Yes, I realize this might not be the most original thread today.
Some ground rules:
Water on average.
I take it you haven’t been to a garden supply shop to check up on how much they charge for bags of dirt.
Or to a gas station with one of those air compressors that cost 50 cents. I bet air there is one of the most expensive substances by mass.
It’s probably municipal supply tap water. Bottled water is preoposterously expensive; tap water, which you do pay for one way or another, is (a) cheap and (b) very heavy, so it’s a pretty good candidate.
I’m not 100% sure of this, but what about land? Perhaps some lawyer can tell, how deep does your ownership go? All the way down? Can anyone legally tunnel under your property without your consent? So, if you purchase land, even if it costs a million quid per square foot, going down to the centre of the earth, it must work out at a tiny fraction of a penny per ton.
It is rather interesting that many “free” things can also be expensive, if it is deemed of high quality and value. Dirt, air, water… all free things, except when they aren’t.
As for land ownership… if one does own the land all the way down, then I suppose if I had the technology, then I have every right to drill all the way down.
Funny you should mention this but the Irish government have just decided that you only own land down to a depth of 10 metres (about 35 feet). They did this to avoid any ownership issues arising from the underground rail link they plan to build in dublin
Untreated water is probably cheaper. (I guess sewage would be even cheaper yet!)
Have you checked the price of organic fertilizer lately?
Cecil, in
this column cites an old legal principle that stated that you own a wedge of land down to the centre of the earth, and the airspace above your land up to infinity. However, he then explains that that no longer applies in the case of the air. I’d think the same was true of the land below. I can’t believe that the owners of coal mines, for instance, have to get permission from all the landowners their workings extend beneath.
Mineral rights, then - for a few tens of thousands of dollars, you can (theoretically) walk away with millions.
Which raises the question - what does the OP mean by “purchase”? As in “to consume” or “to invest”? With the right knowledge and a truckload of luck, you can buy stock shares that bring back huge returns.
Depends on if the surface owner owns the mineral rights as well. If he does, then trespassing below the surface for those minerals infringes on those rights. For example if you owned the surface and mineral rights to a piece of land, you’d probably be pretty bent out of shape if a directional drilling company opened up next door and sent a drill horizontally straight into the oil patch in the center of your property.
On the other hand, there was a case in my property class in law school where a natural cave that one property owner ran as a tourist attraction extended below a neighbor’s land, but the cave was of no use to the neighbor because there was no entrance to it on his own land. The argument made by the owner of the land was that the guy’s rights should be limited to what he can reasonably use, just like you can’t reasonably use the airspace 10,000 feet over your house. I don’t remember the outcome, though, I’ll try to look it up later.
Not directly responsive, but I recently saw a publicity blurb from the City of Chicago. The way they put it, they deliver (IIRC) 1,000 gal of water for around $1.30 - which they represented as the cost of a single bottle of bottled water. I found the comparison amusing.
Agri-water.
“Many California farmers still pay the government between $2 and $20 per acre-foot for irrigation water – at little as ten percent of the water’s full cost.”
Acre-foot= 325,851 gallons.
That’s $0.000006 per gallon.
Purchase, as in exchange money for goods. You bring up an interesting idea… perhaps you could buy a penny stock and own a company with a lot of tangible goods. For example, buying Northwest Airlines for 72 cents a share also buys up the mass of the airplanes it owns. (although airplanes aren’t a very good example… they’re designed to have reduced mass)
What’s interesting to me at least, was that the OP posits the very question that I thought about asking here at SDMB the other night.
How about packing peanuts? aka norwegian popcorn. My question would have revolved more around what one could purchase the most of with the most mass, assuming the adviseability of blowing one’s life savings on the “most stuff”.
Packing peanuts have lots of volume, but I wonder if it is cheaper than an equivalent amount of a denser material such as water.
Also, another thought… Bart Simpson bought an old abandoned factory for $1. That surely has gobs of both mass and volume. I would imagine this beats out most of the examples thus far, but can it really happen?
Or, since we’re looking for mass, between $0.00147 and $0.0147 per ton. Even if that’s 10% of full cost, full cost is no more than $0.15 a ton.
You haven’t had to buy dirt lately. Pay for the dirt, then for the hauling. Free it ain’t! :rolleyes: