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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).
"Potentially as large as Mars"? According to Wikipedia: Psyche16: 200km in diameter. Mars: 6800km in diameter
dumping that much extra iron into the economy would make the "value" close to zero.
The $10 Quadrillion figure is total baloney. You can't just take the current value and extrapolate, because the price would fall as the supply rises. A one carat diamond may be worth $10,000, but if there were suddenly a trillion of them, they would be worth next to nothing, and people would use them as gravel in their driveways.
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)
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Pretty much what happened in Spain during the 16th century. They brought so much gold/silver back to Europe, it actually caused massive inflation.
and pretty soon, we're talking about real money.
" one carat diamond may be worth $10,000, but if there were suddenly a trillion of them"
Between the hoards of diamonds that DeBeers keeps locked up, and the ability to make them in a lab, there are a ~trillion of them. Diamonds have no real value, go sell one "used" and you'll find out much they're worth.
Somebody forgot about shipping and handling.
It's all about location, location, location. You got a buyer for that $10 Quintillion USD worth of iron protoplanet located in the astroid belt? Didn't think so.
You're only thinking about trying to get the iron back to Earth to use here. Imagine a market where nations and/or corporations are building things in space. All of a sudden whoever has control of raw materials that are already in space and don't have to be shot of Earth's gravity well are very rich.
> an asteroid potentially as large as Mars
... could be part of what was an earlier planet perhaps as large as Mars". The asteroid itself it nowhere nears as large as Mars (about 2800x smaller by mass).
Note that the USA Today article actually says "NASA wants to know whether the asteroid
Iron and nickel are abundant in the universe, if you are building in space you aren't going to be locked to such resource constraints (at least not for long).
Not quite "baloney" if you also look at it the other way of having a resource that could be dragged into orbit if you want to build stuff in space instead of having to drag it all the way up from Earth at the cost of vast amounts of fuel. If it could be used that way it's the equivalent of spending shitloads in cash.
Otherwise, yes, file it with a snake with poison strong enough to kill five elephants in a single bite under silly metrics since it's not getting to the ground to be sold.
However journalists like that sort of extrapolation.
At least this time it wasn't in Volkswagens or Libraries of Congress.
I wonder how you're supposed to smelt it in space. Perhaps space air is flammable?
https://vk.com/video51098255_1...
There is a point where raising the minimum wage continues to be beneficial; we have not reached that point, but I highly doubt it's more than about $15-20/hr at this time.
The reason it continues to be beneficial is that price increases are still slower than wage increases up to a certain point. If we want a viable economy, money needs to change hands - and people at the bottom end of the wage scale are going to spend most of their money pretty much no matter what, which means that money changes hands more often.
Yes, the "rich" (more appropriately, the entrepreneurial class, regardless of the amount of money they have) need an incentive to actually create jobs... but a lot of people at the top end aren't interested in that, they just want to keep their money stagnant because it's safer to do that and keep people from breaking into whatever their pet industry is (which might cause - horrors! - competition) than to, you know, actually put it to active use.
In short: there's a fucking middle ground between "no raises in the minimum wage" and "minimum wage needs to be enough that someone working 20hrs/week can support a whole family" and that's where we really should be aiming for.
I have no idea where the "potentially as large as Mars" came from - this is estimated as approx. 200km in diameter. Mars is over 3000 times as large.
The 200km estimate is even in the original article.
It's raw materials for future space expansion, when we will bootstrap a space economy.
If that much iron and nickel becomes available cheaply, prices will drop extremely. The only way they will not, is if the cost is in the extraction. For an example, see Aluminum, which is very much non-rare, but getting it into an usable form costs a lot. So if every ton of this iron costs $1'000'000 to extract, its value is negative as market-prices are a lot lower. Basically the only value this iron has for the foreseeable future is that it does not need to be lifted out of a gravity well.
Morale: People with no understanding of capitalism and markets should not make such estimates.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I wonder how you're supposed to smelt it in space. Perhaps space air is flammable?
The space water is flammable after electrolysis. :-)
/off topic : De beers has a massive oversupply which they simply storage rather than sell and have diamond sold at their real price : nearly worthless. The value of the diamond is not really set by the market, due to the quasi monopoly. Otherwise it would be set by artificial diamond which , when properly maid , are not differential to naked eye to natural diamond. And that price is 1/100 of the natural diamond price, probably less if we started mass produce them.
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.
A one carat diamond may be worth $10,000, but if there were suddenly a trillion of them ...
FWIW, there are diamonds in asteroids too.
You smelt using mirrors and the sun.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So, question.......would you really build a death star out of steel?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Here I thought for a moment the mission was worth (or: would cost) 10 quintillion (18 zeroes if using short scale) dollars.
And now that the fourth Zimbabwean dollar has been demonetized, one can't even use that pun any more (from the WP article: "The Zimbabwean government stated that it would credit 5 US dollars to domestic bank accounts with balances of up to 175 quadrillion Zimbabwean dollars and exchange Zimbabwean dollars for US dollars at a rate of 1 USD to 35 quadrillion Zimbabwean dollars to accounts with balances above 175 quadrillion Zimbabwean dollars."
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
* "in 2014 a mission to Psyche was proposed to NASA"
* "A team led by Lindy Elkins-Tanton
* "The mission was approved by NASA on January 4, 2017 and is targeted to launch in October of 2023, arriving at the asteroid in 2030, following an Earth gravity assist spacecraft maneuver in 2024 and a Mars flyby in 2025." So mebe I'll get to watch the progress in my retirement.
