A Giant Asteroid of Gold Won’t Make Us Richer
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[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.
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
There 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Harvesting sand and helium from space might be more valuable than gold.
https://www.npr.org/2017/07/21/538472671/world-faces-global-...
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.
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?
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:
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).
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.
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...
You want your coating to be electrochemically weaker than the material you are trying to protect so it dissolves instead of the material.
The whole article is written with the tone of someone who doesn't understand the concept of "unknown unknowns".
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.
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.
We've had to allocate agile scientific minds to reduce the use of expensive platinum-group metals in fuel cells in order to make them cost effective:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2018-12-scientist...
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.
We're talking billions of miles away, with astonishing temperature variations and nearly pure vacuum. Spare parts are months/years away.
Then, it takes tremendous energy to mine/smelt. And tremendous pressures. How do you grapple with an asteroid in weightless conditions, to apply a drill to the surface? What do you hold onto? How do you generate the torque to turn the drill? Not from some kW power source such as used in existing satellites and probes. We're talking MW/GW power sources needed.
Then, drilling produces dust/grit by the ton. Where will it go? Just blow it away? There's no atmosphere to vent dust. It'll all just cling, hover and generally be in the way. Building up continuously as you drill.
There are 1000 such problems to be solved before we ever see the first ounce of gold (or whatever) from an asteroid.
It will require inventions and new technologies to successfully mine the asteroid, and those will give society access to vast new resources.
Lithium and cobalt are a major cost for Li-Ion batteries, tanking their price could transform the world with cheap(er) energy storage.
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.)
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?
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..
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
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?
The technical challenges and competition will change everything. Maybe some scientific platforms could hitch a ride at a heavily discounted price, for example?
If I buy gold in a commodities market, it is kept in a holding area and rarely moved, but I can for a fee have that gold shipped to me if I really wanted to. Since there is not a substantial price difference in shipping gold to one place vs another on Earth (within the same order of magnitude at least), it doesn't really matter "who" I buy the gold from, so for purely terrestrial markets, gold is gold.
But space-based gold would be much more expensive to ship back to Earth, even if gravity is generally on our side in that case, since you are subsidizing the infrastructure required to make that happen. And this probably wouldn't happen that much anyway, since the space-based gold would likely be kept in space to build more space-based infrastructure.
So would that create 2 different prices for gold? Or would space-based gold be much cheaper than terrestrial gold, offset by some coefficient that would be its relative movement cost between realms?
I am by no means an economics expert, I'm just musing. I believe I'm essentially talking about arbitrage, but need to refresh my memory on this.
If that price moves further from zero than the cost of insuring and transporting gold bars with a company like Brinks, then someone does step in and complete the arbitrage.
If I remember right, the prices don't typically move more than about a dollar an ounce from zero, except for Tokyo where the purity rules are different so there is an extra step involved in melting down the bars and getting them restamped.
If there was some demand for holding gold in space, I'd expect roughly the same economics to apply.
But Wall Street and the Fed (Bloomberg's audience) basically fund every moonshot these days (directly or indirectly) and either they or Congress get into an asteroid race, spends millions/billions/trillions of dollars but fail to recover any more marketable quantities of physical gold for Earth's surface than would an expedition to the center of the Earth (where there's also gold!) ... and instead sell certificates representing ownership shares of the asteroid, which initially trade at pairity with physical Earth-surface metal, but as it becomes clearer that this is an IOU nothing printed based on the most optimistic projections of what is contained in the space rock (and then there are the competing claims of multiple expeditions!), the paper declines precipitously in value and once again demonstrates that economic theory is fine and good, but unmoored from the discipline provided by tangible backing of gold, oil, or whatever, a system of currency and credit like ours predicably generates worthless pieces of paper from huge misallocations of resources and waste.
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.
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).
Lower prices for resources would make us richer in spending power.
An asteroid miner, just like a Bhp or Mincore, would have to take into account the effect on market prices of a large new supply.
Mass of (2.41±0.32)×10^19 kg
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are plenty of precious metals that have abundant industrial uses.
The Children Risking Their Lives In Underwater Gold Mines ... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P1L_pxYZVwE
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."
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.