# How limited are our resouces? Really? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 10, 2012, 6:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-limited-are-our-resouces-really/621535 "2012-05-10T18:22:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2012, 11:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-limited-are-our-resouces-really/621535/21 "2012-05-10T23:11:18Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > The obstacles are the other people out there. There are places in the world where you could pick up gold nuggets from the beach. Except the previous 1,000,000 people who walked along the beach have already picked them up. There are places where crude oil bubbles out of the ground. Except oil companies already own those places. There are places in the world with millions of acres of forest, ready to be turned into lumber. Except somebody already owns them. > > If a random person could just wander around collecting valuable stuff, then why would anybody do anything else? People would quit their jobs and start gathering the stuff, until there was so much competition that it wasn’t worth it anymore. There’s the old joke about two economists walking down the street. One of them looks down and says, “Look, there’s a fifty dollar bill lying on the sidewalk a few feet ahead.” The other one keeps walking without even glancing down. “That’s impossible. If there had been a fifty dollar bill there, somebody else would have already picked it up.” ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2012, 11:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-limited-are-our-resouces-really/621535/22 "2012-05-10T23:13:16Z")
I’d never heard that economist joke in my life, and in the last two days I’ve seen it twice in threads started by **Diamonds02**. ---
**Author:** ![appleciders](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85f322/32.png) [@appleciders](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/appleciders)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2012, 2:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-limited-are-our-resouces-really/621535/23 "2012-05-11T02:37:48Z")
Ways to become fabulously wealthy all have a roadblock; otherwise, everyone would do it, and it would make no one fabulously wealth anymore. Dealing drugs is very lucrative, but you stand a non-trivial chance of going to jail (or being killed) for doing it. Being a CEO is very lucrative, but there’s a lot of competition. Striking it rich as a gold prospector is very lucrative, but you have to get extremely lucky. Being a prostitute can be very lucrative, but it’s illegal and you’d better be extremely attractive if you want to make a good wage. Short version: there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. ---
**Author:** ![Siam\_Sam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2012, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-limited-are-our-resouces-really/621535/24 "2012-05-11T03:00:10Z")
> [@FinnAgain](#): > > An immigrant man comes to the United States, having heard that the streets are paved with gold. He gets off the boat, goes through Ellis Island, sets foot on the streets of Manhattan and, sure enough, there are gold bricks scattered from one end of the street to the next. > > “Nah,” the man says “I’ll start work tomorrow.” We were at Ellis Island last month, and in the museum there was an actual quote from in immigrant, years after he’d been processed. It went something like: “They told us the streets were paved with gold. But when I arrived, I found: 1) There was no gold; 2) there were no streets; and 3) I was expected to make the streets.” ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2012, 3:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-limited-are-our-resouces-really/621535/25 "2012-05-11T03:13:30Z")
> [@hajario](#): > > You’re lazy. You’re looking for the easy way out. Unless you win a lottery or inherit a bunch of money, the only way to wealth is talent and hard work. Luck, connections and ruthlessness are more important than either talent or hard work. Plenty of talented people work extremely hard and die no richer than they started. The hard working, talented people mostly make _other people_ rich. > [@XT](#): > > Except it would be more accurate to say trillions of dollars worth of materials on an asteroid. But yeah, there are huge untapped resources out there for the people who figure out how to tap them economically. > > The trick is figuring out how to do it economically and without killing lots of folks, but there are huge fortunes to be made by someone, some time in the future. It’s largely an infrastructure problem, really. There’s lots of resources in space to be tapped - if there was an infrastructure to get them to market. But until people start tapping them, no one wants to spend the huge sums which it would take to build the infrastructure. ---
