Grrl Power #368 – Billions of bullions
Edit: Ok so I’ve updated Dabbler’s estimate from 2748 times as much, to 20 billion, because I am the worst at math. The actual worst. I’m getting a reverse Nobel Prize for it next year. A Lebon Prize.
Also, if you want to see a lot of gold stacked up in one place: British gold reserves
Having a ton of gold (531 tons, actually) in a virtually inaccessible location is not the same thing as having 531 tons of gold be totally inaccessible. Yes his identity is a secret, the location of his vault is a secret, there’s not an actual ten mile deep tunnel you can base jump down into to get the the gold, you either need his powers or something else that can tunnel through 10 miles of crust to get to it, Archon advised him on additional security he could take, etc, etc. I just wanted to include this page to show an example of a super using his powers intelligently. He does present a potential threat, but he’s not breaking any laws. It’s one of those “watch this guy closer than the strong guy making his living in construction, but otherwise live and let live” supers.
He could try to threaten cities on fault lines and ransom them for millions with is geokinesis, but he’s not living in a silver age comic book, so why would he? It is something that bothers me about a lot of supervillains. So many of them have powers, or their whole shtick is predicated on a gadget they made that with the tiniest application of intelligence could make them millionaires in the private sector. The Trapster made incredibly strong yet easily sprayable adhesive. The Green Goblin made something the size of an opened pizza box that not only can fly, it can carry the weight of at least two humans plus equipment, and based on some of the fights he’s had with Spider-Man, it’s not exactly short range either. Yes, the usual excuse is that most bad guys are a little bit crazy, but then consider this. The first time Spidey beats the Goblin, there’s this flying thing just sitting there. It’s not like the crazy bad guy filed a patent for it. Ok, maybe the first version before he went crazy, but Goblin’s been around for a while, and he’s probably upgraded the flyer, and post crazy, he’s probably not keeping up with the patent process. Somebody would take that thing apart, file their own patents, and boom. Delivery drones, extreme sports gliders, hoverboards, military hovering sniper platforms, whatever. Someone would do something constructive with it. That’s why I’m careful not to throw a lot of gadgeteers into the world, because it would cause an irreversible tech spiral, and the comic world would diverge dramatically from our own.
I actually worked out Dabbler’s math. The total amount of gold mined is estimated to be a 25 meter cube, converted that volume into a sphere, found a reddit thread where someone worked out the total volume of gold in the mantle and core to be a 52.25 mile sphere. Convert to meters, divide by 2 to get the radius, etc. Dabbler only had to google the volume of an Olympic sized swimming pool (which she can do in her head with her cybernetics) and did the rest in her head. She estimated the volume of gold because she knows the size of Earth and it turns out the composition of Goldilocks planets that support life are all pretty similar. (At least in the Grrl Verse) Spinning solid core surrounded by a mantle creates a magnetosphere, without which higher order life won’t evolve because the local star blasts the surface with too much radiation, and solar wind strips away too much of the atmosphere. Earth orbits a medium sized yellow sun which says a lot about its composition, planets are coalesced from stellar dust, debris and asteroid impacts, etc. Anyway, she’d been on enough planets to come really close on her estimates.
Harem jokes about marrying multiple people on this page, but legally, she is still considered a single individual.
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Remember, remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason, why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy FawkesGuy Fawkes, guy, t’was his intent
To blow up king and parliament.
Three score barrels were laid below
To prove old England’s overthrow.
By God’s mercy he was catch’d
With a darkened lantern and burning match.
So, holler boys, holler boys, Let the bells ring.
Holler boys, holler boys, God save the king.
And what shall we do with him?
Burn him!
People tend to forget that the real Guy Fawkes wanted to turn England into a Catholic theocracy, basically.
true they also forget that his name was gredo not guy
My parents sure forgot both of those facts, when they named my brother after him.
Happy birthday bro.
did they also forget the fact that you are meant to burn a guy on nov 5th?
Knowing my mum’s thinking, she probably anticipated silly kids pranking around like that, and possibly having an accident. So it could have factored in to us holding our own private fireworks displays, and never attending public ones.
Actually it was Guido Fawkes which is the name he adopted while fighting for the Spanish.
“his name was gredo not guy”
Did he shoot first?
Only because he got excited, it being his first time ;)
You say that like it was a bad reason! o_O
Probably because of “V for Vendetta”, plenty people have started looking at Fawkes as if he was some sort of freedom fighter of his time, when in reality he was trying to CREATE the regime being fought against in the movie.
I think V, particularly in the comics, was more intended of a gigantic terrorist hipster/crazy enigma. The Mask was worn to be “Ironic” in a sense. Considering his MO and goal was the blow up Parliament to show how impotent the Fascist government was it was certainly ironic enough.
Aww man, you beat me to it…
Also, Congrats on turning this into the first comment.
Bhahahaha! Harem made me laugh a LOT at this one!
Also, if Harem were to marry, would her spouse technically be committing polygamy? Some laws will need clearing up because of her.
Also, image of her relationships.
Vogue: I’m too tired, honey, but Gothy is free for you tonight.
Harem is still just one person. Like Dave says in the description, the law recognizes her as only one person as well.
But if she marries 5 different guys she could be charged with polygamy.
Bigamy. The charge is bigamy.
In Harem’s case, more like pentagamy (assuming she won’t get more bodies).
“Bigamy” is two, “Polygamy” is more than one. And, the “-gamy” refers to having multiple women, so if she marries all guys it would be “polyandry” instead.
Wrong, unfortunately. “-gamy” refers to marriage; being married to multiple women as opposed to men would be “polygyny” (for other uses of the “gyn” greek composite, see “gynecologist” or “misogyny”, who both refer to women). Polygamy is used correctly in this context.
Ah. Didn’t spot the “legally” in the commentary.
Could be actual, physical tired-ness. I don’t think the bodies share fatigue.
Even though DaveB didn’t literally draw dollar signs in Harem’s eyes, I can hear the “Ka-Ching!” in her voice…
:P
when I read it before looking close at the picture I got the image of a shovel in her hands…. golddigger much
A good point you just made: If Harem did marry a rich guy & decided to off him for the inheritance, a shallow grave goes much quicker with 5 shovels, compared to 1…
:P
However, if there’s any real justice at all, the last thing you’d want to do with a dead geokinetic is to bury him…
O.o
Ahh, so you would prefer her to sauté him, and consume him with five bottles of amarone?
i think he meant more “the Earth could revive him”
Good point. But it would have a harder time doing that, for sautéed and digested geomancer poop.
I love how Zoeng agrees with Sidney about Scrooge McDuck being the cool way to store money.
Totally agree!
I can’t imagine in real life (i.e. being neither invulnerable nor a cartoon duck) that diving into a pile of coins would be that much fun either.
well considering said person is a geomancer/geokinetic, they could simply use their powers to swim through the assembled coinage like everyone’s favorite super-rich scottish fowl ^^
And Zoeng probably has a spell for the same effect
he’s got a pool full of gold dust as well.
Max and Sidney could probably do it though. If he let them down into his chamber.
I believe in the comics, occasionally other people than Scrooge have attempted to dive into his vault and [comically] hurt themselves – its actually a special skill he has [although it is a silly comic, and they let him do ridiculous things]
aria having a breath taking money-gasem
agreecian and +1
Oh yea. No doubt on that one. In fact I think this is the scene after half an hour of it. With everyone either politely, or embarrassedly, looking the other way.
Mind you the sight is probably enough to distract them, from the multiple-money-gasems.
Maybe not. Maybe she’s just winded from having to walk all that way down to the guy’s vault. Maybe the others aren’t in the same condition because they are in better shape than her. Maybe . . .
No. On second thought, you’re right. Money-Gasm.
I love Zephan Zong’s reaction/thought flow in the joke at the end. I LOVE IT. :-) It’s nice to see he has a good sense of humor in him.
I guess this would make harem a gold digger?
or at least interested in one
She ain’t messin’ with no broke
Bada bish!
Don’t know how well she would fit into that comic world.
Sooo. How exactly does that stored gold support his lifestile? It’s not like he has acces to it in liquid cash form. He can’t spend it while it’s down there. And it seems like he has WAY already than he could ever spend.
It’s not like he is building a next egg for his future generations, because they can’t acces it without his powers. He’d have to turn it into cash for that to be a thing. No doubt he already turned enough gold into cash to be super filthy rich, but than what does he need that much gold for?
they said he takes out a few bars periodically where he probably sells them and uses the cash to buy yachts and hookers
This guy sounds smart, so my guess is he wouldn’t simply convert a heap of gold at a time. He’d take a few bars, convert them to cash, live off that, then convert a few more once he runs low, and so on. He won’t draw too much attention to his stash (aside from Archos and similar agencies of course) and wouldn’t crash the golf market that way, either.
yh but its the gold market they are worried about
Stupid autocorrect…
Sure, but why even store that gold, if he could extract it whenever he wants.
He extracted more than he could possibly ever use, and he doesn’t even seem that old yet
Because shiny, of course.
Never underestimate just how much power gold can have over some people. I’d love to start hoarding gold, not really for monetary reasons, but because GOLD.
Are you saying that with a Dutch accent?
I luff goooold…
relative of mine? would it be for a nice bed?
Do the hard work first, then live the easy life? It’s what I would do, admittedly.
Because this way he has processed and shaped into bars gold available whenever he wants. He just did a lot of work once to save himself the hassle later.
also what about his kids and grand kids there is enuff gold there keep his family going a good long wile if they can find a way to get it
I would imagine that it isn’t hard to build up a pretty significant bank account a little bit at a time with Gold bars available to be converted a few at a time over a reasonable time period. Plus, when you buy boats, cars and houses with the Gold, the wife and kids have that to sell for cash after he is dead, if needed.
i was thinking that anything he could do to make the gold underground available to anyone after he dies would compromise security based on the coment that there is more there than he could ever use himself
Personally, I would go through all that trouble so that later, I could dance around the bars in pure unadulterated joy singing If I Was a Rich Man whenever it tickled me to do so. You can’t do that over a pit of boiling gold quite like you could bars.
Although that *does* remind me of an actual punishment that happened in one of the Chinese Triads. One of the lower-ranking members was secretly stashing gold instead of reporting it to his Dragon Head (leader). When it was discovered, his punishment went pretty much like this:
“So, you like gold?” points to a pot of molten gold
“Start drinking.”
A Roman general back in the days of the Empire had the same thing happen to him, too. If I’m remembering correctly, the barbarians sent his severed head back to the Emperor with the mouth full of gold.
One thing I had to edit out of the page for space and flow was Zeph saying “He simply likes knowing his personal gold reserves exceed that of all the nations of the world combined.”
Yea, I can see how that would be a cool thing.
Knowing that, theoreticly, he has enough money to buy out the world debt (although not really, because all that gold would become worthless if he brought it out)
I’m much more impressed by the shelves holding those gold bars!
