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0 pointsAnimalMuppet5d ago0 comments

Right, but it was still there to extract. All it needed was electrochemistry.

Whereas with gold, it isn't there in the rocks - not in the same amounts. No future chemical wizardry is going to make it extractable, because it isn't there to extract.

To make gold more abundant is going to take transmutation, which is a much bigger ask.

Now, if you want to say that the ancients didn't know that aluminum was there and gold wasn't, and therefore lucked out by picking the one that wasn't there, I would agree with that.

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mplanchard5d ago

The GGP said “10,000x more processed aluminum in the world than gold,” which the “processed” part, which is I think what GP was responding to: of course the scarcity of available gold relative to aluminum drives its value, but that relative scarcity only exists due to modern electrochemistry: previously, “processed” aluminum and gold were similarly scarce.

People talk about stuff like extracting gold from seawater, so it also isn’t a given that the scarcity difference will always remain what it is.

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mplanchard5d ago

People talk about stuff like extracting gold from seawater, so it also isn’t a given that the scarcity difference will always remain what it is.

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