**Author:** ![drewtwo99](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d07c76/32.png) [@drewtwo99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drewtwo99)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2012, 3:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-limited-are-our-resouces-really/621535/26 "2012-05-11T03:24:19Z")
You could always go the Dr. Evil route. Life is a pretty valuable commodity, one for which people have been known to pay millions of dollars for. Find some rich family, kidnap one of them, and demand a million dollar ransom. Or put a giant laser on the moon and threaten to blow up the world if you don’t get 100 hundred billion trillion gajibijibijilion dollars. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2012, 3:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-limited-are-our-resouces-really/621535/27 "2012-05-11T03:32:20Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > I’d never heard that economist joke in my life, and in the last two days I’ve seen it twice in threads started by **Diamonds02**. In my defense, the subject of getting something for nothing is the topic of several of Diamonds’ threads and that leads to the joke. ---
**Author:** ![mac9891](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f4b2a3/32.png) [@mac9891](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mac9891)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2012, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-limited-are-our-resouces-really/621535/28 "2012-05-11T03:35:56Z")
> [@hajario](#): > > You’re lazy. You’re looking for the easy way out. Unless you win a lottery or inherit a bunch of money, the only way to wealth is talent and hard work. I highly disagree, I know people who don’t work that hard go through school get into a nice university get an easy job that pays well. ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2012, 3:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-limited-are-our-resouces-really/621535/29 "2012-05-11T03:44:59Z")
> [@Diamonds02](#): > > I’ve always believed if I looked hard enough I can find something that makes me a lot of money. Well, maybe. The trick is finding something that somebody else hasn’t already beaten you to. The most likely avenues are 1)find some new way to gather a known valuable resource that is too difficult to gather using existing techniques (e.g. there’s gold in seawater… if you can figure out how to extract it without spending more than it’s worth) or 2)find a valuable use for something that currently seems useless. Good luck. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2012, 3:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-limited-are-our-resouces-really/621535/30 "2012-05-11T03:46:26Z")
[QUOTE=mac9891] I highly disagree, I know people who don’t work that hard go through school get into a nice university get an easy job that pays well. [/QUOTE] Even if I accept the premise that you ‘know people’, etc etc, I am highly skeptical you know a lot of WEALTHY people who follow this trajectory and acquired their wealth in this fashion (I’m pretty skeptical that you know a lot of folks who have even gotten to the ‘well off’ point following that plan), which was the point being made in the quoted section. The OP seems to be looking for a get rich quick scheme, not some dubious plan to get to a solid middle class range by going to school and getting an ‘easy job that pays well’. [QUOTE=Der Trihs] It’s largely an infrastructure problem, really. There’s lots of resources in space to be tapped - if there was an infrastructure to get them to market. But until people start tapping them, no one wants to spend the huge sums which it would take to build the infrastructure. [/QUOTE] Agree completely. I think a good analogy would be the early rail road system. A lot of folks could see the potential, but it was difficult to get anyone to pony up the huge amounts of capital needed to set the stage, especially in the early days. The folks who were able to acquire that capital (or get the government to fork some of it over) became, by and large, the early rail road barons and became ridiculously wealthy. My guess is that some of the folks who eventually figure out how to set up the infrastructure to enable them to exploit resources in our solar system will become proportionately as ridiculously wealthy as those early rail road barons. -XT ---
**Author:** ![Yeticus\_Rex](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/a698b9/32.png) [@Yeticus\_Rex](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yeticus_Rex)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2012, 5:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-limited-are-our-resouces-really/621535/31 "2012-05-11T17:36:44Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > Luck, connections and ruthlessness are more important than either talent or hard work. Plenty of talented people work extremely hard and die no richer than they started. The hard working, talented people mostly make _other people_ rich. Hmmm…[I think there is more to it than that](http://www.buzzle.com/articles/good-luck-quotes.html). Luck is also dependent on having the brains to know the difference of being the tool for someone else and their success, and going out and doing it yourself and doing it better than your former boss. This positive mindset runs counter on how you view luck. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2012, 8:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-limited-are-our-resouces-really/621535/32 "2012-05-11T20:12:40Z")
Actually, most people have idly wished that they could get rich easily, but very few people actually attempt it. Mostly they just make bad investments. Nigerian princes and casinos harvest them regularly. It takes a lot of thinking, planning and work to get rich easily. That said, if you actually apply yourself and work hard at it, you can get rich easily, though it’s by no means a sure thing. Most people simply do not do it. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-limited-are-our-resouces-really/621535.md?page=1)