Unobtainium?
yh now you point it out that would need to be some strong stuff even if gravity is lower 10 miles down
Hardly any change in gravity at a mere 10 miles down.
99.9(several nines more?)% of Earth’s mass below you and hardly any above you.
When considering the pull of gravity when digging down deep, consider the planet to be nested shells, like nesting dolls. When you dig down to 10 miles/16 kilometers, to determine the gravity, only consider the amount of the Earth deeper than your position, to the center of gravity of the Earth. So all the light stuff, like most of the crust and oceans that float on the heavier mantle, etc. are ignored and you are left with the denser materials below you. So, you have managed to ignore a very little bit of the Earth’s mass by digging down that far.
Only 16 km removed from 6364 km (mean radius of the Earth)? F=m1m2/r2, Fg=mE/r2
Reducing the radius from 6364 km to 6348 km will not have a significant change in gravity, especially considering the loss of lighter mass of the Earth.
Ah, nuts! All my <super> and <sub> marks all get ignored. Oh, well.
Use HTML numbers.
That only works if the Earth is a sphere of uniform density. Or at least the material at any given depth is of uniform density. Unfortunately, the Earth isn’t quite spherical; it’s sort of vaguely pear shaped, and that’s before you take mountains and ocean trenches into account. It also isn’t remotely of uniform density, at least not outside the core.
If he can extract gold from the crust and mantle, he may very well be able to do the same to say, carbon…
He can control metal. Those shelves are encased in invisible steel.
no transparent aluminum
Ah-hem.
Transparisteel.
A version of that could be entering commercial production, within five years.
Sci-Fi once again becomes science fact.
If he can get to it, then it’s not Unobtainium…It’s Oneobtainium.
HAHAHAHAHA!!!! Now go put that pun back in the pit.
My theory: his geomancy is so good he can make carbon nanotubes.
If you don’t like him using carbon (which is quite prevalent in the crust, so *I* think it should fall under geomancy) he could also use materials like boron, iridium, vanadium, etc. to create ultra-strong steel alloys.
Also, the gravity would actually be slightly higher at this depth, since most of the gravity we experience comes from Earth’s super dense core, not the overlying layers of mantle. Whatever those shelves are, they really are impressive.
The shelves in the linked video are made of steel and plywood. Granted they don’t have as many on each shelf but it wouldn’t be that hard to make a steel lattice that could hold 11,000kg per shelf.
Something like this.
Second last panel: “… close eye [b]on[/b] his financial…”
Sydney caught on quick. I suspect her superiors are experiencing a rise in their opinion of her.
Dammit, used the wrong tags
Actually, you just used the wrong kind of brackets…Use the Greater Than and Less Than signs & you’re good to go.
Considering Sydney’s performance during the battle and now this I’m pretty sure they have her tagged as somone they want to develope into an experienced strategist, because it’s easy to see she thinks quickly on her feet. Maybe not commanding officer material, she may be a bit too… unusual for that, but definitely someone you want to have around when you’re planning an operation with unusual parameters like super involvement.
.. Or simply asking themselves, “OK, should we be worried about (Insert New Situation Here)?”
Not really. Most experienced intelligent gamers will have, at some point, entered a discussion with his peers, regarding what happens to economies when one dumps dragon-loads of gold into them, especially if the Game Master is running his own homemade world and game system. I have had such a discussion with a player who was also a CPA, when I had given them a price, in gold, on a pirate ship that they had secured in battle. As his punishment for disrupting the session with boring money talk, he had to revamp my game’s financial system, which he enjoyed (okay. I suck at assigning punishment to gamers.). In the end, he pointed out that most major transactions would be done as barter for the most part.
Oops. Got a brain fart there. Heh. Sydney ID’ed the type of power that could get the gold. Which most experienced intelligent superhero-system gamers should be able to do.
That’s kinda awesome.
Or a perfect situation. You hopefully got it out of his system, and you got something cool out of the deal. I can’t disrespect that.
Whoops, I’ll get that fixed.
I had just seen a special on Discovery about how Gold (along with other precious and heavy metals) make up the Earth’s molten core and that only a bit of them are still able to be mined. I wonder if DaveB saw the same one…I think it was about how to build a car, but from scratch…and I mean extreme scratch.
I actually heard about it from a podcast called The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe.
Apologies, but I love bullion, me.
Note that the core (atleast the inner core) isn’t actually molten. The pressure is so extreme there that it’s a solid
Except the bit where the dinosaurs live. You really should have paid more attention to that documentary “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”!
With centre of the earth defined as where your feet and a raft can bring you in two months.
Who care about the dinosaurs?! I would go to the Earth’s core to meet Caroline Munro.
Yup, gimme that hawt cave-girl action.
Well, they ‘were’ walking downhill all the way..
that was documentary was a fail.
they claimed to have reached the center, but in reality, they reached the pocket within the continental crust, where its the thickest.
they call themselves scientists and they can’t even get their coordinates right.
The thing that always gets me, when seeing a spectacular shot, of an explorer, in the most remote place on Earth. Marvelling at how she is carrying all her gear on her back, through such precarious terrain.
Then realising that the gal behind her must have all that, plus the camera, plus the sound boom, and is still keeping pace, whilst framing a perfect shot! Even weirder when they manage to do that on a solo expedition.
It does make you wonder if Flying Camera Guy is behind it all.
Actually, a lot of the time, they are making the journey thrice: once to set the camera in place, then go back to record them walking past, then again to go back and retrieve the camera
Check out Survivorman for that. Les Stroud is awesome, though his lack of enthusiasm for hunting is a little odd- as you can see in the episode where he took his son along, who promptly set about making a spear (which Les has done, like, once) from a sharpened stick- said spear which later managed to snag them a nice full meal which would have gotten away without.
That’s nothing compared to what was in “The Core”, often cited as the most scientifically inaccurate film of all time. It explored (very badly) what would happen if the Earth’s magnetic field went away.
If it did suddenly go away, the results wouldn’t be too severe (unless it stayed that way for many millions of years, allowing the solar wind to slowly strip the atmosphere). More radiation would reach the surface (cool auroras, though) and satellites would suffer more radiation damage – might have to abandon the ISS :-(
Thought “The Core” was if the centre of the earth stopped spinning o_O
That would get rid of the magnetic field- which is caused by the spinning of the iron center of the planet.
Except isn’t it the other way around? The iron spins because it’s in a magnetic field?
Nope. the core spins because the planet does. spinning metal core creates magnetic field.
Absolutely. I just picked that one area, to tie it into DaveB’s rant (a bit). That film tramples over so many areas of physics, biology, etc that I had to get selective :-)
Having seen the trailer, before watching the movie, I was braced for it. Clearly it was set in either a space opera setting or one where two or three universal constants or laws operated differently to here. I concluded it was a case of convergent evolution, based on the latter hypothesis. Where two dissimilar planets, eco-systems and societies happened to end up looking superficially similar and calling their planet Earth.
Of course, when that happens English always ends up being spoken. It is some kind of telepathic wave permeating all of the multi-verse.
Open up their archaeological textbooks and you will probably find they descended from hairy dinosaurs.
Mind you, with that happening, it is really liberating. You can just ignore the science, because their laws of physics are not ours. So you just have to take their word on it. And what remains is actually a rather enjoyable film.
Thanks. Now I’m picturing Hilary Swank as a hairy dinosaur.
Sorry.
:-(
Erm, don’t you need a magnetic field to have an aurora?
Yes, I think you are correct. Strike that bit.
I thought it was just the charged particles reacting with the upper atompshere.
The magnetosphere simply deflects the charged particles in such a way that they can only reach the atmosphere at the poles, which is why there are only auroras there
Harem had me splitting my sides at that! And sooo in character for her.
especially as with her powers she could access his vault if he showed it to her
I think it’s a bit too far away from the surface for her unless she gets really familiar with it or leave one of her there.
she could teleport one extra clone hidden behind all the gold just before they leave and then leave one there wile 3 teleport back and for while one distracts the guy who owns it
It’s safe to say that he must have security cameras installed, just in case.
it could pose a huge risk to security.
one thing is that someone could hack it, to learn of the place, another is that being down there is required to access the terminal, it’s useless as anyone in can simply destroy both the cameras and the terminal.
also another thing.
if someone already knows of this place’s existence, they would just have to look for electric activity that doesn’t fit the natural earth’s pattern.
Not if it’s a remote security system: anyone who hacked in would know that it is there, but not where
Hiding it’s existence is one of it’s biggest security features in a world with teleportation.
He’d need 10 miles of cable to even acces those cameras in real time.
And he’d need to install it himself, knowing how. Cause he won’t be letting anyone in there to do it for him, that’s a good way to blow the secret
No hacking offcourse, it’d simply be a closed system
Yea, I had similar thoughts about a CCTV system and had assumed, prior to that, he would rely on secrecy and inaccessibility (with little risk). He could not use radio, or similar traditional alternatives, to transmit such, as it would not penetrate the ground.
And we have nothing which would lead us to think he had the capability to create an exotic alternative like a neutron transmitter. Such would only draw attention to itself in any event.
That said, if I owned a swimming pool full of gold, I might fret if there was no additional security or easy way of checking that there was nothing amiss. And he had been working on this for ten years. So CCTV and feedback from an alarm would be desirable. Even so though, that is still an impractical task, on the face of it.
Until you remember his geomancer powers, that is. He could open up a channel, through the rock, large enough for his cable to be threaded down (but no larger, to minimise any security risk). Provided he chose a cable that had metal in it, he could then use his power to snake the cable down the tunnel he made for it.
Such would actually be a simple task for a powerful geomancer, provided he could affect that much cable at once. If relatively weaker, he would have to just move part of it at a time. Leaving slack so that he was not trying to pull the weight of the rest too. Much as an engineer would have to do (one way or another) if trying to lay any long cable.
The technical parts could be researched easily enough, by consulting individuals with suitable experience or via internet searches. Leaving the only issue as being the acquisition and cost of the cable (plus ancillary equipment). But… swimming pool of gold.
Heh, I get the point of the comic and all, but it still seems so random. “Oh, and btw, there is a guy capable of crashing the world gold market and sending the world into the dark ages economically alone, not counting his ability to theoretically destroy the planet. But no worries.”
They already knew there were probably people with that power.
It’s more a ‘remember, not everyone with apocalyptic powers is dangerous’
Indeed.
Living well IS the best possible revenge. Forget super-villainry and/or global domination / destruction as career paths (too much damn paperwork for those things anyhow), just make your fortune legally, then kick back and enjoy it. Whilst subtly and incidentally rubbing your affluence in the faces of your enemies, of course.
If you can control the weather, don’t threaten to send a storm to wipe out a major city. Offer to send rain at regular intervals to drought stricken areas to save their crops and livestock. For the appropriate fees of course.