The Globalnews and Usatoday articles strike me as being tarted up (read: dumbed down) with that gee whizz number of dollars.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Person A: NASA is planning a mission to an asteroid worth $10 quintillion!
Person B: What? No way! That doesn't even make sense.
Person A: Seriously! I saw it on Slashdot!
Person B: I don't believe you. Which asteroid is it, wise guy?
Person A: Psyche!
by Cyphase ( 907627 )
A one carat diamond may be worth $10,000, but if there were suddenly a trillion of them, they would be worth next to nothing, and people would use them as gravel in their driveways.
It's funny you should mention that. Suppose that if there was a trillion of them, and suppose they were controlled by one monopoly who could regulate the supply say by hording cut diamonds and trickling them out into the economy. You'd actually be in a very similar position to where we are today.
Diamonds are not rare, we can manufacture them quite easily without imperfection. A 1ct diamond can be made for under $2500 The value comes from the fact that people want the single biggest one, all natural dug out of the ground, and perfect in every way. Where do you find diamonds like that? Horded in De Beers safes, and when they announced a transition to end that 80 year long practice of price manipulation it was accompanied by a marketing campaign that just made your recognise that crappy little 1ct diamond for the crappy little 1ct diamond it is, not worthy of your fiance's love.
Diamond as a material is quite abundant and costs $40/ct. I have a toolbox full of products that contain collectively over 1ct of diamond, but industrial uses aren't manipulated by marketing or supply side market distortion.
Now if I had an asteroid in my back yard worth $10 quadrillion, do you think I'll just sell it on the open market at once?
I have never met anybody that thinks we should give unlimited amounts of money to colleges and health insurance companies. Restoring the ability of people to get a job they can support themselves with via government provided education as it was during the entirety of the 20th century seemed to be very successful. Most people on the left think we should eliminate health insurance companies entirely.
The largest estimate for the size of Psyche is 253 km across. Mars is about 6800 km in diameter, enormously larger.
A little under $22 dollars an hour is what the minimum wage was in 1968 when adjusted for inflation and increases in productivity http://cepr.net/documents/publ... So to increase beyond what was in the 1960s we would have to go up higher than that.
Ok, people pointed out the complete bullshit number about the actual - inflation corrected worth.
But there is another vector that needs to be taken into consideration, that has a devastating effect on bigger space mining undertakings.
To make it short if done on a big scale space mining could change the earths orbit and rotation period.
And this is what most fly-highs do not take into consideration.
1.) every planetary body in our solar system is there and "does" that because it has a mass, and a certain kinetic energy
a.) also mass distribution plays a role (moon tide = earth has changing mass distribution, "wobble, wobble")
2.) .. and interacts with other bodies through the "mystic and largely unkown" force of gravitation - its so unkown many people just jump and do other silly things and consider to survive ..
3.) these properties make the planetary bodies move in such elliptecal shapes as they do.
From 3.) change them by mass and the momentum/energy that is "glued" to the mass, you change how the planetary bodies will behave.
Yes, this happens contiously. Earth is loosing as well as gaining mass - naturally. Helium can escape the atmosphere, but meteors are hitting the earth, transfering mass and energy.
And the Apollo missions transfered mass to the moon.
The key point is the scale you'd do that and when thinking in "deathstar" categories you can predict a big change.
If you can't imaging it, go ice skating and do a pierotte and pull your arms to your body.
What in consequence might happen I can only guess , however I know something will happen.
Because you change the system on a big scale. .. our planets relative distance to the sun has considerable effect on our climate. .. the day/night cycle has considerable effect on our life.
I call this the real "masseffect"
You can't realistically adjust minimum wage for productivity. Productivity measures the output of a system vs. its operational cost. The productivity of a person isn't simply the productivity of that system divided by the nr. of employees in it. Else they'd have to pay the one janitor left in Amazon's fully automatic warehouse a couple of million a year, probably.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
It's actually not a bad idea if you want a little inflation, and there are cases where you'd want it. This is Friedman's "helicopter money", where a central bank increases the money supply by giving every person a bit of cash, instead of the usual quantitive easing where they buy government securities. The idea behind this method is that it turns out that money generated through QE doesn't make its way into the real economy all that quickly, where it is expected that a one-off payment to citizens will (even if they decide to save or invest most of it). It was actually briefly considered in Europe, but naturally the banks oppose it since it means the helicopter will not be flying over their lawn anymore,and thus Draghi (president of the ECB and former Goldman Sachs exec) is never going to allow it.
Of course it wouldn't be a million but perhaps $1000 or a $300 Tricky Dick Fun Bill.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Suppose you sold your $10 quadrillion asteroid to De Beers, who would then slowly trickle it to the market. How much do you think they'll pay you for it ? That's how much it's worth.
You smelt using mirrors and the sun.
The asteroid belt is 3 AU from the sun, so the sunlight would be 1/9th as bright as the light that reaches earth. You would need a big mirror, but in the vacuum of space, the only heat loss would be radiant.
So, question.......would you really build a death star out of steel?
Yes. Steel is strong, and easy to work with. The only drawback over something like titanium or carbon fiber is that it is HEAVY, but that isn't a big problem in space. The big advantage of steel is that it is cheap and plentiful, and when you need a quadrillion tonnes for just one Death Star, those costs add up.
Of course, heaviness means inertia, but travelling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, and inertia doesn't seem to be an impediment in any of the movies.
FWIW, there are diamonds in asteroids too.
Cool. Instead of buying my GF an engagement ring, I can just buy her the naming rights to a small carbonaceous asteroid.
just one Death Star
Why make only one when you can have two for twice the price ?
