I did the math on the gold, too. Here are the top 6 countries in terms of gold reserves, as measured in minivans:
US, 23.4 gold minivans
Germany, 9.7 gold minivans
Italy, 7.0 gold minivans
France, 7.0 gold minivans
China, 5.2 gold minivans
Russia, 4.2 gold minivans
Please explain how adding one more gold minivan is going to crash the global economy. And please feel free to double check my calculations.
Also would appreciate your plan, however far-fetched, on how to locate, capture, and return one of these things to earth.
The mindset of these greed mongers is really just amazing. They are unable to look at anything without trying to make money from it. If they heard that human shit had a dollar value they’d have their hands deep in the toilet searching for the latest deposit.
Also the economy isn’t actually based on gold any more, for the most part.
Pretty impressed with Germany’s reserves was that built up post WWII? Where is the Swiss on that chart?
You would see probably a reduction in the price of gold, but the price of gold has more to do with speculation and the confidence of other currencies more than it has to do with just supply and demand.
This reminds me, I did write a story in high school about a group of world leaders discussing the ethics of mining Jupiter’s Hydrogen and the theorized solid diamond core (or partly diamond core). In hind sight, we wouldn’t ever need that much diamond for anything.
I don’t suppose they have some evidence to back up the claim that the universe is not something to be used for public good do they?
But seriously, this government seems to have a problem remembering that its mandate is to provide for the public good rather than private interests.
Article II of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies as signed.
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
In a sense, it was kind of true - for Europeans in the Americas, anyways. Land was still, to some degree, the basis for wealth, and since land was available for the taking, that created this notion of American equality on an economic level - and a notion of being a “self-made man” (because working for someone else was akin to slavery) - that persisted even as it became increasingly untrue over time. Of course, none of that works for space exploration, because the dynamics are so totally different, but we’re hampered by thinking of it as a “frontier” like previous ones.
The economy’s not appreciably based on the price of gold, but ok… The problem with space mining is you replace one cost with another - the cost of digging up a bunch of Earth to collect a quantity of the material with the energy cost of launching your mining devices (or the factory parts that will build the mining devices in space) and returning it to Earth. Those are huge costs, still - and the rewards will go to whoever paid those costs (unless they depress the values of the metals to the point where they undercut their own business). We can look at the recent natural gas glut - it didn’t make energy free or everyone rich (and in fact some gas companies were hurt by the falling prices and couldn’t even pay their own workers).
The Aristocrats! Trump’s America!
“We had our fingers crossed when we signed it!”
More of a pipe dream - we have flying cars, after all. They’re just not widely adopted because of safety/logistical issues and a huge pricetag that makes them unaffordable to most people. Space colonization has way more issues preventing it.
mining in low earth orbit has been discussed. tho a harsh mistress scenario with pissed off space miners/moon colonists sending a barge earthside is very possible still. theyd have to figure out a way to mine economically, in zero G, otherwise the costs of extracting ore from asteroids could exceed the value of the elements extracted
Switzerland is purported to be right behind Russia with 3.0 gold minivans. But who could really know?
Then Japan at 2.2, Netherlands at 1.8, and India at 1.6. That’s just the top hit from an internet search for the top 10 largest gold reserves. A little more detail on Wikipedia.
