What are the most expensive things?

[sub]This has almost definately been covered before, but I haven’t found anything whilst searching, so…[/sub]

Ok, let’s suppose Mad Scientist X has just perfected nanotechnology, nuclear fusion, alchemy and whatever else it takes to make a decent sized matter synthesiser.

Being a Mad Scientist, he’s not going to use it for good, but instead make lots of expensive stuff so he can control the world economy.

And so he comes to the SDMB. What should Mad Scientist X make to get the biggest profit? Or will inflation get to be so high that he’s better off making weapons of mass destruction with his synthesiser?

-ryoushi

Luxury boats for zillioniares.

The mark up is very high indeed although they do hold their value well once the first five years depreciation is over.

Oil.

First he makes enough to drop the price into the basement and put all of the existing oil companies out of business. Once he’s the only game in town oil wise he can raise the prices to anything he wants although he should still keep it reasonably affordable. If he doesn’t it would encourage others to produce their own oil or, possibly, entire nations may declare war on him.

Actually… I’d never thought of using inflation to drive other players out of the market, thanks! :).

Isn’t an isotope of Americium the world’s most expensive substance? He could make a few kilograms of it and never have to work again.

Some of those buggies cost USD$3,000,000.00 :eek:

He could synthesize an new island off of the coast of Hawaii complete with couple of Playboy Mansions, a waterslide park, a few rollercoasters, a Taco Bell, some dunes for a dune buggy and sell the whole island as a package deal.

According to my 1989 Guinness Book Of Records (German edition), the most expensive substance on Earth is an isotope, Argon 38, used for calibration processes. The price of it is given as 14 million deutschmarks per gram. Yet you should of course be careful not to synthesize too much of it, dropping the price.

There’s an article up on the NYTimes today about the scarcity of moon rocks. They say that someone just paid $350,000 for a couple of patches off an Apollo spacesuit that had smudges of lunar dust on it. Another guy will sell you a tiny piece of scotch tape with a microscopic amount of moon dust on it.
The article claims that 99.9% of all known lunar samples are locked away in NASA vaults, and there is no way to synthesize it, the only way to get more is to actually go to the moon, which would cost billions.

If he were to make a WHOLE heck of a lot of gold, he could hold various countries hostage with a threat to flood the world market of gold dropping the price to a few cents per pound unless everyone paid up bigtime.

But if he’s truely mad, he’d have to build KILLER ROBOTS FROM HELL

Electronics, especially semiconductors, are limited by fabrication methods. With a matter synthesizer, you’d be able to make far better ones. So you could easily get a monopoly on semiconductors, which should make you powerful enough to control the world.

If you could only duplicate current products or material, I think you still need to get a monopoly on some product that is essential to our lives. I think oil is a good suggestion.

What about drugs (pharmaceuticals, not narcotics)? Especially vaccines. They are expensive and essential to our lives.

Radioactive isotopes would be a poor choice. There won’t be much demand even if price dropped. I just ordered some Am-241, Cd-109 and Co-57 - hundreds of dollars for tiny specks of them, but it’s a trivial cost for our project, and it’s not like I’ll be buying more if price dropped.

But wouldn’t the method “synthesize oil-ruin the oil prices-bankrupt all the other oil companies-establish a monopoly and control the world” flop? Even if you’re able to bankrupt all your competitors and establish your monopoly, oil prices would increase rapidly, with two effects:

  1. New oil companies will be founded, thus destroying your monopoly. It will be possible, since higher oil prices make that business profitable again, and your synthesizer doesn’t give you control over “conventional” oil production, which is in many countries controlled by the state.
  2. New technologies, like hydrogenium and stuff, that are technically feasible but still too expensive, will fill the gap.

By the way: Synthesizing oil cannot be a solution for the energy crisis, since you will need energy to synthesize it (you raw material, C atoms, have less chemical energy than your product, conventional oil, and you have to input the difference).

Maybe you should synthesize Marilyn Monroe autographs :wink:

When you say “biggest profit,” do you mean the most amount of dollars per pound of the stuff being cranked out?

In that case, I’ll go with Schnitte and Argon 38.

IMHO, answers like moon rocks fail because by definition, moondust cannot be synthesized.