And maybe if you can dump enough snow back on the poles you can decrease sea level rise.
It seems Mom Nature is doing that last bit on her own.
I know a number of people who think they have some degree of weathermancy ability. ALL are very careful to ask for only very subtle changes and well in advance. No summoning or banishing storms on the spur of the moment. Because they’ve ALL had the experience of asking for a substantial swift change and apparently getting it – concurrent with, or swiftly followed by, a weather disaster elsewhere that appeared to be an offset; e.g. no rain here followed by heavy rain and flooding a couple hundred miles downwind.
In talking about secondary powers, and natural limitations:
That rain/snow still has to come from somewhere.
Clouds are actually very useful in reducing incoming solar energy (and thus slowing down climate change), because the white clouds reflect it. If you rain empty more clouds without the also commanding the ENTIRE weather cycle (and understanding it. Which noone does completely), you might actually cause more droughts
Understanding and thus manipulating such a mindbogglingly delicate and complex system without causing catastrophe is why Ororo Munroe (AKA Storm) is known as one of the most powerful characters in Marvel Comics.
Gold market is pretty much irrelevant for the world economy. I don’t understand the hype. AFAIK, the worst thing that can happen is decrease in some high tier electronics that uses gold as conductor or resistant coating.
The gold standard is still, pretty much, the standard used to determine the value of money
Not since 60ies.
Economists have one neat standard for world wide comparisons of costs of living.
The Big Mac.
Seriously. That and other McDonalds fare, anyhow. Because, if you think about it, you can’t figure out the price of an ‘average’ basket of shopping around the world. Because different countries have vastly different things that would be considered staples. Bread would not be found in many Asian countries, for example. Whereas rice might.
But McDonalds has stores in most countries around the world. And has standardised production methods. Which is vital to ensure like-for-like analysis. And their policies to source stocks locally, where possible, is a useful side effect for economic comparisons.
Clearly there is one flaw, in that some countries will not permit hamburgers and others might frown on meat. But McDonalds actually solve that for the economists by finding the nearest socially acceptable alternative and sell something that will serve, as a similar enough product, for comparisons to be viable.
Needless to say this is only a limited tool for telling the prosperity of a country. As the question is strictly limited to ‘how much does it cost for a Big Mac?’ But that is more reliable than asking ‘how much does it cost for a loaf of bread?’ Even if a country does eat bread, one might not look, or be made, anything like another, from elsewhere in the world.
All nations keep part of their liquid reserves as gold. If all gold suddenly becomes worthless, all nations suddenly lose a significant portion of their liquid cash. I’d like to think that kinda thing would effect the world economy
1) It is not particularly large value in relative terms.
2) It is not the cash they intend to spare it is more of a reserve.
3) While there will be some consequences, i don’t think it will be anywhere close to “bring down the world economy”.
3) is an opinion. Not an unreasonable one either, as the world economy might be able to handle it. But the process of handling that will be costly and risky. So there would be severe economic effects even if it were to cope.
Some banks would foreclose. Taxes would have to be increased (one way or another) in countries which had larger gold reserves, to replace the lost reserves. Or suffer the costs of a loss of confidence in the country’s currency and its ability to repay loans.
Many pensions would be reduced, because of gold being viewed as a safe option to use for such long-term investments. So do feature, directly or indirectly (through blue chip firms which have gold in their assets), as part of many schemes. In short individuals, companies and countries would suffer.
Importantly, the flaw in your opinion is that there always remains a real risk of it going the other way. And if you are talking about something which could bring down the world economy, it is foolish to just cross your fingers and hope for the nicer outcome. Hope for the best, but plan for the worst.
Just a thought about our non-villainous super-miner who could disrupt the world economy by going rogue with his gold:
Isn’t there a chance we have an alchemist-type instead, converting less valuable materials to gold?
Addendum: I mean, someone out there doing the same but by transmuting the elements instead?
if he could, i really hope he obeys the law of conservation.
otherwise he could be a short range mattermancer…
but that also rises concern’s about the elsewhere mentioned ‘nuclear gauntlet man’.
Most high tier supers doesn’t.
Wouldn’t be too odd. I mean, all Alchemy is is various kinds of Fusion or Fission- get a chunk of lead, separate it into its constituent neutrons, protons and electrons, put them back together as gold atoms and get rid of the spare stuff somehow.
pretty sure jiggawatt could be an alchemist… just needs lots o shielding to keep others from dying.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1415
…Or one of Dabbler’s little radiation-munchers, as seen on the page after your link…
;)
Interesting tidbit about things that deep into the earth. It’s REALLY HOT down there.
The deepest hole ever drilled, in Russia (12km, 7miles) meassured 180 degrees celsius down there (365 farhenheit).
There’s no way a human would be able to survive the heat at 10miles deep
Could be part of this guy’s power. Or else he used his fortune to construct a REALLY good cooling system.
that really depends on were the cavern is the crust isn’t the same thickness everywhere some places are thicker and you need to go down more for it to heat up
A geomancer of that power (and with the appropriate knowledge, which he clearly has demonstrated) could manufacture a vault that functioned similarly to a refrigerator. Siphoning the heat from that vault up, through a vent, to a cooler depth. The walls even look to be made of insulatium, as part of the insulation necessary to ensure that it works.
With a proper design it would not even require external power. My house is built to a traditional Bulgarian design, which naturally vents the hot air from the lower floors, up through a conning-tower like structure, on the roof. I completely wasted the money I spent on air conditioning. I never have to turn it on. Even when the weather is hot enough that the tarmac on the roads is melting, my house is idyllically cool.
Not so good in winter mind. It really is designed as a rich man’s house. Working on the assumption of being able to afford unlimited wood, to keep it warm. But, on the plus side, it is very well insulated. So once I learnt the knack of sealing off the circulation, when the temperature drops, I much reduced the fuel needs, and can keep my primary room toasty, with the fire going.
That being a tip I got from observing the locals. The entire family will live in one room, over winter. Privacy takes a secondary consideration, to avoiding the freezing conditions, at that time of year. And very few can afford to heat more than one room effectively.
Got any references or names for that particular design?
Sadly not. The only name I have is a complex-sounding Bulgarian name (which I never could get my tongue around, let alone remember) and I know that it related to the more common aspect of the design. Where the top floor of the house is bigger than the lower.
My translator described it as meaning ‘mansion-style’, although I do not know how accurate he was. The style is not common in my region, so the locals were not able to help me beyond that. In any event, that name would not refer to the, rarer, design also incorporating the cooling tower.
I can describe the salient features though. Being built on a slope, only the front of the house is fully above ground. To give you an idea, at the back of the property there is a bathroom. From the inside it has a small window, just below the ceiling. Yet walking around, to the rear of the house, that window is at ankle height, just above the paving surrounding the house.
Natural earth thus insulating a lot of the bottom floor. Helped by solid stone walls between 1.5 and 2 foot thick. Other than that one small bathroom window, there are only windows along one facing (plus an immediately adjacent single window, on one other). The biggest of which is only 3 x 5 foot in size. Throw in the modern (albeit handmade) double-glazing and the whole is superbly insulated.
Apart from that one bathroom, the entire ground floor is one open-plan hall. Supported with stone pillars and timber beams.* Which is inconveniently large to heat. The toasty bit are the areas around the fireplace. When you get to the kitchen area (with outside temperatures below -30 C) it is fairer to describe that part as ‘ok to work in’. But you would not be cosy there long-term. **
But, because it is open-plan, and the staircase (on the left-hand wall, about half way down the room) is not enclosed in any way, all the heat (in summer, or when not sealed off in winter) goes up to the floor above. Which is where the next clever bit happens.
The room it comes out into is in the centre of the house. And is enclosed by rooms on every side. With no windows or even walls that are adjacent to the outside. Essentially it forms one long gallery, with doors on every wall, leading to bedrooms, bathrooms plus a connecting corridor to another wing. Even the latter gets some benefit from air being drawn down it’s corridor. If you open the various doors to allow the air to circulate, that is.
If you look up, when in the central gallery, you see that fully one third of the room (in the centre) is actually an open square tower. The only windows in it are small ones right at the top, around the sides. The top of it is covered with a ceiling and roof above it. Being white-painted, the sunlight from even those small windows is enough to illuminate the gallery below, very effectively, in daytime. No lighting needed. Not even when examining paintings, on the walls, for example.
Importantly the cooling effect works without needing to have those windows open at the top. I need a big three section extending ladder to get to the top, so am glad that I do not need to regulate the temperature manually that way!
Incidentally the entire upper floor is a modern brick and timber type design. So no better than any normal house, other than any room you want to cool, you just leave the door to the gallery ajar. It does not even need an outside window open, for the cooling to work. Although you could open any of the large windows to create a draft in addition.
Spring and autumn I live upstairs, to enjoy the panoramic views and surrounding balcony. The height of summer, and worst of winter, downstairs.
* One point of note, for the winter heating, is the minor beams (going at right-angles to the major supporting ones below) trap pockets of air between them. That layer of warm air, at the top of the room, is very noticeable as you walk up the stairs, and pass through it.
Mind you I improvise a hatchway above that point, to capitalise on the effect, and keep it from escaping up the stairwell. When I can afford it, I shall have a proper hatch installed . It would fit naturally enough that I suspect the design specifically allowed for that.
** When I feel I have plenty of wood in reserve, even this part can be cosy, by keeping the fire going on full-blast, around the clock.
Oops. Sorry about the length of post. I got carried away in my enthusiasm. I shall try to be more concise.
Gradually slipping back into bad habits. Thanks all for tolerating me, despite doing that recently!
Don’t you mean your kennel?
An English dog’s home is his castle.
Actually, that was very interesting :)
Kind of you to say so.
Even then, I think I failed to properly convey the height that the tower rises up though. Above the gallery is a large attic, with enough clearance that it essentially forms another floor. Complete with a door (not a trap door, a regular house door) connecting to the upper gallery/lower tower area.
The tower extends all the way through the attic, and rises up yet another, generous, story above that! Not including its little roof at the very top.
The ladder, that I mentioned, gets loaned out, around the village, during the summer. As it is the only one capable of getting to the roofs of the tallest buildings in the village. Each section is approximately one story tall. I have to fully extend all three sections, in the event that I need to get to the top of the tower, from the gallery below.
The basics are cooling via convection of rising warm air. This is seen in many colonial houses that have a raised cupola above an open core in the center of the house. This acts as a chimney to pull out heat. Jefferson went to the additional step of adding a ring of gas burners to his that when lit created a strong updraft like a hot air balloon that actively pulled air through the house. There is also the tactic of using thermal masses such as very thick walls to buffer the day/night temperature changes. The house can be partially set in the ground to act as a buffer as well (popular with hobbits).
