Exports? As much as we try for material self-sufficiency, there are going to be certain items that martians are going to be importing for a long time. A few examples of these are, in my mind, computer chips (the equipment necessary to make nanoscale transistors and build them into Integrated Circuit chips is pretty complex and expensive), certain catalysts (Chemical catalysts typically have complex nanostructures that are more-or-less required for them to really work), and of course it would probably make sense for the colony to subsidize the cost of transport for its colonists so that the best and most hardworking, instead of the richest, people come to Mars. My question is: What can Martians export? There are the easy novelty items, to start with. For example, martian regolith/dust might be worth money if sold as a novelty on Earth. However, I find it dubious that a significant amount of revenue could be generated from this because the price will probably fall by a lot as soon as the regolith becomes easily available. Then there are things like mining platinum or gold, which are at least worth considering because of the high prices of these materials on a per kilogram basis. Mars also likely has better reserves of Gold and Platinum than are left on Earth because weve been mining precious metals here for possibly as much as ten thousand years. For comparison, annual Gold production is worth 100 billion dollars so we could probably sell a significant amount of gold without crashing the market, while annual platinum production is worth 13 billion dollars so we would be much more likely to flood the market (leading to a crash in prices) if we have a significant supply. On the other hand, Gold is mostly useful for coinage and as a commodity while Platinum is really a very useful metal in industry, so in the long term the price of platinum will respond less to changes in demand because the demand will grow to meet the supply. Then there are also things like volatiles, which really just pushes the question of where the money is coming from onto whoever is buying the volatiles. This is the reason why Im skeptical of the business model of Planetary Resources, btw.
Posted on: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 18:10:05 +0000
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