The Private Sector Doing Space?

[LordTimothytheWise]

Overview – Environment | Virgin Galactic

Speaking of the private sector wouldn't it be interesting to find gold on some planet? There could be a lot of wealth to be made out there in our solar system.

 

[Nabobalis]

There is alot of wealth to be made mining asteroids too. There was a big article on it a few months back in scientific American.

While this isn't that article it does discuss what there is to find in asteroids.

Here. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ive-read-references-in-bo

 

[Cabal]

Overview – Environment | Virgin Galactic

Speaking of the private sector wouldn't it be interesting to find gold on some planet? There could be a lot of wealth to be made out there in our solar system.

Or just start hoovering up Titan's atmosphere, seeing as it's mostly methane and ethane.

 

[pgp_protector]

Or Diamond Oceans further out.
Diamond Oceans Possible on Uranus, Neptune : Discovery News

 

[Nabobalis]

Or Diamond Oceans further out.
Diamond Oceans Possible on Uranus, Neptune : Discovery News

Now that would make an amazing picture.

Oh how I wish I could be an astronaut.

 

[pgp_protector]

Now that would make an amazing picture.

Oh how I wish I could be an astronaut.

Just imagine the suit/ship required to withstand the pressure though

 

[Nabobalis]

Just imagine the suit/ship required to withstand the pressure though

Make it out of diamond?

Oh how I'm glad I became a physicist.

 

[grasping the after wind]

The private sector should be doing these things as government has more important duties to attend to.

 

[Cabal]

The private sector should be doing these things as government has more important duties to attend to.

Well, exploration, yes. I don't know if I necessarily want a corporation having access to a planet's worth of resources, though.

 

[Saving Hawaii]

Overview – Environment | Virgin Galactic

Speaking of the private sector wouldn't it be interesting to find gold on some planet? There could be a lot of wealth to be made out there in our solar system.

Gold really isn't worth anything... in what possible way does having more gold circulating in the economy increase your or my welfare?

On that note though, this reminds me of something Keynes once talked about. People were criticizing a lot of the infrastructure projects during the Great Depression as "inefficient", to which Keynes exclaimed that they were missing the point. The idea was to get people working and to give them incomes, at which point they would spend those incomes on things they wanted boosting demand yet again and creating jobs in the private sector. To that end, he facetiously suggested burying bottles full of dollar bills at the bottom of mine shafts so that entrepreneurs would hire people to dig them up. Unfortunately, we found a sort of Keynesian stimulus even less productive than burying dollar bills to end the Great Depression. The Second World War.

So, let's say that we launch the Shuttle Discovery for one last mission. Cram it's cargo bay full with as many pictures of Benjamin Franklin as we can possibly fit in there. Slam the thing into the Martian desert at full velocity and count on a few good sandstorms to disperse the dollar bills so that it would take a significant effort to actually recover all of them. Then you tell the private economy to "fetch!". It's Keynesian and much better than burying dollar bills or killing millions upon millions of people and obliterating whole continents worth of civilization. It would also drive a tremendous amount of technological progress. And for what? The price of a few reams of paper?