These and others are seen in https://www.yourhome.gov.au/passive-design/passive-cooling
My own house has a ground loop heat pump with a long loop set at a deep layer in the back yard. The pump pulls heat from the earth in the winter and dumps it there in the summer for cooling. My energy bills have been shown to be about 40% of using a standard heating/cooling system.
I love seeing people do intelligent things with their powers. Though this guy sounds ridiculously powerful. As in he’s probably the most powerful mutant with this ability in fiction. I can’t imagine Terra from Teen Titans moving that much gold, nor that one guy from that X-Men cartoon.
So yeah, I guess part of his success is also due to being powerful enough to move all that gold along with being smart enough to apply a logical plan.
Magneto, from the X-Men movie moved more (albeit only across San Francisco Bay, rather than from the mantle up to 10 miles below the surface). Magneto lifted the Golden Gate Bridge (380,800,000 kg). Whereas Harem’s prospective fiancé moved:
Weight of gold per cubic meter: 19,282 kg
Olympic swimming pool volume: 2,500 cubic metres
19,282 kg x 2,500 = 48,205,000 kg
you need to remember at the core there is no gravity
also magneto also moved asteroid M and held it in geosciences orbit
No, but it gets progressively stronger the further you get. 7,000 + miles vertically requires massively more energy, per kg, than a few miles sideways. Even if the first few miles are not battling against gravity.
The point that offsets that mind is he could have done it a smaller amount at a time. Say a ton a trip, over a period of several years. Still awesomely impressive. And a phenomenal range. But (possibly) his single load limit could be a tiny fraction of Magnito’s.
Then there is all that comic whatnot about him being able to tamper with the entire Earth’s magnetic core (to interfere with telepathy). So they are both world-class powers, each (potentially) stronger, in their own way.
Err duly adjust the thread for referring to the mantle, not the core. And the distance reducing accordingly. But the geomancer’s feat still remains kg for kg the far more impressive one.
Gravity makes pressure, pressure makes heat. Even though there’s enough heat to turn the Earth’s core liquid, there’s enough pressure to keep it compacted into a solid. Although there’s less mass under your feet, producing less gravity pulling you down, there’s more pressure from the mass on top of you.
Sorta evens out in the end…as in, evens you out into a nice thin puddle.
At the risk of getting too picky, the young Earth was originally molten due to the heat of accretion from all the star stuff falling together into one lump. It has manged to stay partially molten for the last few billion years largely due to the energy from the decay of radioactive elements.
I guess that’s how this guy got his powers. He was bitten by a radioactive planet.
Planet geomancer, planet geomancer, does whatever a planet can.
Well, technically, its never said he moved all this gold at one time.
Well, he didn’t do it all at once. He’s been siphoning it for at least a decade.
Betting Terra and that X-Men guy, once they hear of this, will both be going: “Why didn’t I think of that!!!” :)
Avalanche! His name… it was Avalanche. Yeah, it’s been a while and I just remembered.
Wait-wait-wait. You’re telling me that you can mine gold in the US without a license? Huh.
Also, I’d like to see this much of gold dumped at the market. It would finally become just a high-grade conductor and lose its mythic status of “true measure of wealth”.
teckicly even if he is an american citizen he wasn’t in america when he mined it
I doubt that coal mines and oil drills are technichally outside of the US jurisdiction. The sovereignity goes all the way up (until you hit the stable orbit, then it’s everyone’s place by the Outer Space Treaty) and all the way down to the center of the Earth.
Hah, I think Emperor Tyrannosaur will have something to say about that! Laying claim to his caverns, which you have never even seen, let alone set foot in, is tantamount to a declaration of war! I imagine his dinosaur legions are readying their war engines, as we speak.
Well, then I guess I’d better prepare the Empire for subterranean defense.
Call up the reserves. And cancel the invasion of Omicron Persei 8.
SEND IN THE LAWYERS !
I agree about the world market. Yeah, dropping the gold prices will hurt few people and few governments, but why would it hurt world economy?
One follows the other. The sub-prime crisis originated in the US and the UK, but the world economy is a series of dominoes. Under the right conditions tipping one or two can take out the whole lot. And it is still dangerously balanced after that time.
Britain in particular is being far too lax in allowing bankers and the broader financial sector to slip back into bad habits (or more accurately not get out of them in the first place). But, as with before, if a few key countries markets collapse, then the inter-connected trade network goes down.
Long-term though, even if having to rebuild it from scratch, or resort to a barter system (using extreme case scenarios needless to say) countries could still export say grain surplus and import oil in exchange. But that is a lot more complicated, if the world-wide financial trade network has collapsed.
For example Britain would be badly hit. Most of its income derives from financial services. In a post-collapse barter economy they might not be able to trade those, for the resources it needs. And it is a huge net importer of food. As we know from WWII, it would starve without imports. But it only has limited resource production and is no longer a manufacturing country.
It would not be alone though. Many nations are on a tipping point, near starvation or open warfare. Just look at how IS sprang up so easily. There would be many ripples, and the world would be a much harsher place for everyone.
First of all dropping that amount of gold would not affect gold prices much, as incising the amount of gold in the world with 50% (or even 100%) would not affect the rarity of gold that much. On short term the gold market might crash, but in in the long run, gold would still be very valuable. To really devalue gold you would need 10-100 times the amount.
No major economies in the world are dependent on gold, so even if gold values dropped very low it would really only be an insignificant bump in the road for the world economy. It would be very bad for a few developing countries that relay on gold export, but the economy of such countries has very little bearing on the world economy.
The value is based on the rarity. Knowing that all the gold in the centre can be extracted by one guy, would kill its long-term investment value. Do bear in mind that anytime there is a financial crisis, or loss of confidence in the financial market, people, pension funds and nations turn to gold as one of the preferred alternatives.
Besides which you are totally wrong to calculate the impact on sales based on the total amount in existence. You base it on the total amount being traded per annum. Which he would exceed many many times over, all in one go. The price would crash (even if it may recover, over time, to reflect the point you made).
You may find a chunk of your own pension is dependant on it, either directly or indirectly. For example if your portfolio includes a couple of banks, they might have a proportion of their capital in gold. If they collapse, the entirety of your investment in them is lost, rather than just the value represented by their gold assets.
Plus supply and demand is not the only determinant of value. A lot of it is perception. De Beers does a lot of advertising to ensure we view a diamond as forever. So even though there are other far rarer gems, of comparable quality and attractiveness, many are worth far less. And they work very hard to restrict the annual sales to a small amount, to ensure the price remains high. They too have big vaults of diamonds that they avoid selling, to preserve the price.
And if confidence is lost, the value may never return. As Ratners found out when their chairman called their jewellery ‘crap’.
I’m uncomfortable with this argument. Imagine we find a really cheap way to increase productivity of electric generators. Really-really cheap, so we could just increase in a month electricity’s production tenfold while staying at the current expenses. Then its price would fall down, production of generators would fall down, companies could as well decrease the numbers of their employers and inventory, etc. Basically, sudden abundance of a commodity would lead to depressed economy — that’s something I find really hard to believe.
Gold is different to electricity generators, as it is used in national reserves and likewise features in the cash reserves banks are required to keep. Further it is treated like a currency in its own right by investors. If there are economic problems hitting the EU and the USA, people sell euros and dollars and buy gold.
Gold is considered a fairly safe stable investment, and as such many institutions, including pension funds can and do feature it in their portfolio of investments. All of which make it a special case, different to other commodities.
But, let us run with your scenario. Because there would still be an impact on the economy even despite those differences. I can even give a name to the new generators. Liquid thorium reactors. These would provide what amounts to free, unlimited energy. Every town, hospital or large vehicle (submarines for example) could have one.
So some super scientist has figured out how to mass-produce these, and has had his secret factory turning them out for the past decade. Producing enough to put one in every town, around the globe. This is a good thing, and the world would be a much better place for it, in the long term.
But now let us look at the nasty things that happen in the immediate aftermath of the market being unexpectedly changed like this.
Various African and Asian countries are heavily dependant on exporting electricity from their hydro-electric dams, to neighbouring countries. For some it is their only trade surplus. That is now gone. Those countries are in a dire state. But they are small and poor, so the world economy can cope. If that was the only problem, that is.
Now let us look at Russia. It is in financial trouble at the moment. Sanctions, for their actions in Ukraine, have been hurting them. Doubly so because of the price of oil slumping. Russia relies heavily on exporting oil and other fossil fuels. Now I happen to know what the major uses for those are, as a big part of Europe, including my bit, are major importers of that.
They go to power electrical power stations. Much of the rest being used in domestic heating. The last time Russia cut off the pipelines, due to a payment dispute with Ukraine (before the invasion of Crimea) thousands of people died, because their homes were deprived of heat, during winter. Including in this country (Bulgaria).
So I can guarantee that everyone, who can, will switch over from costly oil heating, to free electricity. Electricians will be very happily employed. However Russia will suddenly find that a massive part of their economy has been slashed in value.
Likewise all those oil producing countries, in the sensitive parts of the middle east. Many of whom are tied up in the fight against ISIS. Plus the coal and other fossil fuel exporting countries would have problems too.
Oil will still have uses mind. But electric cars are now becoming viable. And who will want to buy petrol, when you can power your car with free electricity? Especially factoring in the environmental cost of using petrol.
Ok, there will always be a demand for in in plastics. But the huge prices it used to command will be a thing of the past. Those presently rich countries would have a serious problem.
So even flooding the market with electricity generators could have major countries put at risk of economic collapse, if they are under strain for other reasons. And if one or more of those go, it can start that domino effect that pushes the rest of the world economy back into recession, depression or, worst case, collapse.
The core of your argument essentially is “Positive supply shock leads to recession and may even cause world-wide economical crisis”. The problem is, it’s against any economical text book. Positive supply shocks decrease price level, increase real GDP and reduce unemployment, not the other way.
Fair enough. :)
Intuitive arguments do not always match text book predictions. Mind you text book predictions do not always match real world outcomes.
Do recall though that I emphasised this was a prediction of the immediate short term impact, as opposed to the long-term outcome.
Limitless energy would vastly improve GDP in the long run. But a country which lost its sole significant source of international income (eg the poor countries exporting hydro-electric produced electricity, in the above example) cannot be said to have increased its GDP.
Plus if the country already had an electricity surplus, that would strongly imply that there was not a local demand for the electricity locally, in the first place. Any obvious uses for plentiful electricity will already be a feature of the economy.
It would take time and, equally importantly, money, to exploit any new innovations that entrepreneurs might come up with. Something that would be a problem in a country which has lost its sole significant source of income.
Economic text books do not care about the impact of transition. Money being more important to the subject than quality of life. Or even life itself, for that matter. The short-term downward blip (from the perspective of history) equates to a lot of misery during that period.
Albeit that the, subsequent, rise represents a significant improvement in quality of life (for those still alive to enjoy it, that is).