So that would be an iron cube with a side length of about 257km hiding in a roundish object with a diameter of about 200km ... that would make it a very interesting thing to explore indeed ...
right now health insurance companies cost you about 30 cents for every dollar of your health care.(obamacare limits it to 20 cents) Adminstration of health care costs you 90 cents for your dollar.
how much more health care could be provided if adminstration costs could be cut back?
The USA has a very top heavy infrastructure and not enough grunts in the fields. everything is that way. businesses government etc.
the finance guys and upper management wont' mention it since it is their salaries at stake, but they trimed the fat from the supply chain, and lower levels. now the fat is all concentrated in the upper management fields. This country won't grow until that takes a couple of major cuts. And that won't happen for a few more years.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Of course it makes a LOT more sense to start with a small one that is closer or on it's way past in the first place, but we are talking seriously way out SF stuff here if we are talking about needing planetoids worth of minerals. By the time we need that much stuff we'll probably be ready to set up processing onsite in the asteroid belt instead of moving something so huge.
On Earth our biggest problem is the ores are normally metal oxides that need to be reduced, and that typically requires both a lot of heat and a serious reducing agent. Some of these asteroids have stuff in a metallic state instead of oxidised so there is a lot less to do. You've heard of "sky-iron" swords and daggers? It's not just myth, Tutenkamen had one, a nickel rich iron dagger forged directly from a chunk of meterorite (just heated to red hot and hammered into shape) - I think it's in the British Museum.
How much more health care could be provided if admin costs were drastically cut? Maybe a week before malpractice suits, refused reimbursements, and regulatory stop-work orders drove the providers out of business.
By the time we need that much stuff we'll probably be ready to set up processing onsite in the asteroid belt instead of moving something so huge
What is this "need" that you speak of ? There's nothing in space that would be worth the insane expense of setting up an industry in the asteroid belt.
Certainly higher education is like that.
You are welcome on my lawn.
A one carat diamond may be worth $10,000, but if there were suddenly a trillion of them, they would be worth next to nothing, and people would use them as gravel in their driveways.
Unless some company had a total monopoly on diamonds and used it to keep diamond prices artificially high. #debeers
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
"I have never met anybody that thinks we should give unlimited amounts of money to colleges and health insurance companies."
Then you must not work for the government.
"The asteroid belt is 3 AU from the sun, so the sunlight would be 1/9th as bright as the light that reaches earth. You would need a big mirror, but in the vacuum of space, the only heat loss would be radiant."
If you can mine from asteroids, you can build a big anything you want in space.
You can keep prices high only when you don't sell much. But if you don't sell much, you will never recover the capital expense of retrieving the asteroid.
"Dragging an asteroid into orbit isn't cheap..."
Which is why you want to do the refining and as much of the manufacturing as possible in place. Then you change the orbit of your undersea tunnel tubes or solar array scaffolding as needed.
I claim this planet in the name of Mars! Isn't that lovely?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Dragging an industry to an asteroid isn't any cheaper, I'm afraid. Much cheaper to find the materials here on Earth and do the processing here.
"Now if I had an asteroid in my back yard worth $10 quadrillion, do you think I'll just sell it on the open market at once?"
Yes you would, because as soon as the technology exists to exploit asteroidal materials, any rise in market price of your product will cause other asteroids to be mined. Even if Phyche is the exact best place to mine because of its status as a planetary core, there are plenty of other bodies in the same region of space that are almost as good.
It's not *complete* nonsense. The only phrase they neglected to include was, "at the current market price." I don't think this measurement is as useful in an economic context as in an order of magnitude context. If you told people that there was an asteroid out there with about a billion megatons of iron and nickel (if I did my math right), they might not be able to put it in context as well as if you told them how much that is worth at the current market rate -- more than all the economies on the planet. It is a little sensational and misleading because obviously you can't extract anywhere near that much value from it, but it does help understand the order of magnitude a little. Also, maybe the space program deserves a little benefit of the doubt these days having been cut so much due to irrational psychological issues screwing their budget over. Maybe people who can't put money in a proper context deserve to be misled a little in the other direction with a story that shows what kind of value the space program can offer if you give it a chance.
What Australia did was have a higher reserve for its banks. That prevented the need for expensive bailouts of "too big to fail" banks.
And avoiding recessions is not necessarily a good thing.
I wonder how you're supposed to smelt it in space. Perhaps space air is flammable?
https://vk.com/video51098255_1...
You smelt it with the uranium you mine.
Given what we just found (or rather, probably found a while back, but just decided was interesting)? Yeah, iron and nickel. In fact, it's already round-ish, so maybe we just make one giant one out of the core of that. :)
I have never met anybody that thinks we should give unlimited amounts of money to colleges and health insurance companies.
Yes, but arguing with sensible proposals is too hard.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Elkins-Tanton calculates that the iron in 16 Psyche would be worth $10,000 quadrillion ($10 quintillion).
Yes, the ten pounds of iron they'll be able to transport back will cost that because of the enormous cost of the space mission to retrieve it. But it will be worth it because of the awful iron shortage we're suffering through.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
I think it's in the British Museum.
It's in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Let's see you build an apple pie and an iPhone from scratch using only the materials you find on the asteroid.
FWIW, there are diamonds in asteroids too.
Where did you ever get that idea? Diamonds are only formed under conditions you will find on a planetary body:
Most natural diamonds are formed at high temperature and pressure at depths of 140 to 190 kilometers (87 to 118 mi) in the Earth's mantle. Carbon-containing minerals provide the carbon source, and the growth occurs over periods from 1 billion to 3.3 billion years (25% to 75% of the age of the Earth).
