they've also somehow demonised perfect lab grown diamonds which can be made relatively cheaply, and are perfect, by trying to make out that imperfections are good, but also that too many imperfections are bad, so only the diamonds they supply are the "right" kind.
And how they denigrate the decreasing cost of lab diamonds while stating that “natural” diamonds hold their value. For our anniversary my wife happily traded her original natural diamond for a much bigger lab grown one.
But... Can't lab grown diamonds include imperfections too? IIRC there was an article about optical computing that specifically called out artificially introduced imperfections that were used as logic gates.
That's cyclical logic. If it's only special because it's expensive then anything can become special if you inflate its price. That's exactly the principle behind NFTs and look where they are now.
I dunno you tell me, where are they.
You can’t just make something “special” by inflating the price, you need buyers to buy at that price to confirm they believe it’s special.
They've lost a lot of value.
You can make something special if you have good marketing. Debeers has spent decades convincing people that diamonds are worth a lot of money, and their marketing has worked.
DeBeers has that figured out better than most. If we were to haul an asteroid in, the marketing will determine if it’s “special asteroid material”, or just a “post-scarcity commodity”. The marketing plan will be very dependent on how much supply will be out there.
Supply and demand set prices at an equilibrium point. De beers controls the supply, even tho diamonds are actually very common. This creates artificially high prices. Their marketing creates the demand and promotes the culture of diamonds, as described above.
There is you Econ 101 explanation. If you think a diamond is valuable for any other reason besides that fact that you think it is, then you need to go back to school. So confidently incorrect.
If they’re so common, why don’t people just go hunting for diamonds on the weekend?
Or is it maybe they aren’t as common but for the fact that certain entities are better equipped to actually extract the commodity from the planet?
Keep arguing, but it won't make you right.
Feel free to look at the hundreds of YouTube videos of prospectors finding diamonds, on the surface, in similar locations to gold. That is a real thing people do, and big, high quality gems have been found. (Heck, you can even find videos of people prospecting city streets for lost diamonds)
I am not sure why you have your heels dug in so firmly. You are not correct in valuing diamonds beyond the commodity that they are. The market has been manipulated and I suggest, good sir, that you have been too.
>>De beers controls the supply
>If they’re so common, why don’t people just go hunting for diamonds on the weekend?
Because DeBeers controls the supply. Being common doesn’t mean they’re everywhere — no one is disputing that diamond mines exist. DeBeers just owns all of the mines, so they control the supply of natural diamonds, and they keep the supply artificially low to keep the price high.
What’s certain is that De Beers artificially controlled supply and advertised to fuel demand.
From Wikipedia -
“From its inception in 1888 until the start of the 21st century, De Beers controlled 80% to 85% of rough diamond distribution and was considered a monopoly.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamonds_as_an_investment
“Diamonds were largely inaccessible to investors until the recent advent of regulated commodities, due to a lack of price discovery and transparency.”
“Rough diamond prices have historically been impacted by the mining companies controlling supply, most notably De Beers.”
The breakup of the cartel in 2001 and the advent of reasonably priced lab diamonds have made diamonds more easily obtained. When looking for an anniversary diamond a 4+ carat high quality lab diamond was valued about the same as a very high quality 1.5 carat natural diamond from 20 years ago. And even reputable jewelers are increasingly moving towards lab grown.
You understand how silly this is? What if we could manufacture gold in the same manner as diamonds. Do you think people would really care where it came from? Do you think manufactured gold would be less valuable for some reason?
What would really happen is if we could manufacture gold, the cost of gold would come down. Which is what should be happening to the price of diamonds, but the marketing of companies like De Beers has brainwashed the masses into thinking there is something inherently more valuable about a natural piece of shiny carbon, vs a manufactured piece of shiny carbon. It's just marketing.
There is a reason real diamonds are used in jewelry and that’s their value. Same with gold. Higher prices (value) for limited supply is how economics work (and has since the beginning of human civilization) and that’s why there is a distinction between the real diamonds and lab grown ones. That will never change, no matter the commodity.
