Period as a semi-retired pensioner: 156 days
My blog is back after a week’s break. A monthly meeting with one of my many coffee buddies alerted me to the bored ape yacht club (more about that later) which set me to ruminating. The bored ape yacht club (BAYC) is an entirely suitable topic for Ruminant Pink Friday™.
What is objectively real and what are human fictional creations and what are the boundaries between these two? Although there are those that argue that objective reality does not exist the physical world and universe around us is an objective reality that conforms to the laws of physics that we are still in the process of fully discovering.
The human application of science to the world around us has enabled the industrial revolution and has enabled humans to become the dominant apex predator on earth. We have applied science to create many things that serve us. Science is enormously powerful when it is applied to things that are objectively real like aircraft. We can predict and simulate how an aircraft will behave to an ever-increasing degree of accuracy.
On the other extreme humans create fictional edifices and structures that are not objectively real in the same sense that an aircraft is. One of the most important fictional human creations is money. 99% of what we call money is now digital and exists only as numbers in a database. Some people confuse representations of money, such as gold and silver, with money – the concept. Money is an abstract, basically an IOU, entitling the bearer to a certain amount of goods and services. So, it is “real” as a concept, but not objectively “real” in the physical sense. Although money is a reasonable store of value in the short term it is a very bad store of value in the longer term. The US dollar has lost more than 95% of its value in the last 100 years.
Money does feel real to most people including me. Money is however not objectively real like an aircraft is and the laws of physics do not apply to money. The laws of money are made by humans and have changed over the last 100 years and will most likely change in the coming 100 years in ways that we cannot predict now. The laws of physics are timeless and will be the same in 1000 or ten million years as they are now. Financial models are not subject to science and objective reality and our current financial theories will probably look quaint and ridiculous far in the future.
I have also done some research on what the rules of money are on other alien worlds and although the information is sparse the Klingons do have a monetary system and a currency called the DarSeq (DeQ). http://klingon.wiki/En/Money. We don’t know what the rules of their monetary system are, but they are not the same as ours. My favourite alien race are the Vorlons, and they seem to have access to any amount of currency required. https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Vorlon_Empire Imagine what Julius Malema could achieve if he could strike up a friendship with the Vorlons.
How do humans measure value and how does one create value? Money is an imperfect measure of value. Perhaps we should look to art. The list of the worlds most expensive paintings is interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_paintings. Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvador Mundi sold for $450.3 million. Some paint on a canvas is worth nearly half a billion dollars and is owned by a Saudi billionaire. I suspect one could commission an artist to create an amazing replica for a lot less than $100 000. If one could sneak into his palace in the dead of night and swap the replica for the original, he would be none the wiser.
Owners of trophy art are deemed to be highly sophisticated and are looked up to (not by me though). If one wishes to attract a trophy spouse, then owning a da Vinci will get you access to the most desirable and needy trophy spouses on the planet.
This then brings me to the bored ape yacht club and digital art. The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is a collection of 10,000 unique Bored Ape Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) – unique digital collectibles living on the Ethereum blockchain and was launched in April 2021. https://everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/bored-ape-yatch-club All of the BAYC images have been sold. Today if you want to buy a BAYC image the starting price is $140 000 and the illustrated image bored ape #7090 recently sold for $2.25 million in a Sotheby’s auction. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bored-ape-yacht-club-nft-111457016.html#:~:text=A%20Bored%20Ape%20Yacht%20Club,sale%20yet%20for%20the%20collection.
In less than 6 months billions of dollars of value has been created out of thin air. The cost of creating these digital images is negligible compared to their value. Digital art is a fantastic and climate friendly business. Working in the real world creating physical things like aircraft is a dreary and tough business in comparison.
Being a member of the BAYC will only give you access to 2nd tier trophy spouses, but they will be as needy as 1st tier trophy spouses.
How humans measure and create value has led me to speculate as to why we have not been contacted by advanced alien races. Without revealing my sources, I can now reveal that I have a translation of the message the recent Vorlon scouting party sent back to the Vorlon home world:
“Although humans are a sentient race and have a basic grasp of science, they have deeply disturbing mental problems. The ability to measure and create value is one of the defining features of advanced races. Humans ascribe enormous value to trinkets and fantasies of their own creation. This is significantly hindering their progress. Humans should be left to mature or go extinct, and we will check in again in 10 000 years.”
Thank you for your comments and suggestions please keep them coming.
Regards
Bruce
Ruminant Pink Friday 
Ah yes – the delta between God’s law and Man’s creations. Visible when it’s a failed bridge, hard to determine when it’s a failed concept.
Always a good read – keep it up !
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I listened to a fascinating BBC radio 4 (love radio 4) discussion on the origins of money. The oldest records are of notched split willow sticks. As you say money is just an IOU (I promise to pay the bearer on demand). One notched stick held by the lender and the other by the borrower . Both can be traded for other goods. In the end though, to settle the loan, you have to find the holder of the matching notched half a stick. I think the notches indicated the magnitude of the loan in some way – sadly, very few of these notched sticks have been preserved..
Since the financial crisis and “quantitative easing ” money has become even more ethereal and it is very hard to fathom that a country can exist with trillions of dollars of debt. Before the gold standard was dropped, there was a somewhat concrete thing we could loosely associate with, but in truth – since gold has limited practical use – it’s still an ethereal concept – a huge gold find makes people wealthy without adding a jot of real value.
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Ah- a correction… the tally sticks we have retained are from the middle ages and there were coins long before then… the tally sticks really represent the first “chequebooks”…
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