Ain't gonna happen on an asteroid. A basic rule of thumb is that asteroids will only contain igneous materials, never sedimentary or metamorphic.
Between the hoards of diamonds that DeBeers keeps locked up, and the ability to make them in a lab, there are a ~trillion of them. Diamonds have no real value, go sell one "used" and you'll find out much they're worth.
Obligatory:-
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?
The Diamond Myth
Replying to myself with one caveat: there are lots of tiny diamonds in asteroids, formed mostly by pressure in collisions involving carbonaceous objects. Different animals, but still "diamonds" in the crystallographic sense.
It would take a lot more material than that for a Dyson Sphere. It would take far more material than we have in the entire Solar System.
If you compare to the fictional Ringworld in Larry Niven's N-space universe, a strip that's 1,600,000 km wide, fans have estimated the mass to be the mass of Jupiter, which is just over 2/3 of the mass of the Solar System sans the Sun itself, without respect for composition of the Solar System.
To look at something more practical, in David Weber's Honor Harrington universe, a superdreadnought starship weighs a little under 9,000,000 metric tons. If the entire mass of 16 Psyche is usable then one could build over two trillion of those fictional starships, asteroids like that would make for a sound basis as natural resources for a space-based economy, assuming that one could manage to perform the materials refining needed without landing the mined ore on a planet's surface.
Your Deathstar example would probably also work.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Relax, It's just Dr. Evil's cost estimate.
And there's some twenty million tons of gold dissolved in the Earth's oceans. Jules Verne made it the source of Captain Nemo's incredible wealth.
To put twenty million tons of gold in perspective, all the gold that has ever been mined by humans totals up to about 180 thousand tons. To put in another perspective: sure, it's gold, but at a concentration of thirteen billionths of a gram per liter of seawater it's worthless unless you have unlimited time and energy to extract it.
That's the problem with asteroid mining in general. Until the cost of changing an object's momentum goes down drastically it's not worth doing. If Pysche were a 1000 kg block of pure, refined platinum (market price: $34 million) you'd be hard-pressed to retrieve it and return it to Earth at a profit. Which is not to say asteroid mining is a bad idea; but first things first: you've got to reduce the price of interplanetary propulsion by a couple orders of magnitudes. One thing that never happens in a sci-fi asteroid mining scenario is the hero worrying about running out of gas. Propulsion in stories is always practically limitless and free of charge. Real propulsion will never be that good, but it could get good enough.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That reminds me of John Elway on Trevor Siemian. Siemian was the last quarterback drafted that year. He had already lined up a job in real estate because he figured he might not be drafted - he wasn't that good. Fans were surprised and a bit dismayed when Elway drafted him for the Broncos, who were a powerful team -they won the Superbowl that year. Elway said Siemian "has potential".
It turns out that in his first year as a starter Siemian had a an 18-10 touchdown-to-interception ratio and an 84.6 passer rating, both stats better than Peyton Manning and Brock Osweiler in the previous Superbowl-winning season.
Elway later reminded one fan who had been dismayed by the Siemian pick that Elway does indeed know how to spot potential:
http://www.si.com/extra-mustar...
If my limited knowledge of nuclear energy is correct, then iron is also the furthest you can go down the periodic table before fusion stops being energy-positive. So if we ever master fusion, we might end up with a lot of leftover iron :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You misunderstand. The asteroid has bank accounts worth 10 quintillion space bucks, and we're going to go try hacking the asteroid to steal it's money. Obviously bringing all that iron ore back to earth wouldn't give us 10 quadrillion bucks!
Mars would get instant global warming, and all the iron they need to establish an industry. You'd probably just have to wait several thousand years for the planet to turn solid enough again before sending people.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
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.
If you can give a tiny handout to people who will spend it and then avoid the global financial crisis. How is that not a good thing?
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.
I wonder how you're supposed to smelt it in space.
You don't smelt it; it's not in an oxidized state.
That's a good point: the banks in Europe did appear to need some help with their reserves. But at some point, the object was no longer to save the banks from collapse, but to improve their reserves so that they could start lending money to businesses and individuals again, thus kickstarting the economy. But proponents in favour of helicopter money argue that the effect of such QE on the economy is slow and limited, and that giving cash in the hands of people directly is a far more effective way to aid the economy.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
$15/hr * 40 hr/wk * 50 wk/yr (2 weeks vacation) = $30,000/yr. Most people would consider that a living wage. Federal poverty level for a family of 4 is just $24,250/yr.
So the $15/hr target is too high. If you target the poverty level for a family of 4 (assuming it's a single income family), the target is $12.12/hr. Poverty level for a single person is $11,770/yr, which translates into $5.89/hr, which is actually below the current minimum wage of $7.25/hr. So the current minimum wage is in the right ballpark of a compromise between singles and single-income families.
Yes this assumes full employment throughout the year. The minimum wage has to be tied to productivity because wages are tied to productivity. If you try to set the minimum wage based on poverty levels for people not being productive the full year, you end up eliminating jobs of people who are fully employed and productive the full year. Inability to find full employment is an employment problem (number of jobs available), not a wage problem (how much you're paid for a job).
