Just need to scale it by trillions to make 1 ounce, but transmutation of lead to gold - the dream of many alchemists - is now just a by product of particle accelerators.
Quite fitting actually, alchemists scamming investors with needing a "starting" amount to get their reaction going
It just doesn't make a lot of economic sense, but I wonder why nobody made fusion art yet.
In a slightly more serious note, I remember listening to Elon in some podcast 1-2 years ago saying how they create new metals/alloys that nobody had created previously, because they needed specific needs covered, and no known material had the attributes they needed. So.. in a way..
This has happened before. Aliminium used to be very scarce, and hence expensive. More expensive than silver. The top of the Washington monument is capped with aluminum.
A new process was invented to extract aluminum. So scarcity disappeared and value is negligible. Today we use it for packaging soda.
Turning anything (cheap) into gold means gold is cheap. It doesn't make us all rich.
Interesting. I was curious how large and expensive this was.
Apparently the tip weighed only 100 ounce, at a time the price was around $1.10 per ounce. Translating to 2025 dollars it would be around $36 per ounce, or $3,600 for the entire tip; much less than I expected, but still more expensive than the silver price today ($32.75 per ounce).
The problem in that context is test it would have been impossible to keep the process a secret. To be useful (to say the king) it would have to be more than one guy in a castle. And between spies, and traitors who could be materially incentivised), and outright kidnapping and torture, well, I just don't see it staying hidden.
And its not like a King could really even hide the fact that he had a "gold mine" producing endless quantities of gold.
It's kinda like the story of the goose laying the golden eggs. The story fails to elaborate on what they did with the eggs. Presumably they sold them, but to whom? And did that person not get curious as to the source of the gold? And what did he do with all that gold? He'd need to sell enough of it to pay the peasant. Did his customer not notice the increase in volume?
So no, alchemy wouldn't have remained a secret for long. And the king would just be financing wars to protect it.
Comparing a slight tweak to the mix ratio of 304L stainless steel alloy to transmuting elements is a stretch...
The only problem, the element left of gold is platinum, and platinum-196 is not even the most common isotope of platinum, making up ~25% of it. You're rather unlikely to be able to make money on this.
(Not that you would have been able to regardless of the price of platinum. There are 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a gram of gold, and a desktop fusor is going to generate ~<1m neutrons per second.)
I have no clue about this stuff, but don't black holes also change matter... somehow? I mean, with all that gravity and stuff, crazy things must happen in there, right?
This is a common misunderstanding. Space and time don't swap roles. It's just that there's one rather popular coordinate system (Schwarzschild coordinates) whose coordinates t, x outside the horizon correspond to temporal (timelike) and spatial (spacelike) directions, respectively, and inside they correspond to spacelike and timelike directions. What we mean by "timelike" and "spacelike", however, does not change.
τ = (2√2)·R/3c
So "fraction of a second" is only true if you're talking about relatively small black holes. For a supermassive one, it can take hours or even days for the largest ones.
But note again that this assumes no orbit, just falling straight towards it from rest. For orbiting objects it could take much longer depending on their velocity.
Also, this all is from the perspective of the observer who is undergoing the fall. From the outside, time dilation means that objects never actually cross the event horizon at all - no matter how long you wait, you'll see them as they were getting closer and closer to it, but never the actual crossing.
It's not only a measurement problem. Rather, the laws of physics, as we currently understand them, lead to this singularity. Sure, many physicists may doubt the existence of the singularity. They will need new physics, not only better equipment, to challenge it.
https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...
A single LHC weighs 3.6*10^9 grams, so 2.44 sextillion of them would weigh 8.8*10^31 grams, which is about 50 times the mass of the sun.
So in a way, all of those people who were concerned about the LHC creating a black hole would be right.
The Earth's oceans contain approximately 1.4 x 10^21 kilograms of water, which equals 1.4 x 10^24 grams. The average ocean temperature is about 3.5 degrees Celsius, and we need to heat it to the boiling point of seawater at approximately 100 degrees Celsius, for a temperature difference of 96.5 degrees Celsius. Seawater has a specific heat capacity of about 3.93 joules per gram per degree Celsius. To calculate the energy needed to raise the temperature, we multiply the mass by the specific heat capacity and the temperature difference: 1.4 x 10^24 grams x 3.93 joules per gram per degree Celsius x 96.5 degrees Celsius = 5.3 x 10^27 joules.
