posted on Jul, 16 2009 @ 05:23 PM
Ugh. Such ignorance. No, the reason aluminum was so expensive 200 years ago (and Napoleon Bonaparte was buried with a set of aluminum cutlery by the
way) was because they didn't have any good way to melt aluminum oxide. This was fixed when they found that grinding up and adding in cryolite,
another but much rarer aluminum mineral, lowered its melting point from over 2000 degrees celcius to about 1000. There is a very important difference
between a cubic mile of seawater containing 40 pounds of gold (4 parts per trillion by weight), and not knowing how to turn aluminum oxide into
aluminum metal. The big fundamental difference that seems to be lost on fixer is that aluminum oxide is, by weight, more than 50 percent aluminum!
It's simply a matter of changing it to the desired chemical compound, namely the metal. And it's abundant. Very abundant. The gold in the ocean, on
the other hand, already IS gold metal. But it's tiny particles, as small as individual atoms. And whatever process you come up with, for it to
produce as much gold as the amount of aluminum metal that comes out of alcoa, supposing you wanted to compete with alcoa aluminum - which produces
over 5 million tons of aluminum per year by the way, you'd have to do it at such a furious pace that you would be done with all the water in all the
oceans of the Earth in less than 5 years. Don't forget of course that 2 and a half years into this procedure, unless you somehow cordon off and
isolate the part of the ocean you've sifted through already from the rest, it will then be at half the concentration it was before and so twice as
hard to keep up that pace. And of course, being one of the primary elements constituting the Earth's crust, we are practically all walking on
aluminum ore. So that's not going to run out. So no, the simple fact is, gold is not nearly as abundant as aluminum and no, it can't be refined as
cheaply as it, and if it was, it would all be gone in a flash. And finally, the value of gold is not due to its scarcity. Are you aware that gold, in
the Earth's crust, is fully half as abundant as silver, even though its market value is 50 times higher? The reason gold is so overpriced is simply a
matter of human faith. People hoard it. They always have. They always will. If a large amount of gold was dumped on the market, you know what would
happen? People would hoard that gold as well. In one decade, all that gold would be locked in dark vaults across the world, hardly ever to see the
light of day again. Out of circulation. And therefore effectively nonexistent. And you know what? This is ALREADY the state of things. The human race,
after 10 thousand years of refining gold, has, surprise surprise, a LOT of it already. And it's all sitting around in dark vaults already. Gold
isn't worth a thousand dollars an ounce, for crying out loud. That's just what the market says it's worth. But it's not really worth that. It's
just a result of wacky human notions that all started from the mere fact that it looks pretty that has caused it to be inflated. Take tellurium for
instance. One of the rarest elements on Earth. More rare than gold. Yet practically dirt cheap. And a more useful substance too for actual practical
purposes, since bismuth telluride is used for those thermoelectric coolers that keep CPUs and thermoelectric refrigerators cool. But the ancients
didn't make jewelry out of the stuff - they didn't even know it existed - and so it isn't valued as it should be simply because of human
chauvinism.
So no. If you took all the gold from all the oceans of the world and dumped it on the market, you wouldn't even be able to drive the price of gold
below 100 dollars an ounce. Not even a snowball's chance. And 10 years later, it would be right back on track for 5000 dollars an ounce. It could
happen a lot sooner than that, depending on what the US dollar does of course.