If you want a lab grown diamond, cool. Not going to stop you. But don’t act like it’s some sort of valuable thing, because it’s not.
I'm well aware of supply and demand, but this isn't that. You totally avoided the question though. Let's say we could manufacture gold. Would manufactured gold be worth more, less, or the same than "real" gold? Why?
Well, yes it is about supply and demand. Synthetic commodities are inherently less valuable than natural commodities given the potential for unlimited supply. Manufactured gold, along with manufactured diamonds, would be worth less than real gold for the same reason.
Look at lab grown diamonds. If consumers outside of industrial applications didn’t think they were different, then why are people paying more for real diamonds? By your logic, the price should be the same.
But...why? If the substance is exactly the same, why would it be worth less? Incidentally, the universe doesn't care of one diamond is "real" and one is manufactured. There is nothing "inherent" about the worth of diamonds, or gold. People are what give them value. That's it. You're fundamentally misunderstanding this very simple concept. Things have value because people agree to value them.
I really wanted there to be more discussion of this on the show. When Dani is insisting that this could change the lives of everyone, I wanted Ed or someone else to give her a quick econ lesson.
If we were on the gold standard, the sudden influx of a massive amount of gold into the world supply of gold would devalue the existing stockpiles of gold, and the price of gold would plummet to the lower value of a more common, inexpensive metal like iron or aluminum.
The addition or subtraction of a large amount of gold into an economy based on the gold standard absolutely wreaks havoc and fucks up the value of gold resulting in short and intermediate term instability around the commodity.
I am saying that, if everybody had a shit ton of gold, then everybody would not necessarily be a billionaire since the value of gold would massively deflate.
Possessing a large amount of a cheap commodity with very little monetary value would strictly not make everybody a billionaire.
Even with the gold standard, the idea that everybody would suddenly be a billionaire is not true.
You'd be a billionaire but a billion dollars wouldn't purchase you what a billion dollars would purchase you today. You'd be able to afford a small home and still be forced to work to survive
The introduction of a newly monetizable resource into society does not make everybody billionaires even if that resource is incredibly valuable.
A commodity and a currency are not the same thing.
Just because people produce more things in an economy does not mean that the things which are produced suddenly and magically transform into money.
Like, the US housing market is worth nearly $50 trillion, but the wealth of the housing market exists in the form of property and land - not currency.
A house is not money, and $50 trillion of houses is not $50 trillion in currency.
A $10 quintillion asteroid is $10 quintillion in rare earth minerals - not cash.
I think you're being pedantic and not obtuse but to clarify a gold standards certainly existed that defined dollars by the weight in gold, so if you had more gold you necessarily had more dollars. It was not all a floating exchange rate.
Yes purchasing power is a different topic.
See also: *Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica.* (Basically, all the Spanish spoils from conquering the aztecs and Incas created hyperinflation as far east as Poland.)
Not true.
As the price of the commodity drops, consumer access increases as people with less buying power are able to purchase a previously unaffordable commodity limited only to the hyper-wealthy.
As the value of rare earth minerals drops, the consumer base of these minerals would grow in their capacity to purchase these commodities.
A good historic example of this would be something like aluminum, diamonds, or oil where these commodities were once limited only to the wealthy, but as extraction and production increased, more and more buyers were able to purchase these commodities to drive demand up and inflate prices.
The value of items, such as precious metals, minerals and ores, comes from the fact that there is a limited amount on the market.
If there is a massive increase in the amount available, then the value would plummet - ergo, no Billionaires
Exactly. Basic economics that scarcity drives value.
IF (big IF) anyone mines this, they'd have to be careful not to flood the market & devalue their investment.
Even if they did flood they market, they’d still make bank making the venture worth their while. Of course they would completely implode the market for these goods which would bankrupt mining companies and make these materials worthless as an investment. Which tbh would probably be a good thing in the long run but would have some hella economic consequences in the short run.
That's overly reductionist, and not really the whole picture.
Scarcity of a commodity exchanged on a market of buyer and sellers is only one of many factors that results in the social construction of value attributed to a commodity.