Except that economic books do care about impacts of transition and devote whole chapters to the short run since the 40-ies. And “Positive supply shocks decrease price level, increase real GDP and reduce unemployment” is a short-run prediction.
Heh, I was letting my cynicism, of capitalism, unduly flavour my reply, wasn’t I?
You still do not explain how that would happen in the prime example though? I was not using implausible straw men for any of them, for that matter. I picked three valid, present day economic situations, where tipping points could cause serious problems.*
But take a closer look at a textbook definition of positive supply shock.
Likewise their second example deals with the discovery of new resources.
So the very sources, which you are quoting, are expecting a steady phased introduction. First the markets hear about the invention, or discovery, and react to that. Then there is the delay for infrastructure has to be created, to exploit it (building the factories or mines). Finally production starts.
Which, oddly enough, no historical example has ever included ten years worth of production, at global scales, being dumped onto the market in one day!
I think you have failed to factor that into your argument.
* Tipping points are critical because external influence can occur, such as political instability,** or a panicked run on the banks. At which point the ‘all other things being equal’, demanded by text book examples, are no longer present. Damage is being done, in the real world.
** Note that the political dynamics of European to Russian relationships is presently heavily affected by the inter-dependencies created by energy supply. Remove that from the equation, and hawks on both sides would contemplate more aggressive solutions to political problems, such as in Ukraine.
Throw Russia into a severe balance of trade deficit, along with similar instability in the middle east (at least one of them is on the tipping point just coping with ISIS and just LOW oil prices, let alone them going any further). Then factor in the strain on the IMF, by having to bail out many energy exporting poor countries, simultaneously, and you have a world political crisis, as well as an economic one!
I should have mentioned gas, not just oil, when talking about Russia’s exports and pipelines (notably regarding what I said about home heating).
Extremely unlikely too. You’d need to try really hard to make gold worthless. Namely, gold has frgging good qualities. People would start to use it as a replacement for copper in cables and such. Him mining gold would probably start up a new gold-working industry somewhere. Sure, the gold-bubble would burst. Would it be worse than some other bubbles? I don’t know. In the end, he’d probably do humanity a favor by bringing all that gold to the market. Making resources easily available and all that.
You are talking long-term (and make good points) However my arguments were about the immediate impact. You can still have the market crash and have a commodity be useful afterwards. That can, and has, happened.
You get countries plunged into recession or even depression. People loose their jobs, suicide rates go up, vulnerable economies can have knock-on effects like widespread starvation or civil disturbance. And then, eventually, the situation stabilises, albeit with a weaker economy than before.
Meanwhile those who have stocks of the less valuable commodity will, of course, find ways to recoup their losses as best they can.
Okay, so he can tunnel into the earth for massive distances “safely” (either remote or with appropriate defenses). So why bother with gold? He could be making billions by wild catting for oil reserves –a few bars as collateral for a loan and ‘oh look’ I found oil at a ridiculously shallow depth. And again. Oh my, I stumbled onto deposits of rare gigantic crystals that won’t break the economy but do sell quite well. And how much would your government pay to have him do the next “Chunnel” project in a few weeks? Get a degree in geology and bleed off earthquake potential for a nice yearly stipend… Raise your own island next to Hawaii and auction off the new land to developers? Widen the Panama Canal for a few trillion?
Nobody said he didn’t do all of those things. One bothers with gold because its value is unquestioned. Gold = money, and you can easily trade it for whatever else you want. Here’s a guy whose heart’s desire is just a gold bar away, and he’s intelligent enough to swap a gold bar for it, since he has plenty of them.
But gold isn’t money. It’s an overvalued yellow rock.
If “Deep Space Nine” has taught me anything, it’s that gold is absolutely worthless unless it’s got some latinum in it.
. . . Oh, and also that a Trill’s spots go all the way down.
But just make sure you check on the right Dax body.
I’m willing – not to say, eager – to check either Ezri or Jadzia . . .
but all that would be work. now he has the gold, he dosn’t need to put in any effort at all, just sell a few bars year. any of those ideas, while more effective at wealth creation and profitablity, require him to be putting in the hours at the forefront of ligitimate and long term enterprise.
Some folks are quite happy having enough to pay their bills, without having to negotiate contract deals to make money they do not need.
This page was hard to edit because I sort of wanted to touch on all that stuff and had to control myself to keep it all to one page. During his siphoning process, he probably came across all that stuff. He never bothered with oil cause it’s not nearly as valuable. I mean, you could roll a drum of crude into a refinery and say “how much for this” or you could swap a bar of gold that you “found in a pirate ship” for bearer bonds. He probably does have a big pile of precious gems as well, but he’s obviously someone who can exercise self restraint. He lives quite well so there’s no need to guild the lily.
“Guild the lily”? Hell, he can guild the whole freaking continent.
Or even gild it.
Ooh, you grammar Nazi, I hope you feel guilty!
Probably not as guilty as you should feel for that pun….
Understood. The oil line of thought was “things that can slip under the radar” of letting anyone else know what you are up to. I’d imagine our geomancer friend now has “issues” going to Alaska or portions of South America/ Africa. Any mine’s production drop and he might get sued as the cause even if he was just vacationing. Discovering an island forming in the pacific and claiming it might still lift eyebrows if you do it … twice. Hell, if he has the range to mine into the core he might just be able to ‘call in’ meteors in such a way they don’t immolate on the want down. Basic meteor rocks go for tens of thousands per pound, and nobody blinks if you drop a few dozen of those on the market.
Just so long as he does not overdo it, like that dinosaur geomancer, 65 million years ago.
that dragon geomancer is currently confined in europa around jupiter. (why do so many mistake dragon fossils for dino?)
Good girl Arianna. Sitting carefully on the stage, to avoid flapping your clams.
At least she understands that if you’re going to put on a show up on the stage, you’d better first charge admission & sell tickets…
It helps that her dress goes past her knees even when sitting (I’m guessing it limits her motion quite a bit)
Gold would be useful (more useful) as an industrial metal if it weren’t
for the “it’s money” thing.
Plumbing, rustproofing, electrical uses, cookware, radiation shielding….
Gold would be useless for plumbing, actually. It’s way too soft. Even gold alloys retain a certain softness.
If this guy mined silver, though, he’d make a killing in the electronics industry. Replace copper wiring with silver.
The Manhattan Project needed tons of copper for the electromagnetic separation process.
There wasn’t enough available, so they borrowed silver from the mint.
Hey… Even more guards around it at the secret factory!
Ok, you just plate the pipes, there’s no reason to make them solid (you’re only looking for corrosion resistance). And as far as silver, gold is a FAR better conductor (though you’d still want the silver for the longer lines – for that, the gold IS far too soft).
Aluminum is a better conductor by weight, which is why it’s what actually gets used for big power lines.
Well, that and it’s cheaper. But it’s got about 48% the resistivity-density of copper (silver is actually worse, at 110%), so it’s still better even if we could make it out of any metal. The best resistivity-density is sodium, at 31% of copper, but it (and most of the others that beat aluminum) is unsuitable for other reasons.
Yeah, you would need good insulation. Don’t want sodium to get wet…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODf_sPexS2Q
No joke. When I was in high school, one of the guys thought it would be fun to steal a lump of sodium from the chemistry lab. Problem is, this was early in the school year (early September), so it was hot enough for him to start sweating.
He was in the cafeteria, so when it started burning, he poured a can of soda over it… needless to say, he spent a long time in hospital recovering from a 4th-degree burn (all the way to the bone) in his left hip. I don’t know if he ever did recover full use of the leg, but one of my friends reliably informs me that he did at least recover enough to walk on it (but never returned to sports).
Goodness. Smarts didn’t seem to be his strong point, surely? My old lab treated sodium with reverence, and newer students treated it with fear.
Maybe you are a year or more younger than MSpears, and that incident got a fair bit of publicity, in teaching circles or otherwise?
Else sometimes student senselessness subsumes sound sensibilities.
The person in question wasn’t stupid; he was simply ignorant. He had never taken a chemistry class in his life, and therefore had never seen the warnings about sodium. He stole it just for bragging rights.
It’s really hard to explain how the science classrooms were arranged, but essentially there were eight classrooms arranged around a storage area where they kept all their samples. One of the doors into the storage area was accidentally left unlocked, and that’s how he got his hands on the sodium. He didn’t want to go too far into the storage area (he was afraid a teacher might show up, or that he might get locked in if the door closed behind him), and the sodium was the closest thing he could grab.
The end result is that the only “bragging rights” he got was that now he was able to brag about the size of the hole burned in his thigh muscle. And hopefully he was grateful that he didn’t grab something even more reactive. (Then again, anything more reactive probably would’ve been kept soaked in oil to prevent a reaction with humidity in the air.)
Dungeons and dragons differentiates mental attributes, to reflect your point, in separating intelligence from wisdom. So it is correct to say that he was not stupid, if he was a clever student. But, conversely, he was stupid for taking something that he did not know the properties of.
Harsh judgement, given the price he paid, but true nonetheless.
Ah, fair enough so. I’m so used to everyone being familiar with the dangers of sodium that I assumed everyone in a lab setting would be. My apologies for my hubris (call me Concretia).
If you think sodium is dangerous…
There’s always dioxygen difluoride (O2F2), aka FOOF, aka “Satan’s kimchi” (433 kcal per mole). It’s only stable at low temperatures… by which I mean -180C (-300F).
Alternately, there’s hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane (henceforth called CL-20). It actually becomes less explosive if you mix it with TNT, as a one-to-one cocrystal. Of course, when you heat the crystals, the compounds separate, leaving you with crystals of pure CL-20 floating in a bath of liquid TNT. Unless you want to become acutely aware of the fleeting nature of life, don’t play with this stuff. It tends to explode if you look at it funny.
And absolutely, positively, stay away from Chlorine Trifluoride (ClF3). The important thing to know is that it is hypergolic (self-igniting) and is a stronger oxidizing agent than oxygen. This means that it will burn almost everything… cloth, wood, test engineers, leather gloves, asbestos tile, concrete, wet sand, and a lot of things that you thought were already burned to hell and gone. One ton of this stuff got spilled in a warehouse back in the 1950s. It burned through 30 centimeters of concrete and another meter of sand and gravel beneath. Oh, and if you stuck around for the fireworks, the door prize is clouds of hot hydrofluoric acid…
Aren’t Sodium and it’s periodic relatives stored in oil though? That’s how they keep it dry.
So how did your friend get it out off the oil and put it in his pocket (I asume that’s what he did).
Even for bragging rights, and not knowing what it is, I wouldn’t want to put some oily lump of rock in my pocket
That was mentioned above. Apparently it is not as reactive as the others, so does not have to be kept that way, if it is stored somewhere that it is safe from condensation or other moisture.
