[ExI] Gold

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 10:04:51PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> One of the things Brent's cannonizer position said was that if Nasa (or
> SpaceX?) found and brought back a large quantity of gold from outer space

Space is expensive. Space is really, really expensive.
It costs about 0.4 MUSD/kg of payload to Moon and 
back, 0.5 MUSD/kg for Mars.

If you can mine resources in space, they will be used in
situ. Earth would be a backwater, a nature park.

High to middle Earth orbit is an excellent place for 
energy production, communication, computation, and storage.
Photons travel very lightly, and information can be
very valuable (since it can encode persons).

> that it would devalue gold. While basic supply/demand clearly demands that
> the price of gold would go down, I personally don't think it would go down
> all that much because it is such a useful element on its own.
> 
> I read an article in an old National Geographic where the author had a
> frying pan created out of solid gold, about 3 pounds worth. He said it made
> the best fried eggs he had ever experienced, and of course it was non-stick
> (probably before there was teflon, but I don't remember the date of the
> article) and easy to clean because gold doesn't react to anything.
> 
> If gold came down in price, I think it would just get used for more things
> because of its unique properties... and that makes some kind of floor. It
> will always be relatively rare compared to the abundance of the other
> elements.
> 
> So, I kind of disagree about large amounts of gold causing a severe
> devaluation... What do you all think?

I think there will be never large amounts of anything travelling
in the local system. It's stupid. It makes no sense.