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NASA Is Planning Mission To An Asteroid Worth $10 Quintillion (usatoday.com)
New submitter kugo2006 writes: NASA announced a plan to research 16 Psyche, an asteroid potentially as large as Mars and primarily composed of Iron and Nickel. The rock is unique in that it has an exposed core, likely a result of a series of collisions, according to Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Psyche's principal investigator. The mission's spacecraft would launch in 2023 and arrive in 2030. According to Global News, Elkins-Tanton calculates that the iron in 16 Psyche would be worth $10,000 quadrillion ($10 quintillion).
Ten thousand quadrillion. By comparison, the total value of EVERYTHING WE EVER DID as a race amounts to about two quadrillion as per:
https://xkcd.com/980/huge/#x=-... (link looks odd because it's one of his large-scale images, zoomed in on the appropriate area)
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I heard the accompanying video's talking head saying "...an asteroid with so much money, it could easily solve the worlds..." and then I shut it off.
I'd much rather know what the volume of iron is, because that's actually interesting and practical. Let's do the math. Feel free to double-check me as well, as I'm just going to rush through this.
Iron costs about 80 dollars per metric tonne, according to Google. So, $10,000,000,000,000,000,000 converts to 125,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes of iron. Cast iron weighs 7.3 tonnes per cubic meter, so that's ~17,000,000,000,000,000 cubic meters of iron. That number is a bit high to visualize, so let's turn that into cubic kilometers by removing nine zeros. We're looking at 17 million cubic kilometers of iron.
Holy crap. How many Death Stars could we make out of that? According to someone on the internet, a Death Star requires 1,080,000,000,000,000 tonnes of steel. Divide our original tonnage by that and... Hell yeah, we could build a fleet of 115 Death Stars with that asteroid.
See? Now that's way more interesting and easier to visualize at the same time, right?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Yet this very logic has been at the core of the minimum wage campaigns - "minimum wages haven't kept up with the growth of the economy". No, of course they haven't. The growth of the economy isn't caused by burger flippers becoming better at burger flipping. The two drivers of economic growth are the highly-educated side of the workforce and the increased use of capital. The two are closely connected because the deployment of capital in production typically requires engineers and the like.
If anything, the current low interest rate should be seen as a problem. Any company that needs to increase production will have a simple choice between deploying more capital or more workers. The Fed has been keeping the rates low in the hope to produce more jobs. This is based on an outdated economic model where cheap capital allowed companies to build factories, which then employed workers. More new factories, more new jobs : a positive correlation between capital investment and employment. But it's no mathematical law that the correlation is positive, it turned negative when technology allowed the replacement of workers by capital. It's time the Fed wakes up to the reversal, and starts stimulating the economy by raising interest rates.
What's interesting was that at least 1/3 of the mined Spanish silver was going to China for goods there. That also caused a huge boom there as well, and poor investment. When the silver trade started drying up (due to Westphalia) the boom was over and crashed the Ming economy.
What's also interesting was that there was a huge arbitrage deal going on. In China you could exchange silver to gold 1:7, while in Europe only 1:13, so you had people sailing to China to get in on that deal, since silver was China's reserve currency, while Europe was on the gold standard.
Lastly, when the silver trade imbalance truly started getting out of hand, and Europe couldn't sell any of their products in China, Britain started to sell opium instead, and later blows up China for trying to stop the drug trade.
Sound familiar? Globalization and trade imbalances have been happening for hundreds of years, with boom and bust cycles.