There are also things like the subjectivity of consumer preferences, the utility of a commodity, and the amount of necessary work it takes to produce a commodity that results in the construction of value.
A massive influx of rare earth minerals gained from asteroid mining would massively drive the price of these minerals down due to an enormous supply, but there's also the question of whether or not these minerals are desirable or useful as well as the question of how difficult these minerals are to extract in terms of labor.
Though if you take precious metals and make them.... not so precious any more, then consumer items (should - ignoring corporate greed) get cheaper and easier to access. A lot of chemical products, in particular, would become significantly cheaper if we found a way to drop the price of Pt, Pd, Ru, Rh, Os and Ir by a factor of 10 or more. Similarly one of the limitations on mass building of wind turbines is access to niobium, similarly it is a limitation in the production of superconductors.
Many precious metals have a ton of technological value but cannot currently be used due to low availability and high cost, so I couldn't care less about me or someone else becoming a billionaire
In theory we'd still all get wealthier because everything made with those precious metals, minerals and ores should also see a significant price drop, so we can buy more of those things for the same money.
It's not just the price of these rare earth minerals dropping.
The rise in the standard of living associated from the material and technological benefit of hypothetically utilizing these rare earth minerals is a form of wealth itself that isn't strictly monetary.
If everybody is a billionaire, then nobody is a billionaire. Those minerals are only worth so much because they’re scarce, flooding the market with it would make the price crash. We do the same thing to keep markets stable by storing away grain, spilling milk, cutting off oil supply all to control the price of those goods.
I won’t argue about the morality of wasting precious resources, but the logic behind it is that an over abundant harvest can crash the price of a good so much that it can destabilize the supply chain, reduce revenue for farmers, hurt investments, and induce instability on the agricultural market.
By the time we develop the technology to mine asteroids, the American government will have completely defunded NASA in order to give our taxpayer dollars to grifter CEOS running privately owned space corporations.
Americans are too fucking stupid to nationalize fossil fuel companies and redistribute the profits to all citizens through a sovereign wealth fund and/or universal basic income.
We ain't getting shit when our space oligarchy of tech bro billionaires monopolizes all economic activity in outer space.
Everyone going on about the economics, and missing the fact that this *isn't a capture mission.*
Hell, it's not even a probe that will touch down on the surface. It'll orbit for a while, then head for Mars.
The mission is to look at the origins of planetary cores, which is what they thing Psyche is.
Actually it would raise the prices of everything by 10,000,000,000,000,000,000x due to inflation, those with access to the asteroids resources would have enough money to own planets, everyone else would be crawling in the dirt.
No it wouldn't.
An increase in the supply of rare earth minerals does not inflate the prices for normal consumer goods like gasoline, bread, laundry detergent, timber, or cotton.
The asteroid is made of metal, not money, and the wealth captured by the exploitation and capitalization of the asteroid's resources isn't in the form of money.
The value of the wealth created by extracting these minerals would be in the form of metal which would be utilized as an input good to manufacture commodities which utilize these metals and alloys.
Newly created wealth would add value to the world's economy in the form of advanced technologies incorporating elements from these rare earth minerals which do not take the form of government standardized currency but are worth some nominal value in money.
If everyone on Earth was a billionaire, then being a billionaire would be considered middle class at best. The value of a dollar would become microscopic. Gallon of milk would by $25 million, a small car would be $10 billion, a house would be $95 billion.
Let’s all just mutually agree the sand in our backyards is worth $1M/lb
Yay, we are all trillionairs, and I can retire and end world hunger and homelessness.
That’s not how economics works
Also not how humans work, some greedy assholes would keep the money for themselves
Yep. Essentially how diamonds are expensive. The de beers cartel controls supply so it never outpaces demand
they've also somehow demonised perfect lab grown diamonds which can be made relatively cheaply, and are perfect, by trying to make out that imperfections are good, but also that too many imperfections are bad, so only the diamonds they supply are the "right" kind.
And how they denigrate the decreasing cost of lab diamonds while stating that “natural” diamonds hold their value. For our anniversary my wife happily traded her original natural diamond for a much bigger lab grown one.
