Hacker News Reader

Comment by gus_massa | Hacker News Reader

I still not sure about the details, and I don't like how they use the word "cheap" there.

Nevertheless, the density of Lead is 11.35 g/cm3 (the density of water is 1 g/cm3). The densest element in this table is Osmium with 22.6. So replacing if you replace a Lead weight with a more expensive weight you only gain x2.

http://www.lenntech.com/periodic-chart-elements/density.htm

View on HN

Gold is about 20g/cm^3, and although it sounds expensive, there's a lot of gold just sitting in storage. Why not store it underground here instead? This is in contrast to tungsten which has direct commercial value and would be wasted just being stored.

You have to add the cost of the armed guards, because a big block of gold will be a nice target of a robbery.

Well, yes. To be fair, if there was like a farm of these devices, it might makes sense to swallow that expense.

I wish gold wasn't so rare! Its such an amazing material, and our economy is not based on precious materials anymore (except the commodity markets or course), so it seems like a really sad thing that we can't have more abundant gold just yet

Tungsten is near 20g/cm3 and is much more reasonable as far as price is concerned (Osmium is basically a precious metal). I'm not sure sparing a few hundred meters of hole digging is worth gathering tons of tungsten, but I would not be surprised if it was.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com