At least everything would be covered in gold then. Electronics would be cheaper too.
They’d be cheaper to make.
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
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
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
Not if I get to it first
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
More like the one-hundred-trillion-dollar menu.
Yes, like everyone in Zimbabwe is a billionaire in Zimbabwe dollars.
The so-called Zimbillionaires
Yeah like the influx of gold and silver from the Americas shook the European economy in the 17th century:
That explains why our economy is so shaken today!
This level of inflation amounts to 1.2% per year compounded, a relatively low inflation rate for modern-day standards, but rather high given the monetary policy in place in the 16th century.
But think of the gold cable connectors.
Monster Cable would have to find a new, useless luxury connection material. Platinum plated HDMI with carbon fiber strain relief boots.
#dontlookup
This would be useful for tech reasons I think. Isn’t gold a better conductor than copper?
Everyone being a billionaire is the same as no one being a billionaire.
Like I told the VP who marked every single email as High Importance…when everything is important, nothing is important
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
Look up a movie called “Don’t look up” which has a similar story regarding a situation like this. I’ll say human greed has no bounds.
To be fair, that movie was about climate change, not really the asteroid
Tim apple fucked us good.
Making everyone on earth richer is how it’s supposed to work. Not like millionaires, more in the sense that gold is a resource that requires us to ration it in a sense, and we would be able to use the cheaper gold to make all lives better.
That an influx of gold wouldn’t do this is an indictment on our economic system.
It would make gold cheaper and more abundant for sure. But that doesn’t really mean too much. Slightly cheaper electronics, much cheaper gold jewelry, and Trump can build an entire tower out of gold if he wants I guess. Gold is important, but suddenly having an order of magnitude more wouldn’t mean we’re all an order of magnitude better off.
But really someone pointed out that only part of that asteroid is gold and the total value was calculated using the value of all the different metals in there. Iron (boring, it’s not THAT expensive as is), iridium (quite important for electronics), etc. If we managed to bring that whole asteroid into orbit and actually share the spoils equally between nations, a lot of different things would be slightly cheaper to manufacture. Not sure the effect would be too noticeable in the end though. We have a tendency to manufacture more shit than we need so cheaper materials would just facilitate that.
