[ExI] Hawking urges Moon landing to 'elevate humanity'

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Jun 23, 2017, at 10:38 AM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
> 3) Set up a mining camp, start extracting the easiest-to-extract
> chunks, land them on Earth, and sell them to achieve first revenue.
> Aggressively ignore the pundits who howl that the only profitable use
> of resources in orbit must be in orbit, but who can't point to
> specific buyers with nearly as much to spend as, say, the platinum
> commodity market.  Accept that first sales of these minerals will
> start crashing the market; getting to first revenue ASAP is critical
> to getting the funding to have gotten this far.

One major problem with this: real world markets ate forward-looking. The prices for the commodities would likely crash beforehand based on the expectation of such sales. If traders expected the project to work -- and it's hard to see how they wouldn't unless you somehow keep the whole thing secret or most traders expect failure right until contracts are signed.

One way to mitigate this might be to set up futures or options contracts with the goal of profiting before things start to happen. But that puts you into a realm of very speculation trading that might not end up playing out as you believe.

Another is to try to stimulate demand. If a very rare commodity's supply increases hugely and demand stays the same, prices typically crash, but if the demand can go up that might play out another way.

Regards,

Dan
  Sample my Kindle books via:
http://author.to/DanUst


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