The Gold Standard - Killer App for Space?

Mr. Poretto is going on about the gold standard - he is in favor of it - which is interesting but a bit much for my poor button-brain.

Travis replied ...

The world supply of above-ground gold increases by about 2% per year. The supply cannot be accelerated faster than that; the laws of physics prevent

I disagree. Gold mining, like everything else, responds to increasing demand. If the price of gold doubled, could we not drastically increase gold mining with a decade or so?

Look up? 99% of the resources in the solar system are not terrestrial. We think that Eros has

20,000 million tonnes of aluminium along with similar amounts of gold, platinum and other rarer metals.

In the 2,900 cubic kms of Eros, there is more aluminium, gold, silver, zinc and other base and precious metals than have ever been excavated in history or indeed, could ever be excavated from the upper layers of the Earth's crust.

That is just in one asteroid and not a very large one at that. There are thousands of asteroids out there.

People will talk about a 'killer app' that drives development in space - the one thing that will be the thing that we can't live without.

SPS could be that but putting all our hopes in such a frail basket seems unwise.

I wonder if putting the world's largest and most productive economy on the gold standard would be the killer app that drives development in space.

You may not be able to depend on energy policy or expensive oil .. but you can always count on people's hunger to acquire wealth.

It's not the inner system - it's a treasure map.