Gold is a actually extremely useful, and has a ton of practical applications where it's not used because of cost. Diamonds, which are supposedly abundant in asteroids, and quite plentiful on earth, on the other hand, can be manufactured in tool grade cheaply, and gem grade can be made for about $300/carat.

It's a good conductor, doesn't corrode easily.

If anything, it seems like an opportunity for billionaires to have indentured servants who are stuck in outer space mining until their term is up. That’s probably some of the reason they have been investing so heavily in prisons.

And that's exactly what every billionaire is thinking.

godspeed brownsugga

Being rich means having a surplus of valuable commodities and capital.

In a modern capitalist system, the commodities are fetishized in order to inflate their received value.

But in a more socialized system, shared capital has the capacity to enrich everyone.

The big catch is that, under a more socialist economy existing in parallel with a capitalist media, poverty becomes associated with the public institutions while capitalism becomes indicative of education, independence, and success.

An individual might be wealthy with respect to historical peers under a socialist model, but still feel improvised relative to the elites and their horded private wealth. That they've got access to libraries and parks and subways and public housing doesn't feel like wealth relative to the country clubbers who have more grandeous private versions of all of the above.

You'll see this in Western depictions of Soviet states all the time. Small apartments, bread lines, and grumpy bureaucrats are slanted as rampant poverty. Meanwhile, homelessness and malnutrition and the lawless frontier are all just part of the Hero's Journey on the way to glory.

Exactly what they did with diamonds.

“The mine owners did not find the gold asteroid, they did not mine the gold asteroid, they did not mill the gold asteroid, but by some weird alchemy all the gold from the asteroid belonged to them!”

Bill Haywood

That's where we currently stand.

will there be advantages for daily life if gold is trivially affordable? probably, it's a good material for many applications. and is extremely rust resistant.

Coating all exposed metals with gold would be trivial.

[Skip a few paragraphs of technical world building. ]

it'll be an increments tech step without any changes in inequality and a minor change in the public quality of life.

Great movie. I have a lot of friends in scientific community, I swear all of them have had a #dontlookup moment in their life

I mean, they'd switch value systems. They've already done that by making "debt" as the unit of value.

They'd be cheaper to make.