Not even then.
The price of gold/diamond jewellery is maintained by artificial scarcity and social engineering. The cost of extracting the raw materials has very little to do with it.
More interesting than you might think:
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Everyone wants to watch c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate, but no one wants to make the policies to make it happen.
I did want to make those policies, but my motivation was lost, like tears in rain.
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I just realized you can live in the vacuum of space longer than you can live at the bottom of the ocean.
i dont know if this is heresy posting this here but :
I’ve stood on the back deck of a blinker bound for the Plutition Camps.
I’ve watched the fires of Prometheus being flung into the void.
Weyland-Yutani hog riggers doing thrust spins on a spaghetti nebula.
I’ve seen it. I’ve felt it. Big things. Crazy things. Unbelievable deals.
Fudgequakes at Nom Nom 9. Cool ice men in an ice city. A space snake. An asteroid shaped like a ball sack.
I genocided crab people on the moons of Andromeda.
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I watched good replicants die for oil profits.
I met a cholo implanted with a xenomorph egg tricking out a flying low rider.
I watched a sex replicant doing special horny moves that no human could ever achieve.
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I wonder, though - at billions of dollars of expense, with other lives on the line? People might balk at the idea of a recovery at that point.
Yeah, the strain of libertarians who insist that space colonization represents ultimate freedom make me laugh because it would be the complete opposite of what they’re envisioning.
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i tend to think of the Olaf Stapledon classic Star Maker
“In this world, as in our own, nearly all the chief means of production, nearly all the land, mines, factories, railways, ships, were controlled for private profit by a small minority of the population. These privileged individuals were able to force the masses to work for them on pain of starvation. The tragic farce inherent in such a system was already approaching. The owners directed the energy of the workers increasingly toward the production of more means of production rather than to the fulfilment of the needs of individual life. For machinery might bring profit to the owners; bread would not. With the increasing competition of machine with machine, profits declined, and therefore wages, and therefore effective demand for goods. Marketless products were destroyed, though bellies were unfed and backs unclad. Unemployment, disorder, and stern repression increased as the economic system disintegrated. A familiar story!”
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When a projectile is launched in space, it keeps all of its momentum until it strikes something, at which point it transfers all of it’s energy into whatever it strikes.
This differs from a projectile fired in atmosphere, which bleeds energy throughout its journey to the target into the atmosphere and is pulled by gravity, and radiates its energy upon contact.
The bullet on earth deforms into the kevlar; the space bullet goes through both the front and back plates and the person wearing the armour, and through the person behind and then keeps going through the hull of the spaceship.
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It’s like this: gov’t/megacorp etc… wants more, because they do. They see giant space minerals/fuels out there, and do what hey need to do to get it, because they can. But…then they have to turn a profit, because that’s what has to happen, so they sell low, but cannot sell low enough because they have enormous stocks of everything.
Prices settle, everything is made of metal or new plastic or w/e, and…
There’s still more for the taking. More metals, more hydrocarbons, more everything and it gets mined, by somebody, and has to be used for something.
Which is why you don’t build pew-pew fantasy space fighters with useless meatsacks inside of them.
Instead, think of swarms of cheap, expendable drones, built to throw shrapnel into enemy communications/navigation/spy satellites.
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Well, I’m saying that because of this principle, anyone who tried to fight a war in space would quickly find themselves without anything to fight with.
in a few different gundam series they have suits that launch smaller UAVs armed with lasers that basically torment and pester enemy craft to death with minor wounds. theyre harder to hit and save the host mobile suit from taking any damage
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supposedly a Oerlikon 20mm was brought on a space mission in one form or another. i guess cartridge based ammunition will still work in space because the propellant has its own oxidizer. the effects of rapid thermal transfer and almost instantaneous cooling after firing would probably be catastrophic though. the gun itself would need to be temperate regulated
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behold the soviet space SBR http://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-a-triple-barreled-soviet-space-gun-with-an-attached-machete-2015-1
not really intended for in-space use, but rather for surviving the frozen taiga forest in case of a crash landing earthside
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Astronomer Peter Schultz at Brown University also notes that in space you could technically shoot yourself in the back.
“For example, while in orbit around a planet, because objects orbiting planets are actually in a constant state of free fall, you have to get the setup just right. You’d have to shoot horizontally at just the right altitude for the bullet to circle the planet and fall back to where it started (you),” Shultz told LiveScience.
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Which doesn’t mean “no war in space”.
It means “the next big war will include space, and probably end in Kessler Syndrome”.
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assuming humanity survives whatever cataclysm we all seem to think is coming, i dont think human nature will change any time soon. technology advances along but man is still relatively primitive
