Guess the future of the Human race

[Final-Fan]

SamuelRSmith said:

Final-Fan said:

Well obviously if you have a shit-ton more gold, then gold will be worth less (all else being equal), therefore a dollar will get you more of it.  That is true for fiat currency as well. 

What we don't see is why the dollar being able to buy more gold translates to the dollar being able to ALSO buy more bread, which you claim with your 'increased purchase power' allegation.  The value change did not happen with the dollar (being worth more) but with the gold (being worth less). 

Basically, I guess it depends on whether you reckon the "value" based solely on its relation to your commodity (gold) that it's based on, or to everything in general.

Ah, yes. Well, no where did I actually mention gold, either in my idea for a hard currency (though, it's easy to jump to the gold conclusion, as this is what is traditionally used), or rapid resource expansion. If all resource supply increases tremendously (which is what I meant by the space exploration = more resources thing), then money will increase in value against everything.

Truthfully, thinking about it, I can see some mistakes in my thinking... as, one of the things that makes gold a good store of value is its relative rarity, and the amount of effort it takes to actually mine something like gold. In fact, I'm now struggling to think how hard money could work in a world of almost limitless resources. Hard money is based on the notion of limited resources, a finite world. Which currency system will be best in the future, with the mass of resources, I have no idea... beyond my realms of understanding.

In fact, all economic theories and systems are based on the notion of scarcity and limits of resources. How the study of economics will evolve if/when we beging pillaging deep space for particular resources, is an interesting thought.

Well.  You said that we are going to go to space and therefore have incredible amounts of all resources, when in fact we could only have incredible amounts of resources that you can get in space.  That includes metals:  Gold, iron, nickel, etc.  IIRC, our rare earth metal supply issues would be over. 

But it does NOT mean that we will have, for example, more labor resources.  Or more food resources.  Or more fuel resources.  Unless uranium is accessibly plentiful out there, which I don't know.  In that case, more nuclear power would give more grid power, freeing up other fuel sources for the smaller jobs.  And it would also give SOME boost to food production etc., but it wouldn't change the fact that the value of metals would become WILDLY out of proportion (compared to today) with the rest of ... everything.  That would definitely cause countries that depended on mining metals to economically collapse.  As for the industries themselves, well, someone needs to mine in space.

P.S.  I know you didn't say it would be gold, I just picked gold because I thought you DID say it would be a metal and gold is the metal people have usually used so I just said "gold" for convenience.