Proving that the country is keeping its eyes on the stars, Luxembourg has announced it has invested 50 million euros in a company that plans on mining a recently photographed black hole.
“Some critics say we’re just throwing money into a giant hole, but that’s the point,” said Hubert Sternmann, spokesperson for the government’s Office of Rational Decisions. “But it’s a good hole, really packed with stuff, and we’re hoping to pull out more than we put in.”
The idea first came when a travelling salesman from the U.S. showed up at the door of the Ministry of Finance and asked if they would like to invest in a company that was going to pump natural gas from the sun. When officials declined, the man then brought up black hole mining.
“Think about it this way,” he is alleged to have said. “A black hole pulls in everything around it, and that could be precious metals, lost jewelry, or luxury vehicles, but there’s no way of knowing what we’re missing until we get in there and get it.”
The man then created a limited liability company and within hours had sold 50,000 shares to Luxembourg. He admitted that while current rocket technology cannot deliver an extraction craft to the black hole, located 55 million light-years from Earth, this is a minor problem that will be solved in a few centuries.
“This guy swears that black hole mining is the next big thing, and that we should get in on the action before any other country with a few million euros to spare beats us to it,” said one excited official.
Experts say the move is logical, considering that Luxembourg was one of the founding investors of SES S.A., which is now one of the world’s biggest communication satellite operators, and that the country almost had a good idea in 2016 when it invested millions in an asteroid-mining firm that sadly ended up being turned into a company that makes funfair prizes or something.
***
Originally published by RTL Today on April 11, 2019