After reaching the boiling point, we need additional energy to vaporize the water. The heat of vaporization for water is approximately 2,260 joules per gram. Multiplying this by the ocean's mass gives us 1.4 x 10^24 grams x 2,260 joules per gram = 3.2 x 10^27 joules. Adding these two energy requirements together, we get 5.3 x 10^27 joules + 3.2 x 10^27 joules = 8.5 x 10^27 joules total to completely boil the ocean. Now, for the LHC gold production calculation. The LHC produces gold at a rate of 10^-11 grams per year and consumes about 1.3 x 10^15 joules of energy annually. To produce 1 gram of gold would take 10^11 years of operation, requiring 1.3 x 10^15 joules per year x 10^11 years = 1.3 x 10^26 joules of energy. Comparing this to the energy needed to boil the ocean (8.5 x 10^27 joules), we calculate 1.3 x 10^26 joules divided by 8.5 x 10^27 joules = 0.0153. This means the energy needed to produce 1 gram of gold via the LHC would boil only about 1.53% of the ocean. Conversely, the energy required to boil the entire ocean once could produce approximately 65.4 grams of gold using the LHC process.
aside : it's funny how many wordy multi-step unit conversion comparisons have flooded the discussion space post-LLM... I'm sure that's unrelated.
It's just like 1 AU being the average Sun-Earth distance. It is easier to comprehend than 149,597,870,700 m when talking about large distances.
Many discussions recently have centered around processes which require tremendous amounts of energy and the vaporized oceans unit provides some more tangible if absurd perspective.
If you were to lay them end to then, then bend the them, you'd have a coil of bananas about three to four bananas (bent) in diameter.
What this means is that there must have been quite a few collisions of such before solar system formed, to produce so much of heavy stuff we see in our planet, no? Stars can produce only up to Fe in normal way. Yet it seems such collisions are very rare, and its not like during collision half of the mass converts to a golden blob (or more like atomic mist spreading away at fraction of c).
I know 8 billions of years is a long time, and gold once fused ain't breaking apart to H or He anytime soon, but still it feels like our planet should have way more basic atoms and not all of those rare fused oned. What about super/hypernovae?
https://science.nasa.gov/universe/stars/neutron-stars/magnet...
The other thing to keep in mind is that the early universe was filled with giant stars, these stars don't last very long. Ironically, the more fuel you have, the quicker you burn through it for stars, so a lot of supernova have happened before our solar system formed.
For additional reading, google "Stellar Population" it's about the amount of metalicity in a star based on how many "generations" old it is
10,000?
1,000 billion billion gold nuclei per gram of gold.
What you're saying is that the ratio of the size of an atom to the size of a golf ball is approximately the same as the ratio of the size of a golf ball to the size of the earth.
I'm surprised atoms are so big, I would have guessed much smaller.
Ok. Imagine we take those cubes that filled our 'little' cube of earth and taped them in one giant stack. That stack would not only reach to the Moon, but reach to the Moon 116 times over! In fact you'd be nearly able to reach Mars at its closest approach (34.8 million miles, vs 27.8 million miles for our box stack). And that's in 1 cubic mile of volume. The volume of Earth is about 260 billion cubic miles. To wrap up by getting back to golf balls - you can fit about 700 golf balls in 1 cubic ft.
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Actually a somewhat macabre example came to mind. How many humans could we fit in our little cubic mile? And the answer is literally all of us, many times over in fact! And that's in just one cubic mile of the 260 billion total on Earth.
Me too. Perhaps what we should realise is not how big atoms are, but how small we are. I wonder if life can be sustained at larger scales. Could we have galaxy-sized lifeforms that make us look like bacteria?
So, a galaxy-sized lifeform would take a very long time to experience stuff. It takes a tiny but measurable amount of time to go from your brain choosing "Press button" to your muscles all that distance away firing to cause the button press, and then for the button press to have effect - at galaxy scale these periods would be much larger than all of human recorded history.
Or consider the humongous fungus: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillaria_ostoyae
One of my favorite episodes of Love, Death, & Robots is “Swarm”. Worth a watch.
They're small but not impossibly so.
When the above isn’t enough to light a bulb, I like introduce that as analogous to pennies.
1 penny is $0.01 10 pennies is $0.1 100 pennies is $1 1,000 pennies is $10 10,000 pennies is $100 100,000 pennies is $1,000 1,000,000 pennies is $10,000 10,000,000 pennies is $100,000 100,000,000 pennies is $1,000,000 1,000,000,000 pennies is $10,000,000
Most people understand that ten million dollars is not just a different amount but a distinct kind of amount from ten thousand dollars. The powers of ten seem to become clearer with a smaller starting amount. Once they grasp the above, point out that the relationship is the same if everything starts 100 times as large.
There’s also a great one out there comparing 1,000 to 1 million to 1 billion seconds, converted to years plus days.
One avocado tree can produce around 200 avocados per year, and the orchards around here are probably around 150 trees/acre, so 30k avocados/acre/year.
