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.
It was also used in medical implants, since it’s a pretty inert material ( was, because nowadays there are better biocompatible materials).
Gold is an extremely useful metal, WTF are you talking about? Despite its artificially high cost, it still gets regularly used in industrial applications. If it had a more reasonable price, it would be used a ton
I hope palladium and other PGM become worthless so catalyst converters are ok to own
You just want to keep your stolen converters ;)
Convert Deez nuts
That’s no moon.
This discovery makes the anunnaki look really stupid.
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.
You fool, the tax payers will fund it. The billionaire will merely provide the shell companies to channel government funding through, in return for some sizeable dark money political donation kickbacks that will enable whatever crooked politicians who allowed such theft to occur to absolutely flood the airwaves with propaganda at every election cycle.
Exactly what they did with diamonds.
Until we got synthetic diamonds
“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
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
It wouldn’t make anything cheaper. We owe more on national debt that all our billionaire could even come close to playing, and that is if China have us market value for the after we would need to sell from the billionaire to extract the value.
Money is fake do you not understand that its like a placeholder an idea of obligation it doesn’t exist materially even these round metal things are just round metal things the money of them is just calvinball
Your right, so how would getting rid of billionaire change anything? They don’t have money, they have stocks and assets
Which are money money isn’t the coin its the thing the coin implies stocks are closer to being money than coins in our very class immobile society its closer to a mystical property like phlogiston or being one of the elect a rare collectors pog is a more meaningful money than a penny a nice suit and white skin more money than either
But those sticks, like rooms for example are only trading at 350p/e because of Elon. If we got rid of him it would be trading at 30 like every other car company. That’s would wipe out 600 billion overnight. You would get virtually nothing from that extraction and Tesla didn’t provide enough profits to solve us hunger or housing, and with the value being extracted the company would unfortunately fall to it’s competitors like byd.
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?
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
Well, given how heavy gold is, I think a decent size brick would still do the job ;p
Best I can do is a can of krylon
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.
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
Gold coating for connectors is nice. For everything else it doesn’t really matter, you get an oxide layer that prevents further oxidation.
I stand corrected. Idk why I thought it was a better conductor
It has ~70% the conductivity of pure copper, it’s not “shit”
You are wrong , Fry-man
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
It’s funny that people think the wealth from asteroid mining will trickle down.
It’s more silly to me that they think the price of gold would remain high with such a large addition to supply. Most fundamental economic concept apparently escapes some people
Its even more silly to think it wouldn’t remain high because a government got to the meteor first and just hoarded the whole thing.
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?
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.
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.
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
enought to make everyone on earth billionaires
How very thoughtful. Hope the present billionaires dont accidentally hoard it.
Naw the new quintillionaires will let everyone have a bit. The biggest change will be adjusting to the new ten-thousand-dollar menu at mcdonalds
And minimum wage remains unchanged
More like the one-hundred-trillion-dollar menu.
Can we send Putin, Trump and a bunch of African tyrants (whatever their names are) there? I bet they would be glad.
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?
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.
Motherboards used gold before. Recyclers make a good profit finding old motherboards just for the gold.
Many motherboards still use gold components.
Ea-nāṣir and his low-quality gold…
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.
Not if I get to it first
And that’s exactly what every billionaire is thinking.
And it’s all yours 😊
