A comment I made in a discussion about energy and economics.
Energy is money.
Which makes you winder why long shots like this don’t get funded: An introduction to Proton-Boron Fusion.
Yes the odds are 10 to 1 against. But if we hit that 1 it is energy for the next 10,000 years. Not to mention Mars in two weeks. We can mine asteroids. A gold asteroid would do wonders for the Austrian school. Cheap gold. Then we get a true accounting. Iron is money. Copper is money. Tin is money. Wheat is money. Hemp is money (and in the early colonial days of America you could use it to pay taxes). Pure water is money.
And the best part? We get a yes/no in about 5 years for $1/2 a billion. Chump change.
Then there was a commenter who believes in resource depletion. I had a reply for him.
Resource depletion? No such thing. The oceans are FULL of resources.
What you mean is that the energy costs of getting those resources is high. That is a different question.
The finding of a gold asteroid would greatly reduce the cost of gold. The intrinsic value of gold is an illusion based on the high energy cost of extraction.Even the “Austrians” have their illusions.
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The “Austrians” refers to the Austrian school of economics.
Comments
8 responses to “Energy Is Money”
I was trying to remember the two monetary systems from the Illuminatus! books, Hemp money and ? was it flax money?
Anyway, I found this quote:
“When A meets B in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses. There is no more Free Market here than there is on the other side of the Iron Curtain.”
I think this is a quote from Hagbard Celine, the supposed anarcho-capitalist. Sounds like something Bernie Sanders would say, which just shows just how ignorant of economics Wilson and Shea were.
Why Thorium being ignored? A Thorium reactor is not a theoretical possibility, proof of principal one was running in the 70s. Thorium is 3x more abundant than Uranium, a Thorium reactor makes no high level waste, it can’t melt down, and so on.
I agree cheap, efficient fusion is even better. And I’m sure we’ll have it. Just around the corner. Any day now. Really, folks, coming right up.
Note that the Austrians – the real ones, like Mises or even Rothbard – have no illusions about “intrinsic value” of gold.
If you’d asked Mises what would happen if a literal mountain of gold was found, he’d have told you that gold as a metallic currency would have the same problem silver did during the Spanish silver boom in the 16th-18th centuries.
A modern Austrian knows that in the long run metallism is no more an answer than using cowrie shells.
(I’m of the “just use a fiat currency” model that Mises accepted after gold was effectively abandoned by the 20s – there’s no magic going back.
As long as you can cow the states into avoiding inflationary policy, fiat currency works well, and avoids deflationary traps [ala BitCoin].)
The odds of the science working may be 1 in 10. Multiply that by the 1 in 100 odds of getting regulatory approval and you have a really bad risk.
Using energy as a stand-in for money in analysis has a lot of utility. Of course, one has to account for energy quality too.
I remember the work of Howard Odom, an ecologist (a real scientist) who looked at living systems in terms of energy flows. A really wonderful way to look at the world.
As to thorium, no need for big research since we have plenty of uranium already. Thorium is cheaper and more plentiful but much more difficult and expensive to use.
Please don’t start with the molten salt reactor. A nice concept and worthy of continued development but no panacea.
Asteroid mining for terrestrial use is never going to take off because the energies and timescales involved are ridiculous, even before we get to the problem that one could accidentally wipe out the Eastern Seaboard.
If you could mine asteroids, you wouldn’t take them to the bottom of a steep potential well, you’d build and trade stuff for your burgeoning interplanetary civilization.
Hi Simon,
Are you and Joe P. OK?
Is talk-polywell dead?
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