IMHO the problem isn't the minimum wage, it's the capital gains tax is way too high for lower income people. People always complain the 15% capital gains tax is too low without really researching who actually pays a 15% income tax. The tax rate is graduated meaning just because you're in the 25% tax bracket doesn't mean you pay a 15% income tax. The threshold where you actually pay a 15% income tax (single, standard deduction) is about $58,500. The threshold where the average American pays 15% income tax (after credits, exemptions, and itemized deductions) is closer to $90,000 (you can figure this out from the IRS tax stats). So it makes little sense for people making less than this to invest their money when it's going to be taxed more than if they just spent it and increased their income via raises (e.g. raising the minimum wage) rather than investments/savings.
The economy rewards you with income for two things - generating productivity (working), and deciding where productivity is needed (managing/investing). The current flat 15% capital gains tax effectively discourages lower income people from participating in the latter. It needs to be graduated like income tax so lower income people have more incentive to save and invest. (The rationale for the capital gains tax rate being lower than income tax rate at higher incomes is the same. It encourages rich people to invest their money thus re-injecting it into the economy, instead of wasting it on gold toilet seats. Same logic applies to lower income people, except some of them "waste" their money on big screen TVs, iPhones, car leases, etc.)
What is this "need" that you speak of ? There's nothing in space that would be worth the insane expense of setting up an industry in the asteroid belt.
The only way mining in space makes sense is if we have fully autonomous robots where we can send 4 of them to mars and they can go collect materials, create a forge, and start building stuff. If we ever get to that point, these same robots will have already replaced 95% of the human jobs on earth.
It is true that if you dumped all that metal on the market, its price would plummet. But that doesn't actually reduce the value of that metal.
Price and value are two different things. The value of that metal is described by the stuff that you can build from it: bridges, towers, spacecraft, etc. That value doesn't actually change by having more of the stuff available. To understand the value of something, you look at the price of it.
Price isn't a constant scale, and it changes over time. There are two different prices that are important here. To understand the value of that metal, looking at its current price is actually quite a good measure: that is how much better we would be off, in current dollars, if we got all that metal. The future price of that metal tells you its value on a different scale, the scale of a society where everybody is much richer because a dollar buys much more stuff.
So, if you want to understand the value of that metal, look at it in current prices. The difference between how much that metal would (hypothetically) cost under current prices and how much it will cost once it's available and prices have plummeted is a measure of how much richer the world has become by making all that metal available.
Of course, heaviness means inertia, but travelling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, and inertia doesn't seem to be an impediment in any of the movies.
And yet TIE Fighters and X-Wings still zip around doing gee-whiz flips and turns while Imperial Star Destroyers and other big ships plod along.
Maybe consistency of physics isn't an impediment to movies either?
And then it still doesn't make sense, because Mars will still be an inhospitable hell hole where nobody would want to live.
Actually, large amounts of metal outside a gravity well is extremely valuable for space exploration, since launch costs right now are thousands of dollars per pound.
Furthermore, once outside a gravity well, it's fairly cheap to move stuff around. If we start mining asteroids for metal, we can move that metal back to earth orbit at almost no cost. We could even deorbit it, although that would really be a waste.
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.
Unless we can convert iron directly into food then it really doesn't solve any problems. Iron is already pretty cheap at only about 4 cents per pound and there is plenty of it to go around. If we could somehow get that iron to earth then the price of iron would approach zero but what exactly does this solve? It would likely lower the cost of skyscrapers and cars a little but probably not a lot. There is probably less than $100 worth of iron in a car so that is not a significant portion of the price of a car. The only use case I can think of for a huge amount of additional iron would be interstellar spacecrafts but it would take a ton of energy to melt it into ibeams, etc.. not to mention that something like an interstellar spacecraft is likely going to need electronics and a lot of other stuff that isn't made of iron. Really, there is very little in space that is going to solve the problems we have on earth. The resources we have on earth that people actually need are food, land, and finished goods none of which are found in space. The raw materials that go into making the finished goods are actually a minimal part of the final price.
Right now, we don't have a very good idea of the exact composition of Earth's core. If this asteroid is a chunk of planetary core, a few tests and samples could tel us quite a lot about how our own planet works. This includes data related to planetary magnetic field generation, radioactive decay heat production, etc. This sort of data can tell us a lot about things like why Mars is dead while the Earth supports life. And we can extend this knowledge to assist in the search for life-supporting planets elsewhere.
Have gnu, will travel.
This asteroid is "potentially the size of Mars." There are reasons other than cost of fuel not to bring it to Earth.
Price is actually a very good indicator of value. When you've built all the bridges, towers, spacecraft, etc you need, using only 0.1% of the asteroid, the remaining 99.9% doesn't have much value anymore.
Of course, heaviness means inertia, but travelling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, and inertia doesn't seem to be an impediment in any of the movies.
And yet TIE Fighters and X-Wings still zip around doing gee-whiz flips and turns while Imperial Star Destroyers and other big ships plod along.
Maybe consistency of physics isn't an impediment to movies either?
Inertia is the answer. The scenes where Star Destroyers smack into each other and where the Super Star Destroyer crashes into the Death Star shows that inertia does matter in Starwars. Note how it was considered a dubious boast that a ship the size of the Millennium Falcon can outrun far larger imperial ships, showing that maximum speed is irrelevant to size (magic space reactors producing whatever amount of energy needed for the plot). What small mass ships like TIE Fighters and X-Wings can do is change direction and accelerate much faster because of having less inertia.
Hell yeah, nerd fights on slashdot!
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If your calculation is correct, it would mean a solid ball with a radius of 159km, which is quite larger than the 100km radius of the actual asteroid.
