it's the only western country where things regress

"Please don't let anyone prove me wrong!"

I'm actually curious what the idea behind investing in gold to avoid a monetary crash is.

the US is the most free country on earth, don't you remember that huge discussion we had the other day where someone told us his opinion and we all just accepted it as fact?

People who tweet that sort of thing normally haven't visited the UK

or left their State EVER

One can't just make gold out of thin air.

the US is free, and it's the only country that can be the world police

One also can't use gold for much of anything other than a luxury

but US citizens are worse off than the rest of the west, and their quality of life is in decline

it's easier to make money when you have some already to invest

they love strawmans

I mean, if you do have wealth, and you know that if you keep it in the form of currency it will lose value, what would you rather do with it?

i.e. much easier for rich people to become richer

than for poor people to become richer. Who'd a thunk it.

Gold only has a "perceived value" for the most part, but... its value has been fairly reliable over millennia.

If I had to invest money in something I knew would keep value, I'd probably go for weapons actually

As long as there's two humans on earth, there'll be a market for weapons.

Yes, you can invest, but now there's a risk of losing money.

Can you invest all of it?

Would you invest all of it?

I would probably invest in real estate

Worked for Trump.

I mean the prices seem to only go up

And you can rent it

Until the next bubble, that is.

unlike gold

bubbles are a very real risk in real estate

Real estate will go up until population declines.

china has one waiting to happen

AKA as long as we have immigration, real estate and agriculture grow in price.

Can you imagine if Elon Musk finds an asteroid made of gold? He'll make it to the history books as the first UN-sanctioned death penalty to save civilization.

How does he manage to make himself sound more pathetic with every tweet he makes?

i wonder what dusty thinks of secular talk

They are friends I think

How does a Gold asteroid helps anyone?

maybe it's me being an idiot, but I actually don't get why people hate conservatives so much. Even if you think they're literally killing the poor, they've agreed to play the game of politics so we can just vote them out

How would they even bring it back?

far left doesn't agree to the game of politics, they want the game of censorship.

Black Science Man keeps talking, the first trillionaire will be the one that finds an asteroid made out of gold or platinum. But truth is, the world's economy might not be able to handle all that. The value will crash faster than a dinosaur-killing asteroid.

Well, balck science man is no black economist man

Unless they can't actually bring it back to earth, in which case it's worth absolutely nothing

Of course, everyone ignores the amount of fuel to haul an asteroid around.

He is upset about the photo of Sargon with PJW

Even so, let's assume they get it back. How heavy is this asteroid we're talking about?

Let's assume it's either of pure gold or platinum, we'll figure out which later. How many kg we talking here?

probably thousands or millions of tons

Then we've a simple solution. Rather than a full on sale of it, they have to sell in intervals, only so much at a time.

At the highest end, we have asteroids in the 10^15 tons range.

That way instead of them just crashing the price because now there's an oversupply, there's a level of control to the price. This is all assuming they even sell it to begin with.

@dko you can't bring back a moon sized asteirod

because tbh I wouldn't put it past someone like elon to just make a space museum and put it in there

I know, the point is, they can be fucking huge.

I mean I'm assuming for the sake of logistics we aren't talking about actually hauling it back to earth

You bring however much you can haul.

I figured we're talking about them having legal ownership and hiring a mining company to take pieces of it off to haul back

He just keeps pumping them out every 5 minutes a new tweet...

The trick is to find asteroids that are remnants of protoplanets that underwent differentiation.

So dense elements are separated from lighter elements.

Instead of having to separate dirt and rock from what you really want, it's mostly pure already, thanks to gravity.

I figured we were talking about it being pure from the start, for the sake of argument

>Their latest figure for all the gold in the world is 171,300 tonnes

Looks like it isn't hard to go above that figure, in terms of asteroid mass.

Anyway, what I was pondering was, what would be the economical and political implications of bringing such an abundant amount of rare material from space, down to Earth.

Is there anyone here who keeps up with how the tech for virtual reality is going? I've been interested in it because I want to see how far it goes (because I want better vr for the vidya games), but I haven't kept up with it lately.

Could be a copper asteroid even.

Oh, easy answer. If it lands anywhere other than china, it's going to be bought from that country by china.

Even if the country can't transport it and so china just buys the land it's on

Imagine the USA, and other countries, deem it a threat to the global economy.

They wouldn't do that. The worst they'd do is decide we can only mine out so much of it at a time, to keep the prices stable.

Imagine if Russia tows the asteroid to Earth.

They wouldn't get to. The US would probably shoot it out of orbit if Russia was getting it, and then claim it was a terrorist attack by Iraq.

Naturally it'd work because ISIS would fucking *love* to claim they can bomb space.

uh

It's a bit related to the idea of a "duplicator/synthesizer" like the ones in Star Trek TNG. Could such a wonder even be introduced into our civilization?

Aren't we already going down a road something like that with 3D printing?

Sudden abundance when there are plenty of parties that benefit from the scarcity.

Yeah, but 3D printing is very limited.

We can't print molecules, we can't synthesize atoms.

And it expands the more and more the tech is developed.

We wouldn't get there like, tomorrow, it'd be over a course of years, possibly even decades.

Even if the tech existed tomorrow, people would be careful to make it a gradual shift.

At some point we would need to be able to control the precise arrangement of atoms.

We must secure the existence of our race and a future for passable traps

Metallurgy would be obsolete.

So would meat

Vegans would win at this point

I think we kind of have some control over the arrangement of atoms already. I'm trying to go look for the experiment again, but if I remember right there was a group of scientists that actually pulled a basic level of it off

they solved the alchemy question and turned lead into gold, I'm gonna go look that up again and see if I can find it

which is fine, no reason to raise animals if their meat can be produced more efficiently without having to do so

moral bonus of not having to kill them as well

some of us like to feast upon the dead

We can transmute elements, with a particle accelerator, and a lot of patience.

LOL

Yeah but if we don't have cows how can we harvest cow farts for methane

Tucker Carlson plugged DuckDuckGo