Traces would continue to be made out of copper or aluminum depending on what you are optimizing for, plated with gold (over a layer of zinc or nickel) to protect them from corrosion, and with various tin/nickel/etc pads for solderability.
Gold has some nice properties, but I don't think it is a wonder metal.
...But it has? Think of all the things we make out of silicon and silicon compounds. Buildings, glass, countertops, tools, computers, etc...
If silicon were rarer we would surely not be making buildings and windows out of silicon compounds! Some of these do not have easy replacements. You can make buildings without silicon (many are made without) but without silicon we would have a hard time coming up with something like glass. Glass fueled a lot of our scientific revolutions, giving us glassware for chemistry, optics for microscopes and telescopes, etc.
Who can know how long it might have taken for us to discover the theory of gravity, cell theory, germ theory, or large chunks of chemistry without glass.
So we already have the precedent of a precious metal becoming an industrial one, although I don't mean to suggest gold alloys would be good for the same applications due to its density.
For example, Titanium is superior to aluminum in most weight/strength applications. If we could mass produce it, we'd not use aluminum anymore.
Carbon fiber is even better than Titanium. Again, if it were mass producible, we'd use it for everything.
I can point to materials that, if they were cheaper, we'd make everything out of them. That's because we've researched these materials and know that they have potential applications. Their availability hasn't been a factor in the research, not really.
Gold, AFAIK, doesn't have those same sorts of analogous usages. It doesn't have a "But if it were cheaper" sort of application. Maybe some electronics or nano-scale applications might benefit from it, but I wouldn't think it would be excluded from that research since you are talking about a tiny amount per component (after all, we still use gold to plate electronic leads today).
Abundance matters (iron, steel), ore processing (electricity and baauxite), but so too do material properties.
Worth noting that aluminium itself is abundant, it is the processing and refinment, before abundant supplies of electricity, which are difficult and proved limiting:
https://aluminiumleader.com/history/industry_history/
After all, we've used gold for tooth fillings in the past. That's a pretty high accessibility for everyone.
I could see the argument for materials (such as anti-matter) which are only synthesized in the lab. However, gold, while expensive, is also fairly common to researchers.
Take platinum as another counter point. Even though it is more expensive than gold, we still put it in catalytic converters for millions of cars.
Gold is researchable today. Maybe if it were more available we wouldn't exclude it from research due to cost. But that is a big maybe.
If silicon were as rare as gold, we'd still be able to say "Hey, this gets transparent when we heat it up" and "Hey, this doesn't really conduct electricity well". That is, we'd be able to see it and have the arguments of "if we just had a bunch more of this, we could make a lot of cool glass things". AFAIK, there isn't some application that exists like that with gold.
It is very malleable. It has a low melting point. It doesn't corrode. The best application I think we'd come up for it is something like using it for soldering like we use tin (it would probably do a better job there than tin does).
The whole article is written with the tone of someone who doesn't understand the concept of "unknown unknowns".
I really don't understand why you would believe this. There are countless things we can make out of widely available materials like stone, wood, glass, steel, etc., because we've spent an enormous amount of time learning how to work with these materials. Researchers have budgets that they have to work with, so they don't use much gold, just enough to plate something that needs to be corrosion resistant or another similar use. Some researchers have large budgets, but who would research the application of gold to everyday purposes if you know that it wouldn't be financially viable?
> Take platinum as another counter point. Even though it is more expensive than gold, we still put it in catalytic converters for millions of cars.
Platinum has been variously more and less expensive than gold over the course of history. At this particular moment it is less expensive, ten years ago it was more.
> If silicon were as rare as gold, we'd still be able to say "Hey, this gets transparent when we heat it up" and "Hey, this doesn't really conduct electricity well".
If silicon were as rare as gold, we would not have:
- Windows
- Eyeglasses
- Microscopes
- Telescopes
- Cameras
Except for use by the extremely wealthy and well-funded, or perhaps in extremely inferior versions. There are some better substitutes we could make in the latter half of the 20th century out of plastics.
> It is very malleable. It has a low melting point. It doesn't corrode. The best application I think we'd come up for it is something like using it for soldering like we use tin (it would probably do a better job there than tin does).
You wouldn't stop using tin just because you started using gold :-) You would use something like 80Au20Sn.
But I think that just because you can't imagine a use for it, doesn't mean that someone else hasn't.
Because, for general manufacturing, gold is sort of garbage. It looks nice and doesn't corrode. So that's cool. But it is extremely malleable (bad) and has a relatively low melting point (also bad).