Good catch. Based on that, it sounds like I'm off by a significant factor. I was extrapolating based on the given monetary value alone, and there were quite a few zeroes in those numbers. I may have misplaced one or two of them. It's still fun even if we can only build ten Death Stars.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Why does the poverty level matter? It's an arbitrary number. Go ahead and actually try supporting a family of four on 24k a year. Go ahead and try supporting yourself on 11.8k a year. Rent an apartment, get a car, get a cellphone (how long has it been since you worked a low-end job? Without those two things, you are staying unemployed.), pay for food, account for taxes: local, state, federal, salestax, etc. You would be going to charities for dinner more often than not. The poverty level in many areas of the country is not even one full step up from being working and homeless.
When basing all your reasoning on the arbitrary poverty level, which has been far too low for two generations, the rest of your argument falls apart. The rest isn't even worth reading. Example, "The economy rewards you with income for two things - generating productivity (working), and deciding where productivity is needed (managing/investing)." No the economy only rewards one thing: appearance. That is how hardworking stiffs that keep their head down get no credit while Trump is president.
Well the parent claimed the upper bound is for 20 hr/wk. So this would give $24/hr to make it to poverty for a family of 4. Still it seems somewhat arbitrary. You want to make minimum wage just enough for them to squeak by. Why not give people more.
I don't understand your reasoning. What does poverty levels have to do with this. The only risk of increasing the minimum wage is substitution. Businesses will need to increase prices which might cause people to change how they use their money. For example, people might not go out to eat if it costs too much. Instead they will cook at home.
This is compensated by the fact that the people who get more money have more money to spend and can stimulate the economy. While there is a concern for inflation, it is limited since only a fraction of the working force is getting this raise. Roughly, it is more about a transfer of wealth from the people earning more than the new minimum wage to the people making less than the new minimum wage.
Poverty levels matter in a different way. Currently we are subsidizing business that pay below the poverty line. Their employees need to receive government assistance. Tax payers are essentially giving money to these businesses.
Again I don't understand your argument. Yes, it does seem unfair that "poor" people potentially have a higher capital tax rate than income tax rate, but why would that entice them to spend it as opposed to invest it. Of course, it's moot since these people don't make enough money to have significant investment.
They are not wasting their money. They are stimulating and directing production. People need to consume things generated by these businesses. Do you expect the rich to drive production. How many iPhones can they buy? IMHO it would be bad for the economy if more "poor" people tried to invest. It would damage consumption.
Chris Mesterharm
And then it still doesn't make sense, because Mars will still be an inhospitable hell hole where nobody would want to live.
If we had autonomous robots that could build giant steel cities then there is nothing that says we couldn't make it hospitable. We would need a huge amount of energy to do it but if you had something along the lines of "Great Wolf Lodge" or "Mall of America", you could in theory create a place where people could live comfortably without ever going outside. This would not be all that different than the many people who rarely if ever leave the city they live and work in. But again, we are talking city scale construction (or at the very least mall size) and you would either have to ship a ton of equipment there or somehow bootstrap a modern factory starting with basically nothing.
You don't need to smelt it: smelting is a purification process. But this particular asteroid is worthless.
The first asteroid of commercial value will be a CHON asteroid very close to Earth . Moved into high orbit and used to make rocket fuel, it's a fundamental missing piece of a space economy. (Plus, the only way to ever get the fuel to move the first asteroid is if that asteroid is made of fuel). Naturally, automated robotics has a way to go first, but automated robotics seems very plausible these days.
The you want an aluminum asteroid, not a nickel-iron one. The first ship built mostly in space will be built mostly of aluminum (well, it will be mostly fuel like any rocket, but then the aluminum).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's hard enough to fuse hydrogen that we'll probably never do that, little well fusing neon into iron.
The Sun barely fuses hydrogen (the amount of energy produced in the core per sq. metre is quite low, there's just a lot of sq metres) and even when it reaches end of life and much more compact, it'll barely fuse helium. Iron (and nickel) are only produced in the largest stars due to the heat and pressure required.
With luck,we'll get fusing deuterium and such in a controlled energy positive manner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The asteroid belt make no economic sense until there's already a thriving economy in space. Fortunately there are plenty of asteroids made of useful stuff very near Earth (not that I would consider nickel-iron "useful stuff" in this context).
An asteroid that you can make rocket fuel from, dragged into high Earth orbit, will be commercially viable once the cost of getting stuff into orbit drops enough.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If we assume that Psyche itself is a purely metallic 'cannonball', we will go to chondrite and carbonaceous chondrite asteroids for the other material we would need to grow your trees and build your iPhone. Since chondrites are 75% of all asteroids, Psyche was highlighted as being a particularly good place for metals mining.
The only objective notion of value is: what it sells for. Every individual values things differently. A market discovers the balance between supply (of different amounts at different costs) and peoples various ideas of value (different for everyone).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Your citation says that not all diamonds are tiny.
"Traditionally, experts have argued that diamonds in meteorites form when asteroids collide. The shock of the crash is enough to crush carbon into tiny diamonds. The gems founds in fragments of the Almahata Sitta, however, are too large to have been created that way, says the paper. Instead, they are likely to have been formed inside a "planetesimal” — a celestial body not quite large enough to count as a planet, but far bigger than any asteroid."
The cost of terrestrial mining is going up fast as near-surface materials are exhausted, requiring us to dig deeper, and because of steadily more restrictive environmental policies. Here in Arizona, a new multibillion dollar copper deposit is about to go unexploited because it's in the territory of one endangered species.
Robots are getting better, access to space is getting cheaper, while terrestrial mining is getting more expensive. It is inevitable that at some point the lines on the graph will cross.
