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just carl said:
My prediction is in the near future Scientist will either be able to make Gold or find other substances that are made to replace ALL precious metals. Note how now Diamonds can be produced and only a little and few laws are preventing the flooding of that market.
Changing metals has long been a chemist dream and is being worked on continuously at neclear labs. It's only a matter of time.
There is a key difference between diamond and gold: diamond is not elemental, it is just one form of carbon, and given the right conditions, you can turn just about any other form of carbon into diamond - all you need is chemistry. Gold, however, is gold - you can't turn anything else into gold by using chemistry (the alchemists of old didn't know this, and couldn't have known this).
You can "transmute" other elements into gold using a nuclear reactor, but it will always be expensive and dangerous to do so, and the resultant metal would be (a) radioactive - gold-195 has a half-life of 186 days - and (b) the isotope ratios and the trace amounts of platinum and mercury decay products from radioactive gold would be easy to test for, so you could tell when gold was natural or artificial. So at best, even if such "artificial gold" could be produced cheaply, you'd have a situation like with rubies, diamonds and pearls - there's lots of "artificials" around, but "naturals" are still prized.
An unlimited supply of natural gold can, however, be found from another source: the sea. Check your history books and you'll find several famous gold swindlers that conned people into investing in bogus technology to extract gold from seawater. But the concept does have a sound theoretical basis: seawater contains around 0.2 parts per billion gold. That might not sound like much, but there's an awful lot of seawater around. By my reckoning, a body of sea as small as San Francisco Bay contains 41,700 ounces of dissolved gold.
It remains uneconomical to extract gold in this way - it currently costs around $20,000 an ounce - but improvements in technology, and coupling a gold extraction plant with other energy-intensive seawater processing such as desalination for drinking water, could easily create a secondary supply of gold, effectively "capping" the maximum price gold can rise before seawater extraction becomes viable.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
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Posted 02/04/2009 04:17 am
That was fun!