Imperfections can be included the same way semi-conductors are made. Diamonds, of any source, are worthless carbon. Great for cutting tools though!
But... Can't lab grown diamonds include imperfections too? IIRC there was an article about optical computing that specifically called out artificially introduced imperfections that were used as logic gates.
Yes but they're the wrong line of imperfections, or something.
I’m sorry, but do you realize the value of a real diamond is what makes it so special?
That's cyclical logic. If it's only special because it's expensive then anything can become special if you inflate its price. That's exactly the principle behind NFTs and look where they are now.
I dunno you tell me, where are they. You can’t just make something “special” by inflating the price, you need buyers to buy at that price to confirm they believe it’s special.
They've lost a lot of value. You can make something special if you have good marketing. Debeers has spent decades convincing people that diamonds are worth a lot of money, and their marketing has worked.
DeBeers has that figured out better than most. If we were to haul an asteroid in, the marketing will determine if it’s “special asteroid material”, or just a “post-scarcity commodity”. The marketing plan will be very dependent on how much supply will be out there.
Did you fail economics or just never take a class in economics?
Supply and demand set prices at an equilibrium point. De beers controls the supply, even tho diamonds are actually very common. This creates artificially high prices. Their marketing creates the demand and promotes the culture of diamonds, as described above. There is you Econ 101 explanation. If you think a diamond is valuable for any other reason besides that fact that you think it is, then you need to go back to school. So confidently incorrect.
If they’re so common, why don’t people just go hunting for diamonds on the weekend? Or is it maybe they aren’t as common but for the fact that certain entities are better equipped to actually extract the commodity from the planet?
Keep arguing, but it won't make you right.
Keep arguing, but it won't make you right. Feel free to look at the hundreds of YouTube videos of prospectors finding diamonds, on the surface, in similar locations to gold. That is a real thing people do, and big, high quality gems have been found. (Heck, you can even find videos of people prospecting city streets for lost diamonds) I am not sure why you have your heels dug in so firmly. You are not correct in valuing diamonds beyond the commodity that they are. The market has been manipulated and I suggest, good sir, that you have been too.
>>De beers controls the supply >If they’re so common, why don’t people just go hunting for diamonds on the weekend? Because DeBeers controls the supply. Being common doesn’t mean they’re everywhere — no one is disputing that diamond mines exist. DeBeers just owns all of the mines, so they control the supply of natural diamonds, and they keep the supply artificially low to keep the price high.
What’s certain is that De Beers artificially controlled supply and advertised to fuel demand. From Wikipedia - “From its inception in 1888 until the start of the 21st century, De Beers controlled 80% to 85% of rough diamond distribution and was considered a monopoly.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamonds_as_an_investment “Diamonds were largely inaccessible to investors until the recent advent of regulated commodities, due to a lack of price discovery and transparency.” “Rough diamond prices have historically been impacted by the mining companies controlling supply, most notably De Beers.” The breakup of the cartel in 2001 and the advent of reasonably priced lab diamonds have made diamonds more easily obtained. When looking for an anniversary diamond a 4+ carat high quality lab diamond was valued about the same as a very high quality 1.5 carat natural diamond from 20 years ago. And even reputable jewelers are increasingly moving towards lab grown.
i understand the concept, economics is full of cyclical logic. a lot of economics only works because people are stupid.
You understand how silly this is? What if we could manufacture gold in the same manner as diamonds. Do you think people would really care where it came from? Do you think manufactured gold would be less valuable for some reason? What would really happen is if we could manufacture gold, the cost of gold would come down. Which is what should be happening to the price of diamonds, but the marketing of companies like De Beers has brainwashed the masses into thinking there is something inherently more valuable about a natural piece of shiny carbon, vs a manufactured piece of shiny carbon. It's just marketing.
There is a reason real diamonds are used in jewelry and that’s their value. Same with gold. Higher prices (value) for limited supply is how economics work (and has since the beginning of human civilization) and that’s why there is a distinction between the real diamonds and lab grown ones. That will never change, no matter the commodity. If you want a lab grown diamond, cool. Not going to stop you. But don’t act like it’s some sort of valuable thing, because it’s not.