I'm sure your impactful work benefits mankind no end.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
And conversely, when the Big Honcho In Japan decided to make the biggest ever bronze Buddah to put in in the Todai-ji temple, it used so much bronze that bronze was like gold in Japan afterwards.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
On reflection, another risk of increasing the minimum wage is based on international competition and technology. I'm less concerned about international competition since many of these jobs can't easily be outsourced, (but I don't really know the statistics). I think technology is the bigger concern particularly in the long term and increasing the minimum wage will just accelerate the inevitable loss of jobs. Perhaps one could use this as a justification to NOT increase the minimum wage to give us more time to prepare. I'm skeptical, as I think the real reason we haven't automated more is not the cost of the technology but the development of that technology.
Capitalism has a fundamental problem that it treats workers as both consumers and cogs. When that breaks, the current system will not work. The easy answer seems to basic income funded by taxes. It would cause the minimum disruption to our current system.
Chris Mesterharm
Literally nothing you said in the summary is true.
It is almost 1% the mass of the asteroid belt, not nearly the size of mars
It is believed to be the exposed iron core of a proto-planet.
Price is indeed how we quantify value. But price is not a constant scale, so you have to decide what point in time you report something on. When you want to understand the value of something in units that you are familiar with, you need to use a scale that you understand, namely today's prices.
Sure, inflation-adjusting historical prices can make sense, though a lot of bias can be snuck in by how you do the inflation-adjusting, so it's good to watch for that. It's also helpful to understand prices in terms like hours of work at the media wage.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It is. But you can't compare prices over time. If I tell you that steel will cost $300/ton in 50 years, you have no idea whether that represents more or less value than today. If you want to understand the value of something in terms of dollars, you can only do so in today's dollars.
You're right that if the market for metals could be saturated, then the incremental value of an additional ton of metal would be next to zero. I don't think, however, that that is true: metals are so universally useful that the market for them will never saturate. If we could bring the entire mass of Pallas to earth, people would create vast engineering projects out of it. If we managed to get it into earth orbit, it would be the start of the creation massive orbital habitats and factories.
If we brought Pallas to earth, the price of metals could fall to near zero, or it might stay the same, we simply don't know; that's really an arbitrary choice of monetary policy.
Of course, those are rough arguments, and they are long term arguments too. In the short term, flooding the market with massive amounts of new metal would saturate it because the rest of the economy just isn't set up to utilize the metal.
Nevertheless, my point stands: utilizing the metal from Pallas would make us enormously more wealthy, and looking at it from the perspective of "it would flood the market and the prices would drop to near zero, so no gain" is just wrong.
My point is that the "$10 quadrillion" price isn't as silly as it may sound and represents real value. Right now, the world economy is about $200 trillion. It might take 100-200 years to use all that metal. $10 quadrillion corresponds to about an 11% annual growth rate in the economy in constant dollars over 100 years or 5% annual growth rate over 200 years (we're currently at about 4%).
I think injecting 10^20 kg of ready-to-use metal into the world economy could easily double or triple growth rates like that over the next century or two, which tells me that the valuation of the metal in terms of current prices actually yields a fairly reasonable estimate of its value to humanity, no matter what the nominal per ton price of metals may end up being.
I'm sure your impactful work benefits mankind no end.
His work helps get (and keeps) people employed. Putting food on the table for an unknown number of people and their families.
So, at least in the short term, their work is more important than some jackass screaming "Global Warming! Global Warming!" while jumping up and down with their hair on fire and hoping someone will give them a grant so THEY can put food on the table.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
"minimum wage needs to be enough that someone working 20hrs/week can support a whole family"
There are people who earn a lot more than the minimum wage but they would have trouble supporting a family if they are only working 20hrs/week. If you want to support your family you are going to need to work for it. Standing around complaining about the inequities in the world is not going to get you very far. The number one factor in determining the quality of your life is the choices each of us make in our lives. Raging against the government while simultaneously demanding the same government make your life better doesn't look like a very feasible tactic.
And who cares how much the asteroid is worth. The real benefit is that NASA has committed to endeavor but to accomplish that goal will require creating the technology needed to meet their goal. Just intercepting the asteroid could be done today. Creating the technology to actually mine the asteroid and deliver the mined materials back to Earth will take some work and a whole lot of money.
It's not that hard to get iron, and there's no shortage of it. The asteroid would never be worth the cost of moving it to somewhere useful. And nickel-iron isn't a particularly useful material in space, being very heavy.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
All at once, or slowly trickled out? The point is not who it's sold to, but how it's sold.
We don't value raw materials by proven reserves. We value them by current supply and demand.
Yes you would, because as soon as the technology exists to exploit asteroidal materials, any rise in market price of your product will cause other asteroids to be mined.
Way to miss the point and be wrong at the same time. Go ask NASA to borrow one of their rockets and see how you go. There's this thing called R&D that goes into developing a new source of materials and a concept known as the first mover advantage which when combined with high R&D costs grants a natural monopoly. My guess is that if we brought down this asteroid BHP Billiton won't have another down within a year. ... or ten.
The $10 Quadrillion figure is total baloney. You can't just take the current value and extrapolate, because the price would fall as the supply rises. A one carat diamond may be worth $10,000, but if there were suddenly a trillion of them, they would be worth next to nothing, and people would use them as gravel in their driveways.
The $10 Quadrillion figure is also a pretty good signal that the current market is unable to respond adequately to meet demand, no? Let somebody satiate that unsatisfied demand, and see what humanity does with it. Certainly that will mean the collapse and disappearance of some current mining industries, but it could also mean the emergence of completely unexpected industries on the demand side of things.
