“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
Hillary Clinton, who is still alive
I'm proud and excited to announce the founding of my new startup, Open Asteroid Impact, where we redirect asteroids towards Earth for the benefit of humanity. Our mission is to have as high an impact as possible.
Below, I've copied over the one-pager I've sent potential investors and early employees:
Name: Open Asteroid Impact
Launch Date: April 1 2024
Website: openasteroidimpact.org
Mission: To have as high an impact as possible
Pitch: We are an asteroid mining company. When most people think about asteroid mining, they think of getting all the mining equipment to space and carefully mining and refining ore in space, before bringing the ore back down in a controlled landing. But humanity has zero experience in Zero-G mining in the vacuum of space. This is obviously very inefficient. Instead, it’s much more efficient to bring the asteroids down to Earth first, and mine it on the ground.
Furthermore, we are first and foremost an asteroid mining *safety* company. That is why we need to race as fast as possible to be at the forefront of asteroid redirection, so more dangerous companies don’t get there before us, letting us set safety standards.
Cofounder and CEO: Linch Zhang
Other employees: Austin Chen (CTO), Zach Weinersmith (Chief Culinary Officer), Annie Vu (ESG Analyst)
Board: tbd
Competitors: DeepMine, Anthropocene
Valuation: Astronomical
Design Principles: Bigger, Faster, Safer
Organizational Structure: for-profit C corp owned by B corp owned by public benefit corporation owned by 501c4 owned by 501c3 with a charter set through a combination of regulations from Imperial France, tlatoani Aztec Monarchy, Incan federalism, and Qin-dynasty China to avoid problems with Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem
Safety Statement: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from human-directed asteroids should be a global priority alongside other civilizational risks such as nuclear war and artificial general intelligence”
You can learn more about us on our website.
The fact that it's a small fraction of GDP indicates that it's not a big bottleneck to creating consumer value. This applies to both (current) SOTA AI and minerals.
If value were critically bottlenecked by some key resource, then producers of that resource could charge high prices for it, or consumers could try to purchase it in larger quantities, pushing up its contribution to GDP. The fact that minerals are sold for relatively cheap relative to the rest of the economy indicates they aren't a very important input, in the sense of bottlenecking consumer value [ETA: assuming they aren't ~perfect substitutes for other goods]. This is not true for things that do take up lots of GDP, like healthcare and housing.
Regarding your specific point: I expect current SOTA generative AI would continue to be a small fraction of GDP even if it were made 10x or 100x cheaper (in terms of inference cost). Do you disagree?
Gold is almost entirely used as a store of value rather than a generator of value. As a result, the net welfare effect of mining gold is probably either slightly positive, or negative depending on the cost of mining it. Doubling the supply of gold would be like doubling the supply of Bitcoin: it would result in a windfall to whoever got the new supply, but would make all previous holders of Bitcoin poorer. These effects cancel each other out; it's a zero sum game.
Real (social) wealth generation is achieved by creating valuable goods and services that satisfy human preferences. This mainly involves utilizing labor and capital to create technology, manufacture items, or provide professional services. Wealth does not primarily come from the amount of raw resources available in the world.