The Natural Resource Fund — universally “the Fund” — is a sovereign wealth fund administered as trustee by the Natural Resource Trust. It invests the income from sales of undeveloped space resources and disburses the returns as a dividend to every living human being.

The Fund is the mechanism by which space development is made to pay a universal rather than a private return, and it is the single most consequential economic institution of the settlement era. Its dividend is unconditional, paid from investment income rather than from principal, and indexed to no nationality, residence, or contribution.

Effect on migration#

The Fund is the reason emigration to a gyrealm is a decision available to ordinary people rather than to the wealthy. As the cost of manufactured land fell — a consequence of self-replicating factories and the autopoietic industry that grew out of them — the dividend crossed the cost of a habitat home well before it crossed the cost of a comparable dwelling on Earth. A family living on the dividend alone can afford a house on a thousand square meters of ground.

That inversion is the engine of the migration: for a given price, a home in space became by most measures more desirable than one on Earth, and the population moved accordingly. It is also what makes the politics of the nitrogen problem so difficult, since the drawdown funds a payment that every human being receives.

Revenue and the nitrogen question#

A very large share of Fund income derives from taxes and royalties on atmospheric nitrogen extraction, running to more than ten trillion dollars a year at peak. There is correspondingly little political appetite for closing that spigot. Campaigners against the drawdown have long argued that the Fund’s dividend functions as a standing bribe against reform — that the institution designed to distribute the benefits of space development also guarantees that no constituency exists to slow it.

The dividend is still widely called the mineral fund dividend, a usage inherited from the earlier United Nations body whose remit the Trust absorbed.