Some alien from another planet far far away wants to buy the earth. All of it. How much is the earth worth?
Think about my question carefully. If you take all the gold mines, and all the platinum mines, and all the coal mines. And for that matter if you take all the dirt and all the clay–and consider the iron core too, and mantle, which we presently can’t even get to. How much in the earth worth IN TOTAL? And has anyone ever even tried to calculate it?
Don’t let my question throw you, though, if you are not entirely certain yourself. I would love hearing some creative responses to my question too.
Hmm… it’s a tricky question because you can’t really go with market value since things like diamonds are pricey due to rather artificial limitations.
If our aliens had the whole earth, suddenly diamonds would be way less valuable.
But then, we’d also get into the insanity of assigning inherent worth to other precious metals, especially since some minerals are more common in space.
I assume you just want the ballpark of the market value of gold times the total amount plus iron plus platinum etc?
Something’s worth presupposes the question “to whom?” How much it’s worth to us could be very different than how much it’s worth to an alien. And we’d have to take into account for what purpose the alien wants the planet. My personal answer would be “Priceless.”
OK, so according to this, the total value of the world’s real estate is $217 trillion, which constitutes 60% of all of the world’s assets. That means that the total value of all of the world’s assets - meaning wealth humans have access to - is $362 trillion.
That’s still negligible the value of the iron in the earth’s core and mantle, which I calculate at around $120,000 trillion - (5972 X 60)/3.
OK, so according to this, the total value of the world’s real estate is $217 trillion, which constitutes 60% of all of the world’s assets. That means that the total value of all of the world’s assets - meaning wealth humans have access to - is $362 trillion.
That’s still negligible the value of the iron in the earth’s core and mantle, which I calculate at around $120,000 trillion - (5972 X 60)/3.
Thats using our values, which are only affected if aliens also SELL us stuff. Well they will sell us something, because money just represents a promise to supply value… somehow… , but then the question can’t be answered …
So the question I can answer , is would iron be something they want to buy ?
If so, they’d want to buy silicate too. And there’s SO MUCH MORE silicate than iron on earth, so earths value in silicon surely totally eclipses its iron value.
But I suspect iron and silicate are easily obtained without going to the expensive of dropping down into earths gravity well AND paying for it. Asteroids contain silicate AND iron, in about the same amounts, so actually its as easy as that… go mine an asteroid.
The rare elements in the universe are rare on earth too.
See Abundance of the chemical elements - Wikipedia
So the odd elements from 45, and all from 60, except lead…
The pattern in the abundance of the odds and evens is interesting hey !
In that graph, where there is no element label, its radioactive badly enough its not really existent to sell. (43 , 61 and starting from 83 except Thorium and Uranium.)
Economic analyses like this are nonsensical because they violate the first rule of economics: supply and demand. The worth of anything is dictated by the highest bidders. So there would have to be multiple alien civilizations bidding for the purchase of our planets total intrinsic, intellectual, real, future, expected worth. It is not an amount that can cleanly be extrapolated based on current commodity prices. The earth’s total value would be worth slightly less than the alien civilization’s military industrial complex, assuming the alien civilization’s military brass are adherents of Sun Tsu. If they’re not, then everything I said is out of the question.
That’s one of the few things in nuclear chemistry that’s easily understandable. Protons and neutrons are fermions, which means (among other things) that they’re subject to the Pauli Exclusion Principle: No two of the same kind can be in the same state at the same time. Now, the state of particles in a nucleus is a very complicated thing, and depends on the presence and arrangement of all of the other particles in the nucleus, but there’s one part of it that’s simple: Each particle has its own little bit of state called “spin”, which can have one of two different values (conventionally called “up” and “down”). So whatever the arrangement of other particles, if you have room for one proton, in, say the spin-up state, then you have room for another spin-down proton. Or in other words, if an odd number of protons is stable, then the next one after it almost certainly is, too, but the reverse is not necessarily true. So even-numbered elements tend to be more common than odd-numbered elements. If you looked at the common isotopes, then you’d find that the same is true for numbers of neutrons.
This is especially the case for helium, which has exactly two protons and two neutrons. All of the particles are in the ground state in the nucleus, because there’s room for them all to be in the ground state, so in that case, the state actually is simple. In fact, the helium nucleus is stable for exactly the same reason that its electrons are stable (making it chemically unreactive), because there’s two electrons, too.
When valuing the iron, are we to compare it to easily extractable sources? Price it as iron ore? Price the core as pure nickel? What about the minerals of the mantle? I’m sure some of them would be valuable, but how do we price them? How about we just assume it’s all worth something possibly average and multiply it by the weight of the whole globe?
I’m going to say it’s worth 100 per ton on average. There is 6*10[sup]24[/sup] kg of it. That's 6*10[sup]23[/sup]. You can refine this but no other result will be more meaningful.
This problem was neatly solved in the first few pages of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - though admittedly in a way that would tend to reduce the value of your investment.
