gold

I’ve been researching gold lately for my essay in Jeffrey Cohen’s multi-color ecology book. Gold is, of course, a fascinating substance, and a vast topic in terms of astrophysics, geology, chemistry, history, and technology. But a few things really stick out that I will try to include in my essay.

One of them is that the total amount of gold mined in human history is not as large as you might think. It could all be compressed into a cube 20 meters on a side, which I’ve found is the same weight as the annual global amount of textile waste, or the yearly American consumption of batteries.

Yet the value of this golden cube would be nearly $10 trillion, which is exactly enough to replace all housing units in the United States if they were all destroyed in a giant catastrophe: homes, mansions, trailers, huts, everything.

Since gold has always been valuable throughout human history, pretty much all of the gold ever mined is in someone’s possession today. An estimated 15% of the total has been either lost or diverted into non-recyclable uses. But for the most part, whatever gold was in the possession of the early goldsmiths at Varna, Bulgaria in 4500 B.C., the Bronze Agers of Ireland and Spain, or the Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, belongs to someone alive right now.

And where is that gold now? Around 2.5% of it, of all the gold mined in human history, is stored at Ft. Knox, Kentucky.

Nearly 4% of the sum human total is at the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank in New York.

But even more shocking is that 11% of all the gold mined throughout the ages belongs to the many wealthy, average, and poor households of India.

The initial gold deposits of the earth sank into the core of the planet during its pre-solid days. That gold is currently irretrievable by deliberate human actions, since the core of earth is over 3000 miles away while the deepest gold mine (in South Africa) doesn’t even go as far as 3 miles.

So, all the gold of Ft. Knox, New York, India and elsewhere came later, during the catastrophic period of asteroid impacts around 4 billion years ago. All of our gold is alien gold.

It also now seems that bacteria may play a role in concentrating gold into larger pieces. This seems to be a defense mechanism, since gold is a toxin for these bacteria.

Kripke noted that “gold is a yellow metal” is probably a false statement rather than an analytic one. After all, gold might appear green under the light of some other world. But we don’t even need to leave the earth to see this, since gold nanoparticles are red in color. But when aggregated the color of these nanoparticles changes to blue, the basic principle behind the new hepatitis C diagnostic test, using gold nanoparticles, that has been developed by Hassan Azzazy’s team at the American University in Cairo, of all places.