Dateline: Oh, five or six billion years ago. Proto-Sol has just gone supernova. Through a strange quirk of astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and Fuller Brush salesmen, more silver than copper aggragates into the ball of liquid hot magma that is the proto-Earth, resulting in it eventually composing some twenty-five percent of the Earth’s crust. Given this alternate and hypothetical earth–and my admittedly fuzzy remembrance of Chem 30 (silver is an excellent conductor of energy)–what’s to stop the Homo sapiens sapiens (assuming they arise, of course) of that world from using silver as their chief metal of choice for electrical wiring? Anything at all?
The title? Shame on you! When’s the last time you watched the clasic stop-motion “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”? It’s sung by Burles Ives, people.
Japanese Game Show Host: And now Mr. Simpson, we will let you down if you can answer one question about Japan.
I don’t think anything would stop them. Silver is an excellent conductor. The only reason we don’t use it for wiring is because it’s rare; on a differently-mineraled planet they’d likely use silver for wiring and wear copper jewelry.
I wonder how it would affect early development of civilization.
Pure copper is very easy to work, and can be used to make tools, but it’s too soft to be really good at things like holding an edge. A copper knife might offer advantages over stone, but it blunted and bent easily. Tin is another easily smelted metal, and people figured out that alloying copper with tin gave them bronze - a very useful metal for making tools, and the Bronze Age was on. Smelting itself was probably discovered once pottery kilns had been invented, which were significantly hotter than an ordinary wood fire, and sufficient to melt copper or smelt copper ore (they probably obtained a smelted copper product accidently at first, and it would have taken a lot of trial and error to learn how to get consistent results). Before that time, copper was known, but supply was limited to finds of free copper.
If silver was the predominant metal, I wonder how it would affect this development. Silver is even softer and more malleable than copper - I wonder if a knife made out of pure silver would be functional at all. Does silver form a hard alloy like bronze with tin or some other reasonably available metal? OTOH, silver exists more often in the free state (compared to the overall amount of silver in existence) than copper does. It seems reasonable that our early humans on this planet would have had scads of free silver at their disposal, rather than metals being a rarity before the discovery of smelting.
I seem to recall an episode of (Geeze, I can’t believe I’m doing this) Lost in Space where the castaways are searching for a treasure chest rumored to have been left behind by a civilization from a planet where the streets were literally paved with gold, pebbles were diamonds, rubies, etc., etc.
Doctor Smith, of course, is very anxious to find the treasure, and keep it for himself. He continually speculates on the riches that such a society would hide.
Eventually, they find the treasure chest, break it open, and find it stacked full of bars of pig iron. They figure out that iron is extremely rare on the golden planet, and, hence is considered of great value.
>After all, copper “tarnishes” (that is, oxidizes), too.
Silver tarnishes by forming a sulphide when there are sulpher oxides available in the atmosphere. It’s not an oxide. That’s why they can keep silver from tarnishing by putting a little packet of sulphide scavenger in the package with it. That’s also why silver plating is added to copper to make switch contacts.
I actually am aware that silver tarnish is an oxide… my main point is that both metals can change from a pure state to something less useful for a particular purpose unless protected from the environment
Of course, on this hypothetical world, copper is a precious metal. Would it be worth mixing in 10% of a precious metal to make useful tools? I can’t see that for anything more than specialized uses (qualitatively similar to how we use platinum and iridium currently).
For wiring, though, it’d be fine. In fact, one of the early particle accelerators used exclusively silver wiring, since it was made during World War II, and copper was a strategic resource.