If you took all the gold currently available and divided it up evenly, how much would each person get? Enough for a ring? Obviously, some have a lot more than their share (like the royal families) and some have a lot less (like myself – as in none). Does anyone have a realistic idea about the volume of gold that is currently in human possession?
My memory may be off here, but I recall hearing a Jeopary question to the effect that the total amount of gold mined in the history of the world amounts to a cube approximately 60 feet on each side. If my math is right, this amounts to 37 million cubic inches of gold, and with a world population of about 6.4 billion, that works out to .058 cubic inches per person. That’s a nugget roughly 2/5ths of an inch on each side.
I concur with Ravenman. My memory has it at a slightly larger cube (80 ft. seems to stick in my mind) but the essentials are there. 
http://www.gold-eagle.com/editorials_02/morgan060302.html
"Plain and Simple: There is more Gold Bullion than Silver Bullion
“There is less silver available for investment than gold. I am often chastised about this bold statement. So, let us use the most recent CPM study and see for ourselves. According to CPM Group’s Silver Survey 2002, there are approximately 400 million ounces of silver bullion and 2 billion ounces of gold bullion.”
That is just gold bullion. This doesn’t include all the gold in jewelry, etc. that is in private hands. More than enough for a gold ring for everyone on the planet.
Which would be very close to a cubic centimeter, yes??
“Figuring out the total amount of gold that has been produced by man is a little harder. To get at some kind of estimate, let’s figure that the world has been producing gold at 50 million ounces a year for 200 years. That number is probably a little high, but when you figure that the Aztecs and the Egyptians produced a fair amount of gold for a long time, it’s probably not too far off. Fifty million ounces * 200 years = 10 billion ounces. Ten billion ounces of gold would fit into a cube roughly 25 meters (about 82 feet) on a side. Consider that the Washington Monument measures 55 feet by 55 feet at its base and is 555 feet tall (17 x 17 x 170 m). That means that if you could somehow gather every scrap of gold that man has ever mined into one place, you could only build about one-third of the Washington Monument.”
That’s about 21 grams of gold for each person… not a particularly thick gold ring…
21 Grams? Isn’t that the mass of the human soul (or so the movie 21 Grams would have us believe? Interesting.
Can I get a diamond with that?
In naita’s quote, what does “unrecoverable” mean? Is that like the gold foil used on many spacecraft for shielding, and presumably now beyond human reach? Or what?
This gold listing on the periodic table says there’s 60 ft cubed of refined gold in the world.
That’s 216,000 ft[sup]3[/sup]. Using 5.5 billion people in the world, that gives each of us 3.927 x 10[sup]-5[/sup] ft[sup]3[/sup] of gold, or a cube 0.034 ft on a side. That’s 0.41 inches, or 1.044 cm.
So yeah, about 1 cc per person. 