So, what would you do with a gold thing that scratches when you look at it and melts at a slightly higher temperature than lead?
What daily application would you use it for? Wiring? Aluminum and copper are better. A Mylar type blanket? Maybe, IDK. Door handles? Possibly.
But I fail to see where else we might use it. You wouldn't use it for any sort of structural application. You MIGHT use it to plate the likes of steal beams/cables to keep them from corroding.
You want your coating to be electrochemically weaker than the material you are trying to protect so it dissolves instead of the material.
Pure gold is crap but cheap gold means cheap gold alloys and they are way better.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2016-07-lab-titan...
Care to guess how soon we could discover that it's neat material for CPUs if it costed 40k$ per gram?
I recently read article about titanium-gold alloy having some neat properties.
> Gold has some nice properties, but I don't think it is a wonder metal.
I pray to the olfd gods and the new that this comment is in jest, but just in case... the silicon (integrated circuit) chip.
That revolution occurred 2000 years ago and then again about 500 years ago.
The ability to work with "glass" was a HUGE deal and actually remarkably difficult--it's one of the major technical advances of the Romans.
And then the application of glass to optics was another big technical jump--eyeglasses and magnifiers are a huge deal (starting around 1500 or so).
Magnified optics, of course, is the gateway to a lot of other scientific advances. Including, of course, photolithography--which enables the manufacture of the computer chip.
Working with silicon is probably second only to working with iron in terms of technical importance to society.
Wires and electronic traces. Low resistivity, highly ductile, and again, high corrosion resistance.
Polycarbonate-gold astronaut sunglasses.
There is an asteroid-sized pile of potential applications, for which gold is currently ruled out due to the cost of obtaining sufficient quantities, while gold is strictly superior to some other material in all other respects. Subbing in cheaper gold does make us all richer. Most people have no idea how much money is lost every year to corrosion.
Interesting, but after giving it some thought (I actively research steel hull efficiency), doubtful. It's true that gold is highly stable in seawater when not in contact with other metals, however, put it in contact with steal and you have a fairly decent dissimilar metal reaction leading to galvanic corrosion of the hull over time. (1) Gold is very soft, so any impact with common marine debris (logs, scrap, buoys, etc.) may very will penetrate to the steel hull structure, which unless quickly repaired would lead to the above corrosion. In general, hulls are designed to account for 40-50yrs of service life corrosion before needing to be scrapped.
However, this comment made me ask the question of whether or not gold is a good antifouling agent to prevent marine growth. After all, we've all seen shiny non-fouled gold being pulled from ancient ship wrecks. I really can't find much data on gold preventing marine growth, but if successful, cost-effective, and non-toxic (as copper is), that would be a major savings in terms of fuel efficiency for ocean-going vessels.
1. https://blog.samtec.com/post/dissimilar-metals-in-mating-con...
But if gold resists the barnacle adhesive even a little bit, that's already a major win.
Estimates that I have seen are that the big cargo ships are around 400 meters long and 50 meters deep. I'm not sure their surface area, but let's call it 60,000 square meters. (22,0000 for each side of a wall of those dimensions, and some amount for the bottom. So to gold plate it is a half-million dollars. https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-fuel-a-cargo-... estimates $130,000 per day for a ship under power.
If gold plating worked, lasted, and didn't leave damage, someone would have figured out that it was worthwhile to do already. So if you deal with it professionally, by all means look into it. But I wouldn't be too hopeful.
That leaf is probably an order of magnitude (if not two) thinner than your kitchen foil.
In fact gold leaf is 0.1 microns. Standard aluminum foil is 0.016 mm = 16 microns. So 160 times thinner, or about 2 orders of magnitude.
When used to gild buildings in air, it typically lasts 40-50 years. Of course a ship's hull in water is likely to be a much more hostile environment...
But gilding is a purely ornamental technique. It's not there to defend the lower layers from elements.
A literal "golden age" to rival the iron age?
They won't stay the same relative to each other if anyone's current wealth is more related to the scarcity of the precious material in question than anyone else, which is guaranteed to be the case for any precious material.
But the dynamics are the same so long as the supply glut is in things interchangeable with what is precious (e.g., diamonds that, down to the De Beers microetching, are indistinguishable from the ones that people place value on.)
Lithium and cobalt are a major cost for Li-Ion batteries, tanking their price could transform the world with cheap(er) energy storage.
No one ever thought it was going to work this way.
