There's only 21 cubic meters in total of gold above ground?
- Thread starter SpacePete
- Start date
there is enough gold in the earths cores that it could coat the whole earth sueface in a 3 foot+ thick layer of gold. i imagine there will be a time when they can suck it out with a huge straw. then its all over. i dont think we will ever run out of gold. we will just keep finding more of it over time in different, more efficient ways and we will be able to mine much deeper. it was always be worth something. untill we get to the giant straw stage 0.o ... but that wont be for a while. but will still happen before any stupid asteroid mining lol
ego2spare said:
I'm thinking that mining the Earth's core falls into the economically and technologically unviable category for the foreseeable future, if ever. I don't think we've even managed to drill further than the Earth's thin outer crust. The heat and pressure down there is quite an obstacle and not to be underestimated despite how easy it looks in movies. Cruising the solar system looking for asteroids would be far easier and cheaper.
I'm more interested in the volume of gold supply over the next few decades. Will it fall off a cliff even if we can filter it from seawater and get more efficient at extracting it from the crust? Or is there enough that advances in technology will be able to maintain or even increase current output?
cashgoldsilver
New Member
Watch this - goldnomics youtube vid you won't regret it,plus great sound track - TURN IT UP 
There has only been about 180,000 tonnes mined in the history of mankind. That is apparently just a 20m cube. of all the gold ever mined.
Think about this, we can land on meteorites and roam mars but can only mine 2500 tonnes of gold a year. There isn't much room for improvement in mining, a tonne of ore only contains about 6 or 7 grams of pure gold.
I think refining ore will get more advanced, faster, but as for pulling it out of the ground? Not sure, the trucks that carry ore out of mines can only get so big.
I wrote a post about Irans new gold mine having millions of tonnes of reserves, but remember that's ore, not pure gold. It still has to be pulled out and refined. 18 million tonnes of ore is just 108 tonnes of pure gold and they can only get out 2.7 tonnes per year.
Even if the gold supply was endless, the cost of pulling it out will continues to rise with rising wages, rising oil prices, and rising costs to dig deeper and go bigger, the more gold they find typically the more it costs to find it and get it out as it will be deeper. There will be a point where we won't be able to go any deeper thus ending the worlds gold supply. I am not a geologist but I assume there is some sort of a limit to how deep we can dig. Be it a safety limit, environmental limit or a population limit, or a cost feasibility limit.
Think about this, we can land on meteorites and roam mars but can only mine 2500 tonnes of gold a year. There isn't much room for improvement in mining, a tonne of ore only contains about 6 or 7 grams of pure gold.
I think refining ore will get more advanced, faster, but as for pulling it out of the ground? Not sure, the trucks that carry ore out of mines can only get so big.
I wrote a post about Irans new gold mine having millions of tonnes of reserves, but remember that's ore, not pure gold. It still has to be pulled out and refined. 18 million tonnes of ore is just 108 tonnes of pure gold and they can only get out 2.7 tonnes per year.
Even if the gold supply was endless, the cost of pulling it out will continues to rise with rising wages, rising oil prices, and rising costs to dig deeper and go bigger, the more gold they find typically the more it costs to find it and get it out as it will be deeper. There will be a point where we won't be able to go any deeper thus ending the worlds gold supply. I am not a geologist but I assume there is some sort of a limit to how deep we can dig. Be it a safety limit, environmental limit or a population limit, or a cost feasibility limit.
No1joey said:
Are you saying a cube of 20m x 20m or a 20sq metre cube 5 x 4?
Autonomous, submersible minebots.No1joey said:
The mothership can be something like one of these FLNG platforms, but it would spawn deepsea babies that sink to the ocean floor to one day return with ore for the platform to process.
World's Largest Ship Ever Built and First Floating Liquefied Natural Gas (FLNG) Platform to Begin Drilling in 2017
Shell Oil will soon deploy its, and the world's, first "Floating Liquefied Natural Gas" (FLNG) platform, built at a cost of $52 billion. The ship took 1.6 million hours front end engineering and design (FEED).