Yorp is correct. While you are correct in saying that it is best to store it in a glass container full of mineral oil, in this case it was not. It was being kept in a vacuum, in an airtight container (which he broke to get it out), in a climate-controlled storage area.
BTW, he most definitely was not my friend. ;) He was one of those sports jocks that tormented me throughout my entire public schooling, because I was (and still am) a computer geek.
Ahh, cosmic justice at work.
*wags tail*
Let us just hope that the cosmos does not develop a dark sense of humour, and it turns out that he developed sodium super powers!
*dashes behind sofa, and tail stops wagging*
Sodium man! He combusts as soon as he gets wet!
Actually, of the metallic elements, silver is the best conductor of both heat and electricity. Gold is great, but silver is that little bit better.
What would they do even if he was using it a lot?
“You’re not breaking any laws or using your powers for villainy but we’re taking all your stuff…”
“…and since you might just get more…”
*Maxima crushes the rich guys skull.*
he would be considered a risk to homeland security it may not be an archon mission but they would do something like black ops
How would he be a risk to homeland security? Who says he is even living in USA? o_O
Doesn’t matter where he lives. It is what he threatens which determines national interests.
If word got out that he intended to dump all that gold on the market, his life would not be worth a spitwad. He would be targeted by assassins from practically every industrial nation on the planet!
I certainly would not speak out in his defence. He would be endangering my family’s lives, in doing that. Arc-Dark would be acting in my best interests, if they got to him first.
It turns out after 1 trillion, income tax is 100%.
Yoink!
That’d be pritty cool though. Everything over 1 trillion is taken.
Still, easy to deal with if you can produce money out of thin air. Just make sure you stay 1 dollar below 1 trillion
Was that a Jedi tax-man ‘yoink’?
Your mathematics looks wrong.
2748 Olympic sized swimming pools of anything wont cover the earth to half a metre deep.
Yes, that’s totally off. It would be spread out so thin, my calculator cannot even tell me how thin. A 52 mile sphere would cover earth’s surface half a metre. But a lot more than 2748 olympic pools fit in such a sphere. Dave lost many many zeroes somewhere.
Yep. I make it a layer just 13nm thick (approx. 90 atoms worth).
To get a 0.5m layer would need 103 billion swimming pools full…
It’s possible (mind you, this is a guess — I haven’t done the math) that DaveB is only referring to the literal “Earth’s Surface”, ie actual land — which is only ~30% of the surface of the planet, by area.
Reducing the surface to 30% does not help at all when the numbers are wrong with a factor in the range of 100,000…
13 nm x 3.333 = 43 nm. So still teeny, if the math for the former bears out. Electronbud is a pro though, so I accept his result as reliable.
DaveB would just need to pick an appropriately sized island to keep the depth suitably impressive.
The Isle of White is a favourite one, for UK journalists. Did you know that if every person on Earth stood next to each other, they would fit on it?
And if they all jumped up simultaneously…
… the dinosaurs, inside the Earth, would complain about noisy neighbours, upstairs.
The Isle of Wight would indeed be a lot closer – it would be covered by a layer 18mm thick.
However, the dinosaurs wouldn’t mind the noise. They actually live under Wales.
You used 2 meters deep swimming pools to get that number, right?
Yes, I used the Wiki figure of 2,500m^3 per pool.
Gah, it’s not surprising I messed something up. It did sound a bit small to me but math skills are obviously not up to the task.
Isn’t Math currently distracted by his last orders issued by Maxi? o_O
They are five star skills. But boobies are very dis..trac..
Math. The archenemy of webcomic artists. Promise us somebody will look over the numbers of the kickstarter for the book.
Obviously you don’t comprehend the size of Olympic sized pools in Dabbler’s home. Consider that if everyone who attended the Earth Olympics was _in_ the pool for the duration of each event (and quite possibly participating to some extent). And then realize the number of such pools that require there own dimension just to store the cleaning equipment…
True, as I have posted elsewhere it actually take almost 83 billion Olympic swimming pools to hold all that gold
I re-crunched Dave’s numbers from the start, and he’s actually almost dead on with the .5 meter layer. He made a huge mistake deriving the pools number.
My work:
Starting from the 52.25 mile sphere of gold:
D=52.25 mi= 84088.224m. Say 84,000m
R=42,000m
25m cube of human owned gold is 25^3=15,625m^3
2.33*10^14/(1.5625*10^4)= 1.49*10^10
So, there is roughly 15,000,000,000 times more gold in the earth than has been mined.
I’ll be the first to admit that I make math mistakes, but Dabbler (and ARCHON) are off by about 7 orders of magnitude
Now then, surface area. The Google result for the surface area of the earth is 510 trillion m^2. Taking the 2.33*10^14 volume I worked out earlier:
(2.33*10^14/5.1 m^3)/5.1*10^14 m^2=.456m
Somehow I failed to copy a step over.
After I found the radius of the total gold sphere, this should have been added:
V=(4/3)pi*42,000^3= 2.33*10^14 m^3
That’s the total theoretical volume of all the gold in planet earth.
Written out longform, 233,000,000,000,000 m^3 or 233 trillion cubic meters of gold.
So how many times one Olypmic sized swimming pool (also said to be 25 m^3) is that? Roughly ten trillion times?
And I’m a little confused by one of your steps, you wrote “25m cube of human owned gold is 25^3=15,625m^3” How does 25m^3=15,625m^3?
I hate writing math out like this, I tend to make so many mistakes, and it’s also harder to follow. I did my calculations in Excel and in small steps, so I’m pretty sure the values are right. I welcome anyone who can find a mistake and correct it.
According to Wikipedia, an Olympic pool is 2,500 m^3. This corresponds to a pool 50m long, 2m deep, and 25 m wide. 50m*2m*25m=2,500m^3
Obviously, 25 m^3 =/= 15,625m^3, I wrote 25m^3, what I meant was (25m)^3 or the volume of a cube who’s sides are each 25 meters, but I knew what I meant, so I didn’t add the parenthesis. So (25m)^3= 25m*25m*25m=15,625 m^3. Anyway if I trust Wikipedia, slightly more than 6 Olympic pools would fit into a cube 25m square.
If we use a pool who’s volume is 2,500m^3, and use the volume I got from your 52.25 mile gold sphere, of 2.33*10^14 or 233,000,000,000,000 (233 trillion)m^3
2.33*10^14 / (2.5*10^3)=9.31*10^10 or 93,100,000,000 (93.1 billion) pools.
Dabbler said 2478 pools worth of gold, so 9.31*10^10 / (2.478^10^3) = 3.39*10^7.
Dabbler’s number of pools is nearly 340,000,000 times smaller than it should be, if we use that reference.
If instead we use a volume of (25m)^3=15,625m^3 for some sort of super pool, then the math should be as follows:
2.33*10^14 / (1.5625*10^4) = 1.49*10^10 super pools. Again, Dabbler thinks there are 2748 of these pools. 1.49*10^10 / (2.748*10^4)=5.42*10^6. In this case, the actual volume (or the super-pool count, same thing ultimately) is 5,420,000 times larger than the amount quoted by Dabbler.
A “25 meter cube” is a cube 25 meters on each side. To get its volume, you multiply length times width times height, which is 25 * 25 * 25, or 25^3 cubic meters.
It appears to me that Dr. Science forgot the 4/3 factor in the sphere volume formula in his calculations. There are other mistakes too, though.
An olympic swimming pool is 2500 cubic meters volume – 50 m long, 25 m wide, 2 m deep. A 25 meter cube would fill 6 of those with a bit to spare.
I’m only finding a small number of estimates for gold in the Earth’s core, and what I’ve found is within an order of magnitude of your 52.25 mile sphere, so let’s use that. A 52.25 mile diameter sphere has a volume according to Wolfram Alpha of 3.158 * 10^14 m^3. A 25 foot cube has a volume of 15625 m^3. 3.158 * 10^14 / 15625 = 20,211,200,000. So there’s approximately 20 billion times as much gold in the core as has been mined on the surface, and that’s enough to fill 125 billion olympic swimming pools.
I was about to indignantly reply that I would not make such a simple mistake as forgetting the 4/3 multiplier because I checked everything carefully.
But I have made such mistakes in the past, so checked my math looking for that mistake and then found that yes, I did miss that step. Thank you for finding it. The beauty of excel is that this is a simple mistake to correct.
Once I fix that, I get a volume in excellent agreement with yours, and all the other numbers match closely too.
Besides rounding the number early in the calculations, what other mistakes are you seeing?
To compare, with the correct sphere formula, I get 19.9 billion times more in reserve than mined, and 124 billion 25m cubes.
Ok, I’ll go with this value when I edit it. Thanks!
Actually wait, we’re saying the amount already mined is one olympic sized swimming pool (1 OSP=25m^3), if the amount yet to be mined is 20 billion times the amount already mined, which is one OSP, shouldn’t that volume fill 20 billion OSPs and not 124 billion?
I wish I was better at Math. This stuff seems pretty basic.
Your mistake here is that “1 OSP=25m^3” is not actually correct. (25m)^3 is 15625 m^3, while 1 OSP is actually just 2500 m^3.
The amount of gold already mined, going by the estimate you’re using, would fill six and a quarter OSPs. Thus, 20 billion times the amount already mined would fill 6.25 * 20 billion = 125 billion OSPs.
One of the points I think both Douglas and I were making was that one OSP =/= (25m)^3 The cube is 15,626 m^3, and an OSP is 2,500 m^3. The cube has over 6 times the volume of the pool.
The numbers we arrived at were consistent (not quite identical), although I mixed up the labeling in my reply to him. Frankly, I trust his numbers more than mine, since he seems to have done a better job the first time he tried.
On the 2nd page of comments, someone mentioned having heard a bunch of estimates of total gold mined. They suggested that the 25m cube as a good middle ground, and that is consistent with what I’ve read. So that is our reference for all the gold mined in history, NOT one OSP’s worth. If you want to keep Ariana’s swimming pool reference, then she should say something like “It’s estimated the volume of all the gold ever mined would fill at least 6 Olympic swimming pools.”
With this as a reference, Dabbler should estimate that the un-mined portion of gold in Earth’s mantle/crust would be in the range of 20 billion times what has been mined.
If you want Dabbler to describe the un-mined gold in terms of OSPs, then she should say something like “There are about 125 billion Olympic swimming pools of un-mined Gold.” If you really just want to put a huge number in there, then use the cubic meter volume Douglas arrived at, maybe with a bit of rounding. Any of the following would work:
300 Trillion cubic meters
320 Trillion cubic meters
316 Trillion cubic meters
Personally, I feel like her saying that the untapped reserves are 20 billion times greater than what’s been mined is best. While the 125 billion OSPs or Trillions of cubic meters is a bigger sounding number, it’s hard to visualize; the clarity of “There is 20 billion times what we have already mined still in the earth” seems better to me. 20 Billion should be plenty of wow factor.
Douglas may have other useful suggestions.