In the words of Syndrome: "When everyone's super... no one will be" Poverty is relative wealth, so if everyone's wealth increased by the same amount, the poverty line would be exactly the same.
If you gave everyone on earth 1kg of gold simultaneously, it would actually make the poor poorer since it would devalue any of their current golden possessions to near zero.
Also remember people saying that in the early 1980's cocaine was essentially worthless in Bimini because it was being used as a staging point in the drug trade.
If we suddenly get a lot of new resources, we should ask how does that impact people's time, and those answers will indicate meaningful changes in wealth.
Just as examples:
The CEO making millions, but also working non stop, could be fairly poor in the basic sense. Slave to the job. One can make the argument they want to do that, etc... and once family, other basics are factored in, that argument may not be as easy as one might think.
Close that next deal, or attend the soccer game?
Another example may be someone who has very little financially, but maybe lives lean, has few dependencies. They may just not need too much, and have lots of time to purpose. That person is fairly wealthy, despite a low net worth.
Think about it this way: what if we gave everyone in the world a brand new iPhone. It's true that the resale value of an iPhone would decrease, but would the world really be poorer? I think that's a very hard argument to make.
If everyone in the world got 1 kg of gold, it would be as if everyone on earth got 1 kg of aluminum... that is to say, you would have a hard time turning that gold into something more useful than a paperweight. You would probably be able to take it to the nearest scrap metal recycling plant and get a few bucks.
Nope. This is entirely wrong.
Consider: You have $100. I have $1000. We both get +$50 worth of gold. So you have $150 and I have $1050. You increased your welth by 50%, but I only increased my wealth by 5%. So yes, if you had no money, you actually did earn purchasing power.
Let's consider another example: The poor person probably has $0 invested in gold. So if anything, it hurts people in the middle class, who might have let's say 5% of their wealth in gold, which is suddenly worthless. So the poor person has actually increased their buying power compared to the middle class, and the rich (who probably have so much money in real-estate and stocks that any gold investment is minuscule) are unaffected.
It would make people whose wealth is disproportionately stored in gold poorer. Same as if a company hands out a bunch of shares ex nihilo -- the existing shareholders are screwed. The people who had no shares and now have some shares are richer, despite the shares being devalued.
If the poor are heavily invested in gold, then plonking a bunch of gold into the economy will make them poorer, but I don't think they are.
However, the real importance of mining asteroids is that it would make it possible to build colonies in space that could potentially hold far more than the present population of Earth.
See O'Neill's original designs.
Imagine if copper wire were replaced with cheaper gold wire?
Yeah, that wouldn't happen. Though maybe it would bring down the cost of certain scientific equipment. Countries like India would probably suffer since they "invest" heavily in gold.
destroy the *gold mining economy
A heavy asteroid might have a lot of Silver in it for all we know.
The property of gold that I like the most is that you can hammer it into such a thin film that it is transparent to some wavelengths of light..
edit: The article does seem to cover this situation kind of.
"There is a lot of gold right here on Earth that has not been dug up! Because it is pretty deep underground or whatever. The relevant supply of gold is the stuff that can be extracted economically, not just the stuff that exists. The same thing is even more true hundreds of millions of miles away in outer space. You cannot just send a big dump truck to Psyche 16, shovel some loose gold nuggets into it, and drive it back to your house."
That would get quickly radiated away. There would be some tiny increase if you had a sustained amount of it constantly coming in.
In gold boom towns, say, as in the California and Alaskan gold rushes, gold nuggets or dust were used in everyday commerce. But at a sharp discount to their value elsewhere.
See also drug value to farmer vs. street, or prices of oil at wellhead vs. end-user, especially in early days (say, 1859-1930).
Some perspective needed. According to [1], Earth absorbs 3.85e24 J/year from the sun. One kg of mass falling to Earth from infinity (i.e. at escape velocity, 11.2 km/s) has kinetic energy (mv^2)/2 ~ 6.27e7 J.
So you would need to drop 6.14e16 kg/year on Earth to match the solar contribution. Something minor like 1000 metric tons (1e6 kg) per year would only contribute 1.63e-11 of what we get from the sun, or roughly 0.0005 seconds worth of sunlight.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy#Potential
The wealth comes from prices going down for useful things and new things becoming possible as a result of the lowered costs.
How much of battery costs are the metals? What about rare earths used in electronics? What compromises are made to save costs?