The huge structure, 1,601 feet (488 m) long and 243 feet (74 m) wide, with a length greater than the height of the Empire State Building, is the largest ship ever constructed with the largest turret ever built. Construction on Prelude began in October 2012. The image above shows the Prelude FLNG being floated out of its drydock at Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) in South Korea. Fully loaded, the ship will weigh 600,000 tons.
Source: http://i.imgur.com/fFt991x.jpg
20m long, 20m wide, 20m high
In regards to the Earth's core having lots of gold; that's just 1 man's theory. Based on a lot of assumptions and theoretical calculations. It's a nice thought to think of the core being a ball of molten gold, ready to spew out of my backyard. But the calculations put the amount of gold to be 1ppm (1 part per million). Meaning to get 1kg of gold you would need to pull out 1,000,000kg of the earth's core. In comparison, the ocean has up to 10ppm.
In regards to the Earth's core having lots of gold; that's just 1 man's theory. Based on a lot of assumptions and theoretical calculations. It's a nice thought to think of the core being a ball of molten gold, ready to spew out of my backyard. But the calculations put the amount of gold to be 1ppm (1 part per million). Meaning to get 1kg of gold you would need to pull out 1,000,000kg of the earth's core. In comparison, the ocean has up to 10ppm.
"built at a cost of $52 billion."
My BS Detector just went off!
The Queen Mary 2 cost less that ONE billion.
OC
My BS Detector just went off!
The Queen Mary 2 cost less that ONE billion.
OC
Article could have made a mistake, or may have included the total project cost including subsea systems. Elsewhere I see $10.8bn and $12.6bn:Old Codger said:
This is far more than a cruise ship. It is incredible. The pictures you see don't show the completed vessel. And it is bigger than an aircraft carrier.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcHhiATEogI[/youtube]
It's highly highly dependant on energy costs. If LM pull off their modular fusion reactor then you can look to see almost every form of commodity completely revolutionised price wise. Possibly the biggest shakeup to the human economy ever, but if it's true it will lead to such a massive shakeup that it's all but impossible to predict the ramifications. As was mentioned, sea water contains minute trace gold in suspension, if you had virtual unlimited power that was fueled by small amounts of dueterium (separated from sea water also), you could afford to extract gold from the water. Gold will likely do much better than other commodities though, oil and gas will all but disappear, except for plastics and lubricants there won't be much need.
If it wasn't LM you would laugh at someone saying they have a small fusion reactor design ready for an operational prototype in a year and commercial models in 10 but LM isn't a crack pot startup. If they make a claim like that it isn't automatically accurate but it's serious enough to give pause for thought. Worth thinking about but I wouldn't worry to much until they announce they actually have it sorted then sell your stack before people realise the connection and invest in technology stocks.
Still, as people have pointed out, fusion is always a few decades in the future no matter how many decades go by so I wouldn't stress about it to much now.
As for gold in the earths core, fusion aside, we will be regularly mining gold from asteroids long before we ever get a single drill head halfway to that depth and mining is MUCH more tricky than research drilling, hardly worth thinking about.
If it wasn't LM you would laugh at someone saying they have a small fusion reactor design ready for an operational prototype in a year and commercial models in 10 but LM isn't a crack pot startup. If they make a claim like that it isn't automatically accurate but it's serious enough to give pause for thought. Worth thinking about but I wouldn't worry to much until they announce they actually have it sorted then sell your stack before people realise the connection and invest in technology stocks.
Still, as people have pointed out, fusion is always a few decades in the future no matter how many decades go by so I wouldn't stress about it to much now.
As for gold in the earths core, fusion aside, we will be regularly mining gold from asteroids long before we ever get a single drill head halfway to that depth and mining is MUCH more tricky than research drilling, hardly worth thinking about.
SilverPete said:
This.
Certain objects in the EdgeworthKuiper belt are definitely worth prospecting for gold, platinum and other metals.
The ore grade and distances will be profitable to 'mine' given the technological advances humanity is expected to make in the next century.