Gold (and related topics)
Jan. 28th, 2010 05:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
guppiecatThe below is why I seldom discuss politics. This sort of argument doesn't win any battles... but it is fun, so here you go.
As I was driving home last night, I noticed that the moon was up. I wondered why the moon was white. I mean, the Earth is mostly brown. I know a lot of that is organic matter, and if you dried it out and killed all the organics, it would be a sorta dingy grey. Since the moon came from the Earth (possibly from some sort of wayward asteroid), it should be grey, right?
Then I thought that maybe it is. After all, to get good photos of the moon, there's a white balance process... and moon rocks are grey. Maybe it just looks white because our eyes adjust (as they do in such circumstances) and our brain tells us it's white and not just a dingy grey.
That means that the moon isn't nearly as bright as it could be.
You know, like if we gold-plated it.
I've heard that gold can be hammered out incredibly thin. In fact, it cam be hammered such that a nugget 5mm can be spread out to cover half a square meter. If we assume that "a nugget" is a sphere, that means that the nugget has a volume of 65.42 cubic millimeters. Given that the surface area of the moon is 3.793 × 107 km^2, it would only take 75,860,000 nuggets to gold plate it. Of course, that's ridiculous, as we'd only have to plate the side of the moon that faces us. Converting half of 75,860,000 nuggets to cubic meters, we get 2.48 cubic meters.
Yep. Only 2.48 cubic meters of gold is needed to make our side of the moon all shiny! (Awesome!)
Given a density of gold of 19,300 kg/m^2, that's 47,888.21 kg of gold. Unfortunately, at today's rate of $35,028 for a kilogram of gold (in USD), that means it would cost $1,677,428,059.34 in USD.
However, I bet that if we bought the gold in that sort of quantity, we'd get a discount. Let's say we get a fairly standard 15% discount. That makes the cost of gold $1,425,813,850.43. Or 1.4 trillion dollars.
Does that number look a bit familiar?
It should.
It's the US deficit.
For the amount of money we lost under George W. Bush, we could have gold plated the moon!
I'm astonished that we're arguing about health care.
ETA I screwed up the math. Sorry. Geekery that is hopefully more correct is here
As I was driving home last night, I noticed that the moon was up. I wondered why the moon was white. I mean, the Earth is mostly brown. I know a lot of that is organic matter, and if you dried it out and killed all the organics, it would be a sorta dingy grey. Since the moon came from the Earth (possibly from some sort of wayward asteroid), it should be grey, right?
Then I thought that maybe it is. After all, to get good photos of the moon, there's a white balance process... and moon rocks are grey. Maybe it just looks white because our eyes adjust (as they do in such circumstances) and our brain tells us it's white and not just a dingy grey.
That means that the moon isn't nearly as bright as it could be.
You know, like if we gold-plated it.
I've heard that gold can be hammered out incredibly thin. In fact, it cam be hammered such that a nugget 5mm can be spread out to cover half a square meter. If we assume that "a nugget" is a sphere, that means that the nugget has a volume of 65.42 cubic millimeters. Given that the surface area of the moon is 3.793 × 107 km^2, it would only take 75,860,000 nuggets to gold plate it. Of course, that's ridiculous, as we'd only have to plate the side of the moon that faces us. Converting half of 75,860,000 nuggets to cubic meters, we get 2.48 cubic meters.
Yep. Only 2.48 cubic meters of gold is needed to make our side of the moon all shiny! (Awesome!)
Given a density of gold of 19,300 kg/m^2, that's 47,888.21 kg of gold. Unfortunately, at today's rate of $35,028 for a kilogram of gold (in USD), that means it would cost $1,677,428,059.34 in USD.
However, I bet that if we bought the gold in that sort of quantity, we'd get a discount. Let's say we get a fairly standard 15% discount. That makes the cost of gold $1,425,813,850.43. Or 1.4 trillion dollars.
Does that number look a bit familiar?
It should.
It's the US deficit.
For the amount of money we lost under George W. Bush, we could have gold plated the moon!
I'm astonished that we're arguing about health care.
ETA I screwed up the math. Sorry. Geekery that is hopefully more correct is here
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-29 12:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-29 12:42 am (UTC)A couple of sources give me that gold leaf is about one gram per square metre, which is one ton per square kilometre; the front of the Moon has a surface area of 19 million square kilometres, so you'd need nineteen million tons of gold - about 120 times the amount of gold that's ever been mined, about $665 trillion.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-29 04:48 am (UTC)Thanks for the note. :)
Moon
Date: 2010-01-29 12:57 am (UTC)Nate
no subject
Date: 2010-01-29 12:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-29 04:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-29 03:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-29 04:53 am (UTC)However, even if we take that out and drop the Bush deficit to $1.266 trillion, I still think that it puts the healthcare debate into a bit of perspective.
Still, thank you for your comment. Until today I honestly was operating under the assumption that we went from +200 billion to -1.4 trillion.