Even if the central banks did sell all their reserves, sure, it would be a shock to the gold market and professional commodity traders would notice, but it wouldn't vastly change the availability of gold in the long term. The central banks have maybe 20% of the world's mined gold in their vaults. Most of it is already being used in jewellery or industrial applications.
[1] https://www.palomartechnologies.com/blog/why-gold-tin-is-the...
I'm not a physicist yet without something like fusion as a miniaturized propellant I don't see how it can ever be wiser to mine asteroids than try to live more sustainably on Earth first.
* We don’t have fusion reactors
* If we did, we could mine fuel from the gas giants’ atmospheres
* He3 is so poorly concentrated in the Lunar regolith that the easy way to extract it also produces high purity silicon and oxygen
* Turning that silicon into ingots and firing them at the Earth, you can generate more power from electromagnetically decelerating them then you would get from the fusion of the helium, and this is a perfectly sensible way to generate power because of the relative depth of the Earth and Moon gravity wells
* You can then burn the silicon instead of coal, and this is absolutely fine because the ash is sand instead of a greenhouse gas. You can also bring oxygen from the Moon to burn it with so you won’t run out of oxygen on Earth to breathe.
Unfortunately I can’t find the post whenever I’ve tried searching for it.
If you can create solar panels from asteroid materials and use water as propellant, it's relatively easy to move materials around in the solar system. You operate on asteroids so you never need high thrust. Delivery takes time though.
Pretty sure Iain M. Banks describes such a game in “Consider Phlebas” though.
But gold isn't that interesting. The only reason it's valued the way it is, is because everybody has agreed it's valuable. But there are many other rare metals and minerals we can mine from asteroids that would be immensely useful. In smartphones and other electronics, for example.
At the moment, rare earth elements are often mined in terrible destructive ways, sometimes under atrocious circumstances. Fairphone is the one phone company that's trying to do something about it, but on their own, they're not going to have a lot of impact. Off-world mining would allow us to leave our Earth intact while still enjoying the smartphones and other electronics that these materials enable.
Harvesting sand and helium from space might be more valuable than gold.
https://www.npr.org/2017/07/21/538472671/world-faces-global-...
The only reason why gold is valuable is because it is easily and arbitrarily divisible, can be worn as a status symbol to advertise your wealth, and it has a goldilocks scarcity where the amount you have to carry to do human-scale business is not smaller than a dime, but also not heavier than a large cat.
The last is becoming less and less true with as population size grows (I can't buy a 5-pound bag of sugar with gold), but the slack is taken up by fiat.
Value, Price, and Wealth
I'd suggest a different triad: cost, price, value.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/48rd02/cost_va...
Are there better examples for illustrating the differences between these kind of distinct terms?
Less convertible collectibles like coins and baseball cards (that require energy for exchange) have (over time t): costs of production, marketing, and distribution; retail sales price; market price; and 'value' which is abstract relative (opportunity cost in terms of fiat currency (which is somehow distinct from price at time t (possibly due to 'speculative information')))
Wealth comes from relationships, margins between costs and prices, long term planning, […]
For concepts as intrinsically fundamental to economics as these are, the agreement and understanding of what they are, even amomg economists, is surprisingly poor. It's not even clear whether or not "wealth" refers to a flow or stock -- Adam Smith uses the term both ways. And much contemporary mainstream 'wealth creation" discussion addresses accounting profit rather than economic wealth. Or broader terms such aas ecological wealth (or natural capital). There's some progress, and Steve Keen has been synthesizing much of it recently, but the terms fare poorly.
A key issue is that "price‘ and "exchange value" are ofteen conflated, creating confusiin with use/ownership value.
Addressing your terms, "cost" and "price", and typically "value", indicate some metric of exchange or opportunity cost (or benefit). Whilst "wealth", as typically used, tends to relate to some store or accumulation. In electrical terms (a potentially, so to speak, useful analogue) the difference between voltage and charge, with current representing some other property, possibly material flows of goods or energy.
The whole question of media for exchange (currency, and the like), and durable forms of financial wealth (land, art, collectibles) is another interesting one, with discussionnby Ricardo and Jevons quite interesting -- both useful and flawed.
And don't even get me started on the near total discounting of accumulated natural capital, say, the 100-300 million year factor of time embodied in fossil fuels. The reasons and rationales for excluding that being fascinating (Ricardo, Tolstoy, Gray, Hotelling, Boulding, Soddy, Georgescu-Roegen, Daly, Keen).
You are correct that all value (and hence wealth) is relative, and hence relational.
TL;DR: Not that I'm aware.