4 papers
Will AstroForge Collapse the PGM Market?
Robert T. Nachtrieb, Steven J. Smith
AstroForge seeks to mine platinum group metals (PGM) from asteroids. Asteroid reserves appear to be unlimited, and at current market price the gross margin of asteroid mining would…
AI Hastens Limits to Exponential Growth
Robert T. Nachtrieb, Steven J. Smith
At any sustained positive growth rate of energy demand, depletion of all terrestrial energy resources, including non-renewable deuterium fusion and renewable solar, occurs within a…
Equations of Motion for an Economy: Capital Deepening, Technology, and Firm Survival
Robert T. Nachtrieb
We derive equations of motion for capital deepening in a competitive economy directly from accounting identities, without assuming a production function. A profit imperative $η^*…
Statistical Mechanics of Household Income and Wealth: Derivation from Firm Dynamics via Maximum Entropy and Mixture Aggregation
Robert T. Nachtrieb
The distribution of income and wealth in developed economies exhibits a robust two-class structure: an exponential (Boltzmann--Gibbs) bulk covering of the population,…