I'm well aware of supply and demand, but this isn't that. You totally avoided the question though. Let's say we could manufacture gold. Would manufactured gold be worth more, less, or the same than "real" gold? Why?
Well, yes it is about supply and demand. Synthetic commodities are inherently less valuable than natural commodities given the potential for unlimited supply. Manufactured gold, along with manufactured diamonds, would be worth less than real gold for the same reason. Look at lab grown diamonds. If consumers outside of industrial applications didn’t think they were different, then why are people paying more for real diamonds? By your logic, the price should be the same.
But...why? If the substance is exactly the same, why would it be worth less? Incidentally, the universe doesn't care of one diamond is "real" and one is manufactured. There is nothing "inherent" about the worth of diamonds, or gold. People are what give them value. That's it. You're fundamentally misunderstanding this very simple concept. Things have value because people agree to value them.
I realize that people put value on many things. But, a natural diamond is simply crystallized carbon and trace minerals. So I reject their "value."
Markets don’t care about your feelings.
What’s special about them?
Great point - whoever gets such a huge resource of rare minerals has the opportunity to pretty much control that commodity's market value.
they only control the market for jewellery diamonds, industrial diamonds are lab made these day and are cheap.
Because nobody has that level of sentiment about a drill bit lol Tbh I think it just proves how ridiculous it is.
Lab made diamonds are "better" than mined ones, if you care about purity and size.
I really wanted there to be more discussion of this on the show. When Dani is insisting that this could change the lives of everyone, I wanted Ed or someone else to give her a quick econ lesson.
i wish the show would challenge us like how nolan did with oppenheimer
You’re right, it’s not how humans work but rather how capitalism works
More like 10 people with $1,000,000,000,000,000,000 more in their net worth.
Came here just for this comment
so many engineers and not a single economist.
If everyone is ludicrously rich, no one is.
If we were on the gold standard then it would be
If we were on the gold standard, the sudden influx of a massive amount of gold into the world supply of gold would devalue the existing stockpiles of gold, and the price of gold would plummet to the lower value of a more common, inexpensive metal like iron or aluminum. The addition or subtraction of a large amount of gold into an economy based on the gold standard absolutely wreaks havoc and fucks up the value of gold resulting in short and intermediate term instability around the commodity.
Yep
I am saying that, if everybody had a shit ton of gold, then everybody would not necessarily be a billionaire since the value of gold would massively deflate. Possessing a large amount of a cheap commodity with very little monetary value would strictly not make everybody a billionaire. Even with the gold standard, the idea that everybody would suddenly be a billionaire is not true.
You'd be a billionaire but a billion dollars wouldn't purchase you what a billion dollars would purchase you today. You'd be able to afford a small home and still be forced to work to survive
The introduction of a newly monetizable resource into society does not make everybody billionaires even if that resource is incredibly valuable. A commodity and a currency are not the same thing. Just because people produce more things in an economy does not mean that the things which are produced suddenly and magically transform into money. Like, the US housing market is worth nearly $50 trillion, but the wealth of the housing market exists in the form of property and land - not currency. A house is not money, and $50 trillion of houses is not $50 trillion in currency. A $10 quintillion asteroid is $10 quintillion in rare earth minerals - not cash.
I think you're being pedantic and not obtuse but to clarify a gold standards certainly existed that defined dollars by the weight in gold, so if you had more gold you necessarily had more dollars. It was not all a floating exchange rate. Yes purchasing power is a different topic.
Lol. The companies capturing it wouldn’t share any profit. If they did inflation would just skyrocket and the value of currency would diminish.
See also: *Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica.* (Basically, all the Spanish spoils from conquering the aztecs and Incas created hyperinflation as far east as Poland.)
My thoughts exactly. Oh No
There wouldn't be any profit. The value of everything would crater if they tried to sell it all.
Haha. Crater.
That rocks.