It requires exploration, mining, transport, and smelting; that's where most of the cost is.
Weight is only a concern in space due to launch costs. If you already have the metal in space, iron is an excellent material.
As I wrote above and you missed "we are talking seriously way out SF stuff here".
Thank you.
If you can give a tiny handout to people who will spend it and then avoid the global financial crisis. How is that not a good thing?
If I could pop a ballooon and then ... ... ...
If I could wish really hard and then
If I could wear a green shirt that day and then
The global financial crisis would not have been avoided by giving a tiny handout to people than it would, if I happened to wear a green shirt that day. It doesn't undo the years of bad decisions leading up to the crisis. It doesn't change that society was greatly malinvested due to so much of society putting their wealth into real estate investments of this sort. It doesn't change the amounts of leverage where high amounts of borrowed funds were used to make bad investments.
Sure, it would be a good thing, if it could be managed. But it wouldn't have been managed.
Money is also a commodity. The amount of other things that money can be traded for depends in great part on the ratio of money to other things. There is no need to expand the currency supply provided that it is adequately divisible; however keeping the price of things stable is generally beneficial. That does make the expansion of the money supply roughly the same as population growth a good thing.
"without the monetary supply being able to expand there would be no money for poor <rude language> like you." is demonstrably false.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Why, exactly, are you exhibiting faulty thinking?
One must not necessarily "win" at the expense of the other...
It takes all kinds man. And tunnel vision like yours helps nothing and nobody.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The car ownership rate in Manhattan is 23%. Car ownership is not necessary in many densely populated areas. Cell phones are unnecessary toys.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Of course they have real value. If you buy one for $10k you may only be able to sell it for $3k, but that's still REAL value. And that really just means the "value" was $3K and you paid too much originally.
I don't disagree that the diamond industry is a complete and utter scam, but like many luxuries, art, etc value is what the market decides it is.
High minimum wage is one of the reasons that the unemployment rate among young black males exceeds 50%.
Are we talking the government's unemployment figures or "percentage of young black males not employed"? If it's the former, I'd hazard a guess that the predominant reason is their peer group tells them they're lame for working and so they quit/get fired.
If it's the latter, part of the problem is the inflation of requirements for entry-level positions, and that there's only so many minimum-wage jobs to go around... and it's likely an across-the-board, without respect to race or gender, high percentage of young people who aren't employed.
It would be a lot more interesting to go after palladium, platinum, iridium and other metals like that, rhodium, osmium and ruthenium.
Bringing back a dozen tonnes of palladium or iridium would be useful. Worthless materials might be useful to built a reentry vehicle (i.e. like an Apollo capsule or nuclear warhead or Shuttle), unless it's actually cheaper to launch the reentry vehicle from Earth and transfer the materials flown from the asteroid belt into it.
But, it's dubious. If you need say a $500 billion investment to get this started, how long does it take just to break even with all the resources you've used down on Earth?
Like, what about looking for these very precious metals as fission products in piles of nuclear waste, transmuting some of them when that's needed. I once looked for that on the internet and wikipedia, just for fun. It does seem barely doable. Fascinating. I'd love we do it, and it's available right here on Earth, talk about ISRU. But on first approximation, it's madness.
right now health insurance companies cost you about 30 cents for every dollar of your health care. ... the finance guys and upper management wont' mention it since it is their salaries at stake
The company I work for uses a non-profit insurance company that so happens to own a large number of the hospitals in my state, and they also reflected this. They're pretty open about their costs. They pretty much said that if they had it their way, they would be out of jobs but the cost of providing service at their hospitals would be much lower if they didn't need to go through all of the red tape of insurance claims. We actually have doctor's offices and dentists that will reduce your bill ~60% if you don't use insurance.
You were already at +5 so my ownership of mod points does not matter at this time...
But damn. That was good. 115 Death Stars. Very digestible... insofar as I can digest the amount of iron needed for a Death Star.
Thank you.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Induction furnaces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The same way steel foundries on Earth do it.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Maybe the goal is to run a test of the moon creation theories...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Didn't work out so well for them.
There is another good example, though I forget his name at the moment. He was an African King (or whatever alternate term), who was vastly wealthy due to gold mines. I believe he went on a long journey I think to Mecca or something. As a show of his magnificence he basically gave away gold all along the way, essentially devaluing it and destroying economies all along the route he took. He also traveled with the largest library on camels, though I may be mixing up my stories on that point.
Um Bronze isn't a mined commodity. I'm pretty sure it is an alloy of tin and copper. So either they started running out of tin and/or copper (which would make them worth more), or running out of smelting capacity to produce the bronze, which I expect made the smelters rich, but little effect on either tin or copper. Bronze might have taken a sharp incline very temporarily if used all at once and took awhile for smelting to bring more to market, but I can't see that as having more than a blip of impact,
Or maybe that is our strategic reserve if we need to fling an iron bullet at some distant world for some reason...
Though funny retort from advanced civ: "Hai guys, thx for all the iron, k thx bai! :) ;) ;P"
You say that, however rare earth mining is problematic for much the same reason (if not the same scale).
You just wait until Space Trump comes and boils off our oceans looking for weapons of mass destruction, and pays himself in 20 million in gold for his trouble.
You can keep prices high only when you don't sell much. But if you don't sell much, you will never recover the capital expense of retrieving the asteroid.
Don't worry. No one is retrieving any asteroids. Meanwhile, DeBeers has control over the buying and selling of almost all diamonds, which is why they're so over-priced.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped