Weird stuff, gold. While it is almost without any practical use, it has become a standard of value that people are willing to kill and die for. It suffuses our language as some undefined aim we should all be striving to achieve – there’s ‘good as gold’, ‘going for gold’ (in Olympics parlance), gaining the ‘gold standard’ or sometimes just a simple exclamation of ‘gold!’ to emphasize excellence. Anything with which one can make money gets compared to gold: thus water becomes ‘liquid gold’ or oil ‘black gold’. At a more banal level, we all can feel blessed to pass under the golden arches of McDonald’s to get our burger and fries.
We still have most of the gold that’s ever been panned or dug up. Still we move heaven and a lot of earth to get more. Exact figures vary, but a semi-official estimate claims there are now 171,300 tonnes of gold above ground (although some believe we have 16 times that). Whatever the amount, it doesn’t take up much space because it is so dense. At the semi-official estimate, if you placed it all in a giant cube it would measure just 20 metres on each side. At 16 times, the cube shoots up to 50 metres high.1
