Why have so many cultures found gold to be so valueable? I was reading a book by a crackpot who thought that gold is univerally valueable because aliens who visited earth found it to be a great conductor of electricity. I don’t buy that, but other than it being shiny, what’s so special?
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It’s pretty.
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It doesn’t tarnish.
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H. O.!!
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It’s hard to find.
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It’s easy to mash into various shapes.
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In 20th and up centuries, it’s valuable because it’s a great conductor of electricity. You wouldn’t want to make wires out of it, but small etched paths or contact points would be OK, if obviously more expensive than most.
I think that about covers it.
Would that book be “Rule by Secrecy” by Jim Marrs by any chance?
Platinum is cooler that gold, anyway.
- Despite being hard to find, it occurs naturally in elemental form, making it easy to use (not as much refining required as more useful metals like iron).
I have read that all the gold that has ever been mined in human history would amount a single cube only 60 feet per side. This seems a very small amount, is it correct?
I believe I have heard that before too.
What’s more interesting, is the fact that there is more gold dissolved in the oceans than we will ever find in the ground. It’s just not cost-efficient to extract it.
I remember reading that someplace, but I cannot recall where, or when.
Does anyone else find it strange that a civilization which has the ability to visit the Earth would be interested in gold’s properties as a conductor of electricity?
<alien #1> Wow! This stuff is great!
<alien #2> Now we can junk our vaccuum tubes and retrofit the ship with microcircuits, just a soon as we invent them.
Gold isn’t the best conductor of electricity, anyway - that honor belongs to Silver. But Gold is good for electrical contacts because it doesn’t oxidize, whereas most metals do and form a metal oxide layer over their surfaces (metal oxides are insulators).
The 60-foot on a side thing might be about right. That comes out to about 4 billion ounces. I dug up a figure which said that official gold reserves held by countries amounted to about 1.1 billion ounces. Another stat I dug up said that such reserves amounted to about 1/4 of the world’s gold supply. Voila! I’ll bet it’s a bit low, though, given that people have been digging up gold since antiquity, and it’s hard to estimate how much, or where it all is.
Hmmm, there’s about as many ounces of gold in the world as shares of microsoft stock (5.4 billion, 4.4 billion float).
Actually it is from a Hebrew book, which is promoted in this site:
http://www.truebible.co.il/index.htm
Like I said, I think the guys a few cans short of a six-pack, but he does raise a somewhat interesting question. I have a hard time believing that just because something is shiny, malleable, and hard to find would make it so valueable in such diverse cultures that had no contact with one another. Its value is arbitrary, so a civilization could have picked any metal or any other material to be worth the most.
In its elemental form, it is sometimes found right on the surface or in streams. It isn’t affected by rot-- Just about everything associated with time eventually decays. Pure gold items are routinely brought up from the ocean floor in good states of preservation, something that can’t be said for copper, iron, silver, not to mention wood or textiles. I think a mixture of acids- “Aqua Regia” is about the only thing that will attack gold.
It can’t be readily counterfeit-- so makes for a credible store of value for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Haven’t heard of too many expeditions in search of some mythical monarch’s checkbook, have you??
curwin you should check out “Rule by Secrecy” - really crazy stuff, and … well i dont want to ruin the wonderful ending chapter for you. The scary thing is… it can’t ALL be false (even if most of it is).
Why, nothing curwn. Send me all you’ve got, and I’ll prove it. 
Well, they tried leaves as a medium of exchange. Everyone became millionaires overnight, but they had to burn down all the trees to stop the inflation.
At least, that’s what Douglas Adams said!
Actually, curwin, you hit on something that has actually happened when you said, “so a civilization could have picked any metal or any other material to be worth the most.”
In ancient Egypt they valued gold, but they valued silver more. That’s because silver was much rarer. They also valued glass, which was almost impossible to make. So silver and glass were actually worth more than gold.
This shows that gold is not always the most valuable material. People who can work metal always value it, because it’s beautiful, relatively easy to work, and doesn’t tarnish. But it’s actual value varies, depending on how rare it is.
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It is pretty.
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It is rare.
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It can be made into interesting shapes
Now just imagine being around 4,000 years ago when the number of metals that were rare, pretty, and easy to make into jewelry were rather scarce.
Marc
[homer]
oooo…shiny!
[/homer]
Actually, gold does oxidize. Oxidized gold is transparent, however, and also conducts electricity.