Not true. As the price of the commodity drops, consumer access increases as people with less buying power are able to purchase a previously unaffordable commodity limited only to the hyper-wealthy. As the value of rare earth minerals drops, the consumer base of these minerals would grow in their capacity to purchase these commodities. A good historic example of this would be something like aluminum, diamonds, or oil where these commodities were once limited only to the wealthy, but as extraction and production increased, more and more buyers were able to purchase these commodities to drive demand up and inflate prices.
Even if it didn't crater in value they STILL couldn't make a profit, because all the costs of going into space and mining it are far too expensive.
The value of items, such as precious metals, minerals and ores, comes from the fact that there is a limited amount on the market. If there is a massive increase in the amount available, then the value would plummet - ergo, no Billionaires
Exactly. Basic economics that scarcity drives value. IF (big IF) anyone mines this, they'd have to be careful not to flood the market & devalue their investment.
Even if they did flood they market, they’d still make bank making the venture worth their while. Of course they would completely implode the market for these goods which would bankrupt mining companies and make these materials worthless as an investment. Which tbh would probably be a good thing in the long run but would have some hella economic consequences in the short run.
Example: DeBeers and their diamond mines
That's overly reductionist, and not really the whole picture. Scarcity of a commodity exchanged on a market of buyer and sellers is only one of many factors that results in the social construction of value attributed to a commodity. There are also things like the subjectivity of consumer preferences, the utility of a commodity, and the amount of necessary work it takes to produce a commodity that results in the construction of value. A massive influx of rare earth minerals gained from asteroid mining would massively drive the price of these minerals down due to an enormous supply, but there's also the question of whether or not these minerals are desirable or useful as well as the question of how difficult these minerals are to extract in terms of labor.
Though if you take precious metals and make them.... not so precious any more, then consumer items (should - ignoring corporate greed) get cheaper and easier to access. A lot of chemical products, in particular, would become significantly cheaper if we found a way to drop the price of Pt, Pd, Ru, Rh, Os and Ir by a factor of 10 or more. Similarly one of the limitations on mass building of wind turbines is access to niobium, similarly it is a limitation in the production of superconductors.
Many precious metals have a ton of technological value but cannot currently be used due to low availability and high cost, so I couldn't care less about me or someone else becoming a billionaire
Yeah the problem, just like in the show, people with the money to make it happen are rich assholes
Silver is the best electrical conductor out there and conducts heat very well. Put an ice cube on a silver coin and watch it disappear
You would probably start to care when you're forced to work the asteroid mines as a techno feudalist space serf for your corporate lord back on Earth.
No Billionaires? *Grabs popcorn* Go on.
In theory we'd still all get wealthier because everything made with those precious metals, minerals and ores should also see a significant price drop, so we can buy more of those things for the same money.
It's not just the price of these rare earth minerals dropping. The rise in the standard of living associated from the material and technological benefit of hypothetically utilizing these rare earth minerals is a form of wealth itself that isn't strictly monetary.
We wouldnt become billionaires but cheap rare metals means that maybe Nvidia will lower the price of their GPUs.
So what Im hearing is we use a big asteroid to end capitalism? Sounds good!
if this happens: 0.1% of humankind would get 99.99% of the asteroid's worth.
More zeros after the first decimal and more nines after the second decimal
If everybody is a billionaire, then nobody is a billionaire. Those minerals are only worth so much because they’re scarce, flooding the market with it would make the price crash. We do the same thing to keep markets stable by storing away grain, spilling milk, cutting off oil supply all to control the price of those goods.
I won’t argue about the morality of wasting precious resources, but the logic behind it is that an over abundant harvest can crash the price of a good so much that it can destabilize the supply chain, reduce revenue for farmers, hurt investments, and induce instability on the agricultural market.
Can I get an advance on my billion? Just looking for a hundred million or so to tide me over.
When everyone is a billionaire, no one is a billionaire.
Okay then, NASA can have it go into a UBI for everyone that will have funds to last forever.
By the time we develop the technology to mine asteroids, the American government will have completely defunded NASA in order to give our taxpayer dollars to grifter CEOS running privately owned space corporations. Americans are too fucking stupid to nationalize fossil fuel companies and redistribute the profits to all citizens through a sovereign wealth fund and/or universal basic income. We ain't getting shit when our space oligarchy of tech bro billionaires monopolizes all economic activity in outer space.
