godspeed brownsugga

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.

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.

Being rich means having a surplus of valuable commodities and capital.

In a modern capitalist system, the commodities are fetishized in order to inflate their received value.

But in a more socialized system, shared capital has the capacity to enrich everyone.

The big catch is that, under a more socialist economy existing in parallel with a capitalist media, poverty becomes associated with the public institutions while capitalism becomes indicative of education, independence, and success.

An individual might be wealthy with respect to historical peers under a socialist model, but still feel improvised relative to the elites and their horded private wealth. That they’ve got access to libraries and parks and subways and public housing doesn’t feel like wealth relative to the country clubbers who have more grandeous private versions of all of the above.

You’ll see this in Western depictions of Soviet states all the time. Small apartments, bread lines, and grumpy bureaucrats are slanted as rampant poverty. Meanwhile, homelessness and malnutrition and the lawless frontier are all just part of the Hero’s Journey on the way to glory.

It’s probably both. I wouldn’t call your friendly security guard wealthy.

If you actually love your SO you need to save up 2 years salary for a ring.

I mean, they’d switch value systems. They’ve already done that by making “debt” as the unit of value.

Nah, copper has better conductivity. Gold is better with corrosion resistance and it doesn’t char when making contact. That’s why it’s used to plate terminal contacts, like the ends of hdmi plugs, and switch contacts. Silver is the best.

will there be advantages for daily life if gold is trivially affordable? probably, it’s a good material for many applications. and is extremely rust resistant.

Coating all exposed metals with gold would be trivial.

[Skip a few paragraphs of technical world building. ]

it’ll be an increments tech step without any changes in inequality and a minor change in the public quality of life.

It’s funny that people can understand every person having a lump of gold won’t improve their standard of living, but at the same time refuse to understand that owning a piece of a factory or a company they work at also does not directly change the standard of living. Reducing the fraction of the factory output that goes to the owners instead of the workers could. This can be done directly with raising the minimum wage or indirectly via taxes. But in the end, even the most pessimistic calculation I was able to make on how much the owners take was only about 50% of the output. Probably more like 30%.

So the billionaires owning too much is IMO a distraction. Pushing politicians to implement policies that would improve quality of life would have much bigger impact on peoples lives. Consumer protections, walkable cities, good public healthcare, social safety nets, better education, reforming how stock market works, … And it does not involve the massive risks of trying to switch to a differwnt economic model that always collapsed before.

Perhaps it’s the modern obsession with fairness. People don’t want to even consider that in reality they may have better quality of life in an unfair system (where billionaire kids get everything on silver platter) than in a fair system. Because in reality, system change, fending off corruption, laziness, authoritarianism, etc. have large costs.

True… There are lots of billionaires in Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Argentina

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.

“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

Exactly what they did with diamonds.

Monster Cable would have to find a new, useless luxury connection material. Platinum plated HDMI with carbon fiber strain relief boots.

We should take all of the world’s billionaires, load them into Bezos’ dick rocket and send them in the general direction of this asteroid.