I gotcha. I thought 25 cubic meters was the same volume as an OSP, but that’s clearly not the same thing. I’ve heard both as estimates for the volume dug up so far, so I’ll just change Dabbler’s number to 20 billion.
I see you made the change.
As shown by making a simple mistake in the volume of a sphere, I am not perfect with math either.
But, if you ever need someone to do a sanity check on your numbers, I’d be willing to lend a hand.
I see you’ve changed Dabbler’s comment, but it’s still not accurate without also changing Zephan’s line. He needs to say 6 OSPs, not 1.
I was thinking primarily of the volume of an olympic swimming pool when I made that “other mistakes” comment, which is a mistake but not really your mistake.
Oops, I gave Wolfram Alpha a diameter of 52.5 miles instead of 52.25 miles. Correcting for that, I get reserve = 19,923,200,000 times mined, which would fill 124.52 billion OSPs.
…My head hurts…
Here, this should cure it.
*offers a swimming pool of pain killers*
Don’t worry it is enchanted, it only allows a medically safe amount to be consumed at once.
Iridium!
Osmium!!
Neo… Um… The super magnet stuff.
Not to mention the reverse… Burying radioactive waste in geologically
stable artificial caverns.
(That might entail actual ‘work’.)
neodymium
if he can siphon up all that gold from all over the place, then he can replace it with the spent fuel. in fact he doesn’t even need to worry about spreading it out, just make sure that the further down it goes the better, as the mantle material doesn’t come back up to the surface and the rest of the geological processes will take care of it.
IIRC there was once plans to dump Reactor waste into the Mariana Trench and let then tectonic movement do the rest.
There is a proposal for high-level waste along these lines: enclose it in a thick tungsten container, drop it in a deeeeeeep hole, and it will melt the surrounding rock and sink slowly down through the crust and into the mantle, the hole re-sealing itself as it goes.
In David Brin’s Uplift setting (plus the GURPs adaptations of the same), responsible galactic races always dispose of their waste that way. Even their cities are built such that, once their tenancy on the planet is over, and they move on, all traces of them living there will be subsumed, in due course.
Galactic civilisation allowing a suitably long fallow period, between each race’s permitted tenancy on any planet allocated to them (other than their home planet, of course, which remains theirs indefinitely).
Why bury waste in caverns? Just dump them in a subduction zone and let the plates itself take care off it.
Can’t hurt anyone or anything down in the mantle
It gets warmer the deeper into the Earth you go. A cavern about ten miles down would be about 400 Celsius/750 Fahrenheit.
Depends on how close they actually get to the molten stuff really
How does Dabby know that?
because Dabby is a super genius who bugged zephans internet searches
Cybernetic eye with internet browser.
And not streaming porn, for once.
well on one or two of the dozen feeds
Never mind the gold, I want the formula for whatever those shelves are made of! Take a good look at how much weight they’re supporting…
Indeed. I once went to a World’s Fair where one could pick up a gold bar (with a glove through a hole in a locked box, for some strange reason) and it was pretty heavy, a fact that Hollywood keeps forgetting or never knew.
I imagine that’s to keep imaginative tricksters from using hidden devices on their hands to rub, scrape, or gouge out some gold as they touched it.
I spent a summer as a pirate on a historical replica ship. Naturally, we had ‘gold bars’ which were lead ingots spray-painted gold. The tour guide told people that real gold is twice as dense as lead, so if you wanted to know what carrying one was like, you had to pick up two at once. I never checked the math.
Duh, silly guide. All they had to do was squeeze two lead bars together, until they were the same volume as one gold bar!
;-)
Our website was being mean to me and not letting me embed my chosen picture in the above.
https://lowres.jantoo.com/science-fishing_bait-fishermen-chicken-chicken_legs-bait-18000351_low.jpg
12.4 kg or ~27 lbs for a standard sized bar. Roughly $500K, which is why it was in a box.
Yep, I did some guesstimations as well. Looks like there is somewhere between 500 and 1000 tons of gold on each shelf segment.
You may want to check out scantrontb‘s estimates, in this thread, on page 2. Which are considerably lower.
Given how similar the vault is to those depected in the British gold reserves reference, which Dave linked in his blog above, I think scantrontb‘s seem credible.
The whole “smarter application of powers” immediately made me think of this.
Comic book supers really have no imagination.
The whole statistics on how much humanity has mined over the course of it’s existence vs all the gold in the world is also pretty telling.
The universe is GRAND and AMAZING and filled with GIANT NUMBERS of considerable ORDERS ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE, and it would be arrogant to think we have done more than scratch the surface of it all.
But at the end of the day, everybody loves gold.
+1
:-D
+1
I have only two questions.
1) How does he prevent the hightened gravity of that area from crushing everyone and thing not metal into pulp [since the deeper you go the greater the pressure exerted on a thing]?
and
2) How does he get breathable atmosphere down there?
I mean I can get him not getting turned into paste, and those easily breakable metal frames can be geomantically [sp?] enhanced to keep from buckling under the pressure. But what about the two he brought over to see his gold? And how were they [and himself] able to breathe that far down?
the shape of the cave is what counters the pressure also note the pressure is not the same as gravity there whould be less gravity there in fact though i doubt you would feel the difference
How’d you get shape = cancellation? That’s not scientifically accurate at all.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/hot-air-balloon5.htm
[talks about air pressure, and the affect of gravity on air particles].
And actually there’d be more gravity. Since the close you get to the core the stronger it gets [where as you get less the further you get from the earth’s surface.], well between the inner mantle and outer core. It only decreases at the core itself [where the gravity is exterted at all directions at once.].
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/18446/how-does-gravity-work-underground
While a rooms shape has some effect on things. It’s more dependent on internal atmosphere, yet we see nothing that’d give that equalibrium [or talk about how it prevents the Bends from going and leaving there without a decompression chamber].
I0wten is basically right. The tremendous pressure of 10 miles of rock is the pressure he needs to worry most about. If he designed the vault right (he didn’t, there are flat surfaces and right angles everywhere) then it could hold back that pressure. It would still need reinforcement, under that much load, even most rock would turn into a sort of very slow-motion putty, assuming it didn’t just collapse catastrophically. I guess he’s just keeping it stable with active geomancy, if he built it, he can maintain it.
There would be an increase in atmospheric pressure as well, but it would be much lower, just the extra weight of 10 miles of atmosphere (assuming it’s in contact with the surface). It wouldn’t be trivial, but it wouldn’t be too harmful either, the human body can survive astonishingly high ambient pressures. I would actually expect oxygen toxicity would be a greater risk than the bends, since it can be harder to notice.
My question is how is he cooling his vault; at that depth the rock should be well over the boiling temp of water.
Not quite related, I had assumed he wasn’t as smart as everyone was giving him credit for; gold is valuable, but world production is more limited that some materials. Also, demand is largely based on the desirability of gold, not its actual usefulness. He could, for example, harvest an arbitrarily large amount of iron, and the market would just absorb it. Rare materials used for industry, like Tellurium, Neodymium, Platinum, etc. might be worth more, and again industry will just snap them up.
But I looked up world production of gold, and it turns out about 800 tonnes (1,000 kg) are mined each QUARTER, so selling off one tonne of gold each quarter (current market price: about $35,000,000) should not affect world supply at all.
Thanks … and yeah active geomancy can attend to why the place is mostly still in shape [since it’s mostly stone]. And I wondered that too, but my first thought was why they weren’t dying from compression / decompression, and how that place existed without killing the two non-supers.
As for the heat … maybe he’s geomantically [sp?] siphoning heat into the earth around it? But it doesn’t look like he has a way to give it breathable atmosphere [then again not a problem for him personally but the two normals were giving me pause. Not even a re-breather amongst them]. But yeah, if I had his power I would simply find out how much diamonds get mined each year. Then create that much flawless diamonds each quarter [20 carats and higher.]
Given we don’t know how powerful he is, the most logical answer is that because of how his power works, that room is literaly an elivator
Holy crap, this guy is potentially the most dangerous person you’ve shown us yet. I’m glad he’s apparently just interested in living the good life, but GOOD GOD! If he can dive all the way to the mantle or below, SORT OUT (to 99.99 purity) and properly package that much of a specific element, and then store it in a cave he apparently KEEPS FROM CLOSING FOREVER when it should just squish down to nothing instantly? This guy could destroy human civilization with minimal effort. He makes Vehemence look like a cute harmless puppy.
A cavern 10km below earth surface is perfectly possible to keep from collapsing without the use of any power.
Most oil reserves of the world are in that depth.
For example, the Kola bore has a depth of over 12km.
He says miles, so make it about 16 km.
It’s impressive, sure, but may be the ONLY thing his powers can do when running flat-out. So maybe he can’t fly, catch bullets in his teeth, etc..
Also unclear is HOW he did what he did. It might have required extremely rare or unusual circumstances to carry off. Just as, for some forms of magic, one might need to use specific artifacts, rare heavenly conjuctions, highly complex rituals, and so on.
“…he apparently KEEPS FROM CLOSING FOREVER…”
zeph said there is no tunnel leading there sooo…
unless you mean the room down below…
well, the walls are already dense and settled…
It might be easier for him simply to remake the cavern each time he travels there. I don’t think we know enough of his power to make such predictions.
He could have spent years, slowly changing the magma currents to pull this gold.
Where Vehemence is sitting now, he is as cute & harmless as a puppy.
;)
Ok, I’m calling it. The geomancer is Deus, right?
That’s the same place my mind went.
Whether or not he turns out to be some kind of super villain, at the moment he is a trusted supplier of gear and weapons to Archon. Everyone is on good terms at the moment. Now notice who went to check out the gold vault – Max, Zeph, and Arianna. I can’t believe they would have sent their lawyer if they thought there was the remotest chance of trouble breaking out.
He strike to me the kind of villain that operates mainly behind the shadows.
He’s already hiding in plain sight. So far, we’ve seen no hint that Archon has any reservations about him.
So far, I haven’t seen any real signs that Deus is even a villain. He spies, and schemes, and likes to cackle evilly, but he hasn’t done anything worse than creep on Maxima a bit, so far.
I’ve noted that I suspect Deus is just some goofball that wants to play at being a villain, so everyone is humoring him. That he’s actually rather harmless, if dramatic, and thus, not worth getting upset about and by indulging in his fantasies, he helps them out. Thus why Daphne is there playing the double agent since she’s the kind of gal that would enjoy the game the most.
It has played that way so far. Cleverly so, as it could go either way. Keeping question marks hanging over both Harem and him.
I admit, if you gave me a lightning crash room like Deus has, even if it has a stalling drawback, I would be standing there making everything sound like an evil plan just so I could stand there cackling evilly with lightning in the background.
Having blown up the comic to 150%, I have to admit that the man in the vault with Max and the others does not quite look like Deus. We can only see him from the back of course, but I don’t think it’s him.