If by “biggest profit,” you mean total revenue per year from selling an unlimited supply of the stuff, the question becomes more interesting.

Certainly, Argon 38 has a much more limited demand than say, oil.

Put another way, the total world consumption of oil, measured in dollars, far exceeds the same for Argon 38.

I’m not an economist, but I’m gonna guess “oil,” because I can’t think of any other substance that commands so much of the world’s attention.

At $30/bbl, I would guess that total world oil consumption is on the order of $1 trillion/year.

If you could generate an unlimited supply of oil with no marginal cost, you could get a big piece of that trillion dollars, although as other posters have pointed out, adding a lot of oil to the market would surely cause the price to go down.

I’m not an economist, but I imagine that if you charged $1/bbl you could drive have the entire market to yourself, although you could not maintain monopoly prices, since other oil producers could go back online if you raised your prices too high.

At $1/bbl, world oil consumption would increase dramatically (a lot more SUVs?). Supposing it increases to 40,000,000,000 bbl/year, you’ll make $40 billion per year.

Of course, if your machines can crank out manufactured goods, then I suspect you could make even more money, although it becomes harder to guess how your products would be received by the market. (Would people buy your cigarettes instead of Marlboros? How would governments tax your products?)

Another question is how broad or narrow the class of goods you could make with your machine? Just one kind of car or chip? Or many?

http://www.bea.doc.gov/bea/gpxind-d.htm

This site might give some insight.

Unsurprisingly, “electronic equipment” seems to be an area where demand is going up. It looks like the total domestic product (in 1994) in that category was $130 billion (for the U.S. alone).

No doubt consumption is much higher today.

Also, I suspect that profit margins are slimmer for manufactured goods than for oil. Perhaps undercutting your competitors by 50% would be enough to take over the world market.

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_329a.html

Apart from being the most profitable (I suspect producing some basic substance which has utility, but is in notably short supply, would be your fastest route to wealth), the most fun could probably be had forging art, archeological and historical items, and collectibles. If we presume he could mimic everything well enough to pass all tests of authenticity, he could create undiscovered Van Gogh’s and so on. I think I would create some new, undeniably “authentic” scriptures to be found somewhere … lessee, what do I want commandments 11 - 15 to say …

Well, if his end goal is to control the world economy,
he should skip the “make lots of expensive stuff”
idea, and just synthesize Alan Greenspan. Replace
the current one with Mad Scientist X’s version, and
he’ll control at least the US economy.

“The Dow fell 50 points in heavy trading in reaction
to Alan Greenspan belching during lunch today…”

Um… by inventing a matter synthesizer extroplolated from perfected nanotechnology, nuclear fusion and alchemeic processes that can perfectly replicate ANY type of matter, hadn’t Mad Scientist X basically BUILT the most expensive thing ever?

He should make more of his invention, then use the profits for perfecting time travel.

Well, the trouble with that approach is that all of his customers would be potential competitors.

Your conclusion doesn’t follow, Schnitte. Petroleum isn’t just useful as an energy source because it contains energy, but because it contains a high concentration of energy that can be easily released as fast or slow as you wanted. If you could create crude oil yourself from hydrogen, carbon, and the energy contained in the resulting hydrocarbon chains, you would indeed make a big dent in the energy crisis. Trouble is, the only way we know of to make petroleum is to bury dead plants and animals deep underground for a few hundred millenia or so.

Energy is cheap. You can get a tremendous amount of power from solar energy-but that doesn’t help you if you don’t have a way to save it for cloudy days, or even for the times you need a higher wattage at a particular moment than the photocell array produces …

Certain isotopes are the most expensive substances ever bought or sold, but there’s other substances which could potentially surpass them. Antimatter, for instance, is much more expensive to produce, and it has nearly unlimited usefulness, but it’s not currently on the market largely because it’s so scarce. Can Dr. X’s machine produce antimatter?

Taking yet another tack on this, there’s some substances speculated to possibly exist, but which have never (yet) been produced or even observed by scientists. Suppose he makes some magnetic monopoles, for instance? We’re talking microscopic masses, here, but some theories suggest that even one such particle could have tremendous usefulness. Or how about negative matter? If such exists, a few grams (or rather, negative a few grams) would be sufficient to build an FTL drive.