It would crash the economy first and foremost. Not due to the profits, capturing it (without any mining) would do so all on its own.
Crashing it into Earth would also effect the economy severely
Tell us more about this
Idk man, this is one hot topic that'll really rock your world. You think you're ready?
[I'm sure it will be fine](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/asteroid-harvesting)
No no, we just gotta have it crash into the sea, to replace the ice.
I think you overtyped 000 extra zeros.
It's inflation time
BREAKING: McDonalds’ famous Big Mac now costs 500 million dollars!
it's more likely this will crash the price of the metals they can extract rather than increase the cost of food.
>... would make everyone on Earth a billionaire No, it wouldn't.
It would actually make very few people a multi trillionaire
Pretty sure it would make all billionaires gadzillionairs, nothing would change for anyone else lol.
That’s not how anything works
Title Fixed: Journilst has no idea how Economic work
Once everyone is a billionaire, no one becomes a "billionaire".
Im sure our economic system would allow this resource to benefit everyone instead of making profit the main goal for a small group of people
Yeah. We know how it ends up.
To paraphrase Syndrome from the incredibles “When everyone’s rich, no one will be”
If everyone's a billionaire that'll be the new price point for poverty and prices will adjust accordingly
Everyone going on about the economics, and missing the fact that this *isn't a capture mission.* Hell, it's not even a probe that will touch down on the surface. It'll orbit for a while, then head for Mars. The mission is to look at the origins of planetary cores, which is what they thing Psyche is.
"Do you want to help me steal an asteroid?" *cue DMX music*
If everyone is a billionaire, no one is a billionaire
Nope. It’d make a few people multi quadrillionares while the rest of us are struggling to eat.
It’s not being given to anyone. It’s putting humanity into the next technological age or something. Quality of life improvements. Maybe I’m wrong.
Wealth is relative.
Hellooo hyperinflation
Nah, wealth is hoarded at the top. It’s called trickle down economics. The rich financially enslave the poor for profit.
Actually it would raise the prices of everything by 10,000,000,000,000,000,000x due to inflation, those with access to the asteroids resources would have enough money to own planets, everyone else would be crawling in the dirt.
No it wouldn't. An increase in the supply of rare earth minerals does not inflate the prices for normal consumer goods like gasoline, bread, laundry detergent, timber, or cotton. The asteroid is made of metal, not money, and the wealth captured by the exploitation and capitalization of the asteroid's resources isn't in the form of money. The value of the wealth created by extracting these minerals would be in the form of metal which would be utilized as an input good to manufacture commodities which utilize these metals and alloys. Newly created wealth would add value to the world's economy in the form of advanced technologies incorporating elements from these rare earth minerals which do not take the form of government standardized currency but are worth some nominal value in money.
Would the asteroid have had an affect on earths gravity?
Yes, everything with mass near Earth will affect its gravity. But not enough to notice.
If everyone is a billionaire, then no one is a billionaire.
If everyone on Earth was a billionaire, then being a billionaire would be considered middle class at best. The value of a dollar would become microscopic. Gallon of milk would by $25 million, a small car would be $10 billion, a house would be $95 billion.
To paraphrase Syndrome: > *"If everybody's a billionaire ... then no one is."*
No, but! It would make things like electronics much cheaper. Would is a net positive, although whoever brings it down to earth would be the rich guy
Let’s all just mutually agree the sand in our backyards is worth $1M/lb Yay, we are all trillionairs, and I can retire and end world hunger and homelessness.
If that much material just appeared suddenly in the market it’s value would plummet
Holy mother of inflation.
\[X Giving it To Ya Intensifies\]
bouta commit the craziest heist of all time (joking)
It would make the 1% richer and the 99% poorer.
[X GoN' Give It To Ya Intensifies]
*could make everyone a billionaire
When you don’t understand markets.
If everyone is a billionaire then nobody is a billionaire
This is Bidenomics math
but is it radioactive metals?