Sunday, November 10, 2019

Why Asteroid Mining is Gonna Be Epic.

If you think space is awesome, and you think mining asteroids for precious minerals is freaking amazing, you're not amazed enough.

Right now, there are estimates that suggest that an asteroid mining operation could cost upwards of 2.5 billion dollars. However, when compared to the costs of doing it here on Earth, the prices are not as far off as expected.

Dont believe me? Read this:

 https://physicsworld.com/a/the-asteroid-trillionaires/

Anyway, you're not amazed enough. Why? Because theres one thing you're not thinking about. Well, maybe you are thinking about it.

Imagine with me for a moment. It is the Year 2050. Several asteroid mining companies in the past 30 years have not only demonstrated the feasibility of mining asteroids, but they have also put in the time, energy and research that made the relevant economies of scale possible.

They're not only mining asteroids of gold, platinum and other minerals. They are doing it cheaply and effectively. They've been doing it for years.

As a result, they have flooded the marketplace with an abundance of resources. Theres so much gold that Midas himself has penis envy.

That's the future. It is a future where going to the store and buying a reel of plastic coated pure gold wire for your electronics project will cost you twenty bucks. All of those applications in science for gold and platinum? Not only is it cheap and available, these materials are the superior replacements for traditionally utilized materials.

It is a future where proposing to your girlfriend/boyfriend/partner with a 12 dollar pure gold wedding band might not only be possible, but make you look cheap. Gold is a great conductor, sure. But Rhodium is forever. That metal is probably running the same price as gold does today, but it's also hella hard to work with and requires jewelers with some serious equipment to get that shit shaped into a wedding ring. Jesus, hypothetical "proposer", get your shit together.

What I'm saying is that as we move forward with quantum computing,  AI, digital currencies, medicine and a slew of other emerging technologies, we will find that mining in space will have a pretty interesting effect on how we percieve the values of resources traditionally considered precious. 

One might consider it one possible facet of a larger possible phenomenon: Post-Scarcity.

As a tangential aside to this little blog post, I wanna go on record to say that overcoming scarcity at a global level might be naive. After all, every resource is limited, and that it is simply our ability to access large amounts of a resource cheaply that does in fact make it easier for it to feel the economic effects of deflating value.

I think a better way to put it would be The Asymptotic Approach to Negligible Scarcity Via Increasingly Financial Efficaciousness of Resource Acquisition.

To be honest... Post-Scarcity is easier to tote about in everyday conversation.

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