Get digging

A Microserf had an entry on his blog where he realised that our whole economy is now driven by something other than gold. Not quite true, not quite false. Here's my take, based on simple stuff learned in Ted Trainer's elective 'Ecosystems and Human Habitation' in second year at UNSW. In 1990; it's not like science is hiding this information from anyone. People like John Winston Howard should be made to study, and pass, this course. At gunpoint. With me holding the gun.

Read on, and try not to get too depressed:

Money, and wealth, still comes from digging stuff out of the ground. It has since prehistory; it doesn't look like it will stop anytime soon.

Up until recently, that stuff was gold, by and large, or any other metals. It probably still is a large component on a global scale. My guess is that by far the largest component of diggable stuff is oil.

Despite all the claims of paper or digital economies, we still base all economic calculations back to three things - the value of the US$, the value of a barrel of oil, the value of an ounce of gold. There is no 'value of a Gb of data' yet, despite a Gb being worth a lot, say for pr0n (no, really, think about it!) or a movie (and the DRM); a Gb of spam is actually worth a negative value. This would be the main reason why data is not a tradable commodity, and likely never will be - 99.999% of it is crap.

Think about what events would really cause economic collapse: running out of oil and / or metals.

Running out of oil is really no big problem - there are other sources of energy. Running out of metals is a big problem though: we can still get energy from trees / sunlight / animals, but without metals we have no transport, communications or weaponry (to defend ourselves from any animals who might see us as a source of energy). Put simply: Stone Age and the resultant minor economic downturn ;-)

Running out of oil might happen in our lifetime; running out of metals will take longer but will happen. Earth's resources are large, but not infinite. Eventually, we will reach a point where there won't be enough metals to allow us to find new sources of metals - asteroids, the Moon, Mercury. For some metals (especially non-radioactive steel) we are close to that point already. Non-radioactive steel currently allows us to build airliners and spacecraft; without it we can't make accurate radiation counters - vital to the maintenance and manufacture of airliners and spacecraft.

Ponder that for a moment - there will come a time, and soon, where we won't be able to make airliners or spacecraft anymore. We'll be stuck, here, on Earth. Using up all the oil, then all the metals, and then... we won't have to worry about economics anymore; only about whether our flint knife will protect us from that grizzly bear runing towards us.

Economics will always be about digging stuff up. Data won't save you from a bear, or from peak oil.

Good luck, have a nice life.