King Midas, Asteroid Mining and Capitalism
In Aristotle’s Politics, the ancient philosopher attributes Midas’s death to the king’s “vain prayer for the gold touch,” that eventually resulted, quite logically and predictably, in his inability to eat food or drink water because, you know, it was all turning to gold. Allegorically, it’s a simple morality tale against greed.
What is it about gold and silver that create such terrible ideas? Whether in history, fiction, in cautious tales told to youngsters and dark tales reserved for consenting adults, gold makes people do stupid, stupid things. Evil characters, for example, replace real limbs with golden limbs. Take Midas. While it’s a bold claim to say he was the least intelligent king in literary history, you would have to think he would have had economic advisers to warn him of the effect of glutting the gold market in Phrygia. To be fair, Midas may have been dull in the senses and thoughts after having entertained Dionysus’s friend, the satyr Silenus for ten days and nights. Midas eventually returned Silenus to Dyonysus (he probably had the god’s updated contact information), but his gold-glutting suicide mission serves as one of western civilization’s most cringey lessons.
I’ll submit here that in the present, it’s capitalism that causes such terrible ideas as those allegorically represented in the story of King Midas. In fact, one of the paradoxical effects of capitalism is to make us forget even the rules of the market when vying to get rich by gaming the system. Midas only saw one side of the value of gold: acquiring gold things was beneficial to him. He either didn’t see, or thought he could further game, the fact that having more total gold things in the kingdom would reduce the value of each of them. This might be because scarcity as a source for value is, for many, a weird and even paradoxical concept.
Now take a very Midas-like phenomenon of the current times, recently satirized in the Netflix film, “Don’t Look Up”: there are giant rocks of solid gold (and other rare metals) floating in space, orbiting the sun. We can mine them, and make an unfathomable amount of money: $700 quintillion for the asteroid Psyche, which we think is made of nickel and iron and gold and platinum. NASA is going there, launching a ship next year that will arrive in 2026.
Noah Smith at The Print has good arguments for why this kind of endeavor won’t make us richer:
a giant asteroid full of gold only adds a little to real wealth. The metal would have various industrial applications and make nice jewelry and dental fillings, but it wouldn’t spark a new industrial revolution, or dramatically bring down the cost of goods and services, or in general make human life much better or more comfortable. Gold doesn’t command high prices just because it’s rare — plenty of rare things have little to no market value. It’s because it’s rare relative to people’s demand for it. And because a golden asteroid wouldn’t increase the world’s total demand for gold, there’s no way it could create quadrillions of dollars of new real wealth.
In fact, Smith points out, gluts of precious metals have historically been bad for economies. When Spain brought large deposits of American gold and silver back to Europe, the result was massive inflation. Smith doesn’t think there’s a large risk of that now because our economies don’t rely on precious metals.
I’m not sure it’s that simple though. As TRT World points out, not only would (obviously) some people lose a lot of money because of a glut of minerals, the gap between the haves and have-nots in relation to this literally unearthly abundance of gold, silver, and other metals would mean the massive exacerbation of existing inequalities: “[C]ountries without access to space mining programs are going to be left far behind countries and private companies that have reached a multi-planetary status, able to leverage off-world income. For many, this promises an era of monopoly and unfair competition.”
On a separate but related note, the arguments asserting that crashing the metals market has no impact do not really make sense. The metals markets are one source of conflict between the U.S. and China. In fact, a glut from China caused both economic downturn and environmental harm in 2015. It’s true that stabilizing markets can be a good thing. More importantly, the ability of rare metals to provide for various electronic elemental needs could reduce conflict, environmental harm and labor exploitation on earth. But this presupposes that extraction and production would be planned with concern for human needs rather than profit. Moving operations to space has its own environmental cost — space travel is carbon-intensive — and reproducing labor exploitation off-planet doesn’t solve it on-planet; rather, it just becomes another way to export exploitation to a more distant periphery. The waste produced will still likely occur through refinement on earth or, if it does happen in space, that waste will have to go somewhere, and space isn’t as empty as we think it is when powerful forces like gravity not only exist but have very clear and extensive impacts.
At its core, the drive for extraction emerges from the privileging of exchange value over use value. On one hand: we do need some metals, even abundances of them, in order to make our technology work. The search for those metals, from cobalt to gold and more, exacts a terrible toll on us now, a toll partly attributable to the metals’ scarcity, but even more largely attributable to the way those extraction, production and distributions are made politically and socially. Off-planet inorganic and relatively impact-neutral sources of those minerals could indeed relieve the toll on our planet and its people. But if such extraction is undertaken under the current global economic system, the economic and even social advantages will end up being negligible at best: environmental and social impacts will continue to be externalized in unfair ways, and most of us won’t even be a little better off.