Each avocado has about 250 calories (and that is just the parts that we eat, the tree has to put energy and mass into the pit and skin etc). These are food calories / kcal, so that’s 250k calories per avocado, or ~7.5 billion calories per year per acre.
7.5B calories/year is just about exactly 1kW, so that orchard is converting sunlight (and water, air, and trace minerals) to avocado calories at a continuous rate of 1kW. It’s incredible. The USDA says that as of 2022 there were about 880M acres of farmland in the United States alone.
So your avocado orchard is converting incident sunlight to food calories with an efficiency of about 0.025%.
(This ... isn't wildly inefficient for photosynthesis, though typical values range from 1--3% AFAIU, though I've not computed this on a per-acre / per-hectare basis.)
Mind too that you're getting more than just avocado meat, there are also the skins and pits as you note, as well as leaves and wood, all of which could be used as fuel should we really want to.
Ecologists look at the net total energy conversion of ecosystems, often expressed not in terms of energy but as carbon fixation --- how much CO2 is captured from the atmosphere and converted to biomass.
And that amount is ... surprisingly limited. We'll often hear that humans use only a small fraction of the sunlight incident on the Earth's surface, but once you start accounting for various factors, that becomes far less comforting than it's usually intended. Three-quarters of Earth's surface is oceans (generally unsuitable for farming), plants and the biosphere require a certain amount of that activity, etc., etc. It turns out that humans already account for about 40% of net primary productivity (plant metabolism) of the biosphere. Increasing our utilisation of that is ... not likely, likely greatly disruptive, and/or both.
Another interesting statistic: In 1900, just as the Model T Ford was being introduced, and local transport (that is, exclusive of inter-city rail and aquatic transport) was principally dependent on human feet or horse's hooves, twenty percent of the US grain crop went to animal feed. (And much of that ended up on city streets.) We had a biofuel-based economy, and it consumed much of our food supply.
(Stats are for the US but would be typical of other countries of the time.)
This isn't an argument that fossil fuels are "good", or that renewables are "bad". It does point out, however, that changing our present system is hard, and any solution will cause pain and involve compromises.
Could intelligent life exist based on some other physical phenomena than a self-replicating string of atoms? Maybe some unknown quantum phenomena inside neutron stars or something big and slow on galactic scales or something new which fills the dark matter gap...
But otherwise it's physics driving where units of "stuff" can exist, and the correct scales for long term complexity/turbulence can happen, like the thin film of goo on the outside of the frozen crust of a molten rock we are.
Being able to detect these tiny amounts is nuts to me.
The ultimate philosopher's stone.
Quick, somebody call nVidia!! They already integrate accelerators into their GPUs and they have scaling better than Moore's law!!
I do not want gold to be prized as a store of value. It is too useful as a material (inert, doesn't oxidize, food safe) that it would be vastly beneficial to society if it were possible to produce in limitless quantities.
Pick something that isn't useful as a material to be a store of value.
If we want a physical store of value, I actually think something of use that can easily be subdivided and combined is ideal. It doesn't even have to be as valuable as gold is today, this makes just as much sense if gold is cheap and plentiful. The natural inflation from creating more of it even helps cut down hoarding. It just gets harder to carry around enough to buy coffee (which of course brings us back to databases).
That's not to say I think this shouldn't be pursued, but I feel like the science and technology side might end up being the easier half of cheap gold from this becoming a reality. I sadly have more faith in humanity's ability to figure out solutions to incredibly difficult technical problems in the long run than I do in our ability to solve the social problems that would benefit almost everyone but require changing the status quo.
(As an aside, I personally find the idea of lab-grown diamonds pretty cool just from a science perspective, and the fact that they're cheaper and don't have the same ethical concerns to make it unfathomable that I'd ever want to purchase a mined one, and I'm lucky that my wife felt the same way when we picked out her engagement ring, although she ended up selecting a lab-grown pink sapphire instead).
An ounce of gold is an ounce of gold. Apart from the cost of turning it into a desired shape, gold is entirely fungible. Not so with diamonds, because you can't forge a single 10 ct crystal out of one hundred .1 ct crystals.
So it would seem that lab-grown gold has a better chance of disrupting the market than lab-grown diamonds ever will. Unlike with diamonds, nobody will be able to tell where that gold came from!
Turns out though that gravity was the philosopher's stone he was looking for.
Alchemy on the other hand was the perfect hobby for any medieval or early modern nerd. Alchemists were basically trying to hack chemistry together. There was a promise of gold, sprinkled with an air of mystery, with lots of booms and bangs along the way. It must have felt like Dungeons and Dragons.