Asteroid Psyche 16 Gold Reserve Debate: Economics Reality Check
No, that would make gold worthless and we’d all still be poor. Take a goddamn economics class.
Text content
Asteroid Psyche 16 has been found to contain gold reserves worth $700 quintillion. That's enough to make everyone on Earth billionaires.
Overview
This image is a screenshot of a Twitter/X (formerly Twitter) thread. The top section presents a viral-style claim: that Asteroid Psyche 16 holds $700 quintillion worth of gold reserves, which the text claims would make every person on Earth a billionaire. Below this text is an artistic rendering of the crater-covered Asteroid Psyche 16 set against a starry space background. A reply from verified user Kevin Gaughen (@gaughen) follows, delivering a blunt, fact-based correction: he explains that flooding the global market with this massive amount of gold would collapse its value entirely, leaving everyone still poor, and adds a sharp suggestion to take an economics class. The humor and core of the meme come from the stark contrast between the naive, optimistic initial claim and the realistic, snarky economic reality check, highlighting a common misunderstanding of supply and demand's impact on commodity value.
Origin notes
This content originates as a thread on the social media platform Twitter/X. The initial post is a shareable, attention-grabbing claim about space and wealth, typical of viral science-adjacent social media content. The reply is a user-generated corrective take from a verified account, leveraging basic economic principles to debunk the initial optimistic claim. The image combines text from the platform posts with a pre-existing artistic/AI-rendered visualization of Asteroid Psyche 16, which has been a subject of scientific and public interest in the 2020s due to its metallic composition.
