[ExI] De-Orbiting Gold

[Brent Allsop]

And I don't think you can  use the horribly inflated price of gold 
today, as your price point.  The current price of gold is only due to 
the immoral fear mongering hording bastards that "invest" in  gold and 
pay to store it in some vault someplace, for fear of some economic or 
social calamity, - all making the world a worse place,  instead of 
investing in something hopeful and moral like Google or Canonizer LLC.

Often times when I try to start my old 2001 Saturn in the morning, it 
fails, till I grind the clutch to clean off the non gold switch 
contacts, before it will start.  I always swear at the bastard immoral 
gold hordes that drive the cost of the stuff up, so manufactures can't 
use the stuff to make better products.  I always curse the immoral 
bastards every morning.

So, even if you did get the price of de-orbiting gold under the current 
inflated price of gold today, that is going to further depress the price 
of gold, and hopefully help the imoral horders to see the evill in their 
ways, and drive them out of the market, towards a more socially 
responsible investment, bring the price more in line of where it should 
be - far cheaper.

So what about other stuff, like maybe platinum or diamonds, or other 
precious metals?  And didn't someone say there was lots of He3 on the 
moon, and that a small amount of that could power a nation for a year or 
something like that?  Finding stuff like gold is also very hard, right?  
Unlike He3??  You got to remember those costs.

I'm still in the camp that thinks all that space stuff is still an 
immoral waste, significantly slowing society down, causing how many more 
souls to fail to reach the millennium to eternally rot in hell or the 
grave?  We've got to focus on the brain, first, and get to where we can 
upload and back our selves up.  Then Everyone, not just the selfish 
rich, can start to easily afford to play in space.

Brent Allsop





On 5/20/2012 7:44 AM, spike wrote:
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
> [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg
> ...Subject: Re: [ExI] De-Orbiting Gold
>
> On 20/05/2012 07:15, Kelly Anderson wrote:
>> Ok, so maybe I'm not a rocket scientist... but what would happen if
>> you had say a one meter diameter ball of solid gold, perhaps covered
>> with a three meter thick coating of copper (total 7 meters), and you
>> just decelerated it as much as possible and dropped it into the middle
>> of the Sahara Dessert.
>> As Spike pointed out, the big problem is that you still need delta-v to
> change the orbit into an Earth-intersector. LEO orbital velocity is around
> 7.8 km/s, so it is going to be a few km/s. Also, if you don't like vaporised
> gold you need to reduce it to near zero in the end.
>
>> Aerobraking can deal with up to 3 km/s, so if you put your gold in a wing
> with some automated control and give it some hefty parachute you might be
> able to shave some km/s off. -- Anders Sandberg,
>
>
> In addition, if you go the aero-braking route, you still need some sort of
> propulsion method to do the final deceleration, if you want that sphere of
> gold to land in some particular location, rather than in the sea somewhere.
> If propulsion, you need some kind of thrust vector control and a
> stabilization system, such as a gyro and a power source to run it, and a
> guidance system, and it wouldn't be at all easy to do.  It could be done,
> but you wouldn't go up and get gold on orbit probably, not with currently
> existing technology.
>
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