cross-posted from: https://futurology.today/post/5004513
Diamond prices are down 60% since a 2011 high, and they are still falling. It’s not all down to lab-grown diamonds, demand is down too, especially in China.
No one can lab-grow gold yet, so its rarity and scarcity protect its value, but that will end too. It’s just a question of when. China launched an asteroid touch-down mission this week, which will make it the 4th country/region to do so, after Europe, the US & Japan.
How soon will it be feasible to mine asteroids? Who knows, but a breakthrough in space propulsion might mean the prospect happens quickly when it does. It’s possible gold has twenty years or less of being high value left.
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We’re going to be making gold by blasting tungsten with alpha particles before we’ll ever get asteroid mining. And before doing radiation stuff corporations will be ripping the gold out of people’s teeth. We’ve got a few dozen crises to go before capitalism would ever do something cool like space mining.
Would that be viable energy wise?
Absolutely not, but nuclear transmutation is at least a thing that already exists unlike asteroid mining. One of the problems is that gold has exactly one stable isotope, Au-197. So there are a lot of means to induce nuclear fusion to make other elements into gold, but I think only one method so far (the large hadron collider) has made stable isotopes.
Maybe China can do something cool once they finish building their 100km electron/positron collider.