ancient alchemists popping off in their graves rn
First fracking now large amounts of electricity to be pumped underground too!
Humanity was not responsible enough with bitcoin to learn how to turn electricity into actual gold. Some nerds going to start setting up Tesla coils in caves soon.
I mean… actual gold isn’t crazy valuable these days, is it? It’s used in quite a bit of electronics for its corrosion resistance and conductivity IIRC.
Gold prices have risen steadily for a long time, partly because of its use in electronics. Over $2500/ounce now. But another quirk of gold is the ease with which we can make very thin coatings of it over other materials, sometimes only a few atoms thick. So it is commonly used, but in very very small amounts per device.
Most of the gold’s price comes from it being used in jewelry and as an investment. Less than 7% of gold is used by the tech industry
https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-industry-sector-share/
If someone works out how to make gold cheap. Then the current value of all gold will collapse and there were be a huge supply of shit that’s been covered in dust in a vault for 100 years.
Okay, for a second, I thought that somebody had figured out how to make gold in a lab, which would then obviously bring down the price dramatically, because it would no longer be a super precious metal.
We’ve known how to turn lead into gold for ages, you just add a couple of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Long story short: Uses a fuckton of energy, not worth it.
Fun fact: When Ernest Rutherford and colleagues put together the first paper about their findings they avoided the word “transmutation” like the plague. It has been considered impossible since before alchemy became chemistry and even though he was publishing in physics chemists would probably still have had his head.
Nuclear energy is more expensive than renewable so not really, no. Having a good combination of starting materials to minimise the amount of energy you need to fuse everything together, or even starting out with something heavier, would be the way to go.
For more details ask a nuclear physicist of which I’m not one. Honestly there doesn’t seem to be much work on it.