Hey! Maybe it’s Donald “The Art Of The Deal” Trump? Or Ross Perot Junior, as I’ve recently taken to calling him. It’s certainly a more plausible explanation for how the egotistical blow-hard made his money than anything else I can think of.
My humble apologies if anyone out there is a Trump fan. To put it simply – I’m not.
What would you do with if you had all that gold?
Personally, I would buy my own country and easily turn it into a superpower.
i whould piss off ever single right wing nut by proving just how bad a system pure capitalism is
You pump enough gold into the world economy to demonstrate capitalism is a bad idea and you’ll break it beyond recovery for decades (until the world decides on a new rare metal to base everyone’s economies on, and enough of it is acquired to actually do so). That is the entire point of this page…
And nowhere on Earth has a pure capitalism economy anyway…
Yeah, the world moved from gold based economy about 70 years ago, so I don’t see how gold price would “crush world economy.”
How would you do that? Even if you destroyed the value of gold entirely (which you’d probably fail to do, given its industrial uses), it would only impact some people’s savings (those who invested in gold specifically). It wouldn’t actually crash any economies, and would make electronics even cheaper, thus making them more readily available to the world at large and improving the lives of many millions of people.
Or would you engage in violence and extortion, thus dodging “pure capitalism” and moving into “robbery and warfare?”
The world’s banking system only holds up so long as there is faith in it. Banks can be ruined by a run started by nothing more than a rumour. Let alone something as dramatic as yanking out one of the financial pillars of ‘safe’ investment. Which is what cold is consdiered. So a lot of very conservative investment, in many firms, pension funds and governments will feature it.
Including more than a few banks. Further when one falls, another linked to it can go, dragging down the whole institution. And we got within a hairs breadth of it running out of control in the last crisis.
Britain is the biggest banking nation in the world. To prop up their banks, in that crisis, Britain had to spend more money than was raised to finance every war since Henry V pioneered the concept of doing that.
To put it another way, add up Britain’s debt from WWI, WWII, the Boar War, the Crimea War, The Civil war in the Americas (a.k.a. the American War for Independence), the Napoleonic war and so on. Adjust them all for inflation. Then spend that all in one day.
From then onwards each household in Britain had to pay extra taxes every month to help repay just the interest on that.
They cannot do that a second time.
‘cold’ = ‘gold’
‘consdiered’ = ‘considered’
‘Henry V’ = ‘Henry VIII’
I shall blame that on my Jack Russell deciding to tread on my keyboard, and prematurely submitting the comment, when she wanted to get off my lap. It is her turn.
You’re a dog with a pet dog?
That sounds….awkward.
She is a person, not a pet! Just a four-legged one. Who does not have an opposable thumb, to open tins.
…Yeah, capitalism sucks- but somehow it’s the socialist countries that end up having lines for food and toilet paper shortages. Odd how that works out.
yh and america was right there with everything that was needed 10 minutes after new orleans was flooded.
most socialist countries with food problems are poor countries were limited resources are a factor richer countries that embrace a more socialist way like a lot of europe dont have that problem
It was still all right there, just under twenty feet of water. As were the roads to bring in replacements. If you feel the need to spout off, then stick to the real peeves like “why are there kids without meals in their stomach tonight? –in America” or “why are we arguing about giving people who want to live here and pay taxes becoming citizens ?” (Duh, most of them are already doing one of the two so what is the harm?).
A wall across the border? REALLY? Where is Reagan when we need him anyway?
Probably a topic we are best off steering clear of at the moment, as immigration can get touchy. Given how heavily it features in the news nowadays (world-wide). The genre does have enough tropes, which act as analogies for this, that we doubtless will have pages will justifiably provoke such debate though. In due course.
But the feeding the poor side sure is fair game, given a pool full of gold! Not very tasty mind.
I’ll bet there’s a homeless shelter within a reasonable distance of you. Please post your real name and address, on their bulletin board, and add a “Free Food And Beds!” notation at the bottom. Leave your doors unlocked,. because you have no right to control your own space when someone else is needy.
Put your money where your mouth is, buddy.
Capitalism itself doesn’t suck. Capitalism is a spectrum running from complete laissez-faire to Nordic style social democracy*, so the statement that it sucks, or was Wanderer put it, “is a bad idea” can only be evaluated by knowing what Wanderer actually considers capitalism. And for that matter, what he thinks capitalism should be replaced with.
*Social democracy is often lumped in with socialism, but it could also be called “regulated capitalism with a strong welfare state.” Such is the nature of a hybrid system.
Given he said “pure capitalism”, that’s an indication right there–something even more extreme than American-school capitalism–maybe closer to the Gilded Age laissez-faire approach than anything else. I’m not sure if any major powers come even close to that any more. (Note, I’d like a more socialist tilt in the American economy, myself, but ‘pure’ systems rarely exist for long, if at all, anywhere.)
Any political system that’s “pure” is a bad thing. Every political system has it’s faults. I tell you this much however, growing up in the 80s and seeing how rough Russia had it, I’d rather be in a capitalistic country. A little self-interest is kind of needed to keep things going smoothly.
personaly i think you need a mix some things should be socialist like water trains and roads others should be pure capitalist such as maybe the stock market and some things should be mixed like farming with a government back up if there is a bad year
Utilities, and the basics for sustaining the population, should be readily available (at a price everyone can afford), luxuries and consumables should be capitalist
As long as everyone has a comfortable place to live, then you can gauge them for everything else
I think a mix between helping others, and helping oneself is best. For instance, nothing motivates people like a personal challenge. It is there where people are rather self-interested. So you use that to give people drive to keep improving and bettering their situation. In that way, if we turn capitalism into more than just money, that’s where capitalism thrives where socialism fails. People will not strive to take the risky, important jobs if they get nothing out of it and so on.
But at the same time, compassion for those that need it most is a mark of a great civilization. Which is where Socialism succeeds where capitalism fails. Helping others is almost universally considered a good thing. This goes into the question of what is helping others, to what extent, what is the end goal here, and general philosophy. Objectivists think that helping others is robbing yourself while Communism states that everyone should forgo their needs to help the community. So what is helping others is a complicated question rife with a minefield.
However, I think that compassion isn’t as important to a healthy nation, and actually can cripple the nation. If you give everything to others to the point where you can’t eat, you won’t survive long. So I would say about 80:20 Capitalism to Socialism is the best ratio.
Personally I view each individual as the core. With society evolving through the interactions between individuals. But all as an integral part of the greater biosphere. The economy just being a part of the social evolution.
Politics just being the decision making part of society. However where we choose to focus its gaze is critical. And I think you are looking too much at the economy. The focus should be at the centre. The people. Whilst still realising that all the greater parts are vital to optimise people’s lives.
The economy is a tool. We must look after our tools. We must choose the right ones for the right tasks. But at the end of the day, we should put them away safely and hug our families.
The whole basis of government is biassed to optimising the economy. Even in the socialist countries. The biggest differences being in how to split up the rewards of the economy. We should stop looking at objects as being the important things.
Look at the person. See how best she fits into society. Look at the society, see how the relationships between the groups best interact. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that mountains and rivers are the dividers. It is the cultural, religious and even ethnic links.
The geographical boundaries simply historically influenced those, but other than imaginary lines we draw on the world, they do not determine our relationships. Organise the social groups such that those with shared values and world views can govern themselves. Whilst allowing those who wish to prioritise other values to find their own ways to do that.
Essential to the carry out the principle in the above post is divorcing the governance of the land to that of the peoples. The people remain the core though, remember. So the land will be governed on behalf of the people. But the people are governed separately.
Let us say that “country” refers to the governance of the land. But “nation” refers to the populace. Currently we see them as being synonymous, but I propose that the nation (or tribe or clan etc) could overlap various countries. And, conversely, that there could be several nations present in one country.
Essentially much of Africa operates this way anyhow. Loyalties lie with tribes first, then the country second. But because European-drawn country boundaries force homogeneous social policies to be applied to all tribes, there is conflict when different values are favoured by different tribes.
Clearly agreements would have to be made as to how the governance and financial roles are split between the country and its nations. Loosely though the infrastructure and environment would fall under the country to maintain (on behalf of the nations). Whereas all social policies (and taxes) would be governed by the nations.
Obviously on issues where social laws impact on the country, or vice versa, then decision sharing mechanisms need to be set up. Notably the country would not have any population. It is purely an institution of governance, composed citizens from, and acting on behalf of, the various nations. As opposed to being a national group in its own right.
Here is how the above could be implemented, in practice.
It would be logical for there to be one army, under the country’s control. But manned with personnel who’s demographics must be identical to that of the component nations (counting residents of the country only). Thus ignoring a nation’s diaspora.
Policing could similarly be shared, or split, depending on the political needs of the nations and country. Certainly separate jurisdictions would apply, when implementing policies with the disparate laws allowable for each nation.
So one country might have three nations populating it. Say one which desired heavy taxes and government controls. Another with few taxes and practically no social safety nets. A third that runs strictly as a theocracy. Each having to contribute a base amount of finance towards infrastructure, environmental management and defence, proportionate to their population size.
But, in return, getting their share of the rewards from taxes on the harvesting of natural resources, as levied by the country. If there is a surplus after covering costs. Firms would register as legal entities associated with one of the nations or the country, depending on their role.
A mining company would have to be registered with the country, not a nation for example. Whereas a financial services company would require national registration. Tourism exists as a service for people, so would need registering with a nation. With taxation revenues being split between that nation and the country, dependant on the specific activities the company runs.
Children with dual nationality (one parent from each of two nations), would follow exactly the same kinds of rules as we already have established for that in the world already.
I is bad. Three big posts rather than one humongous one. But I wants to change the world!
*cries*
Sorry if you ends up living in interesting times, because of me.
I’m not worried about it. I found it interesting actually. I rather like politics, but rarely see anyone here that does more than a simple “A is bad! B is good!” view of things. I admit to looking at it from an economic bent partly because I am worried about our economy right now.
If you want an example of this system, you kind of have the USA. Our government is rather muggy because there’s 50 countries, 51 if you count Puerto Rico each pulling at the government for its needs. You have countries that want less government oversight, some that want less. A theocracy, and one small country Oklahoma that seems to be halfway insane. And while it isn’t a perfect example, by all means, it’s far from a perfect example, there’s no doubt that they are almost like completely disparate countries.
I would have used the EU, but as I’m not in there, I don’t have a place to mention the EU.
The only problem with putting people as the focus in government is when it gets big enough, the leaders always lose sight of the people that need help the most. Then the only people they can look at to help is people much like themselves. And that is never a good idea.
Is the gold market really that important, anymore? Almost no currency in the world is backed by gold, and even where it is, rarely is an appreciably large portion of the country’s overall currency, so if there’s a flood of it on the market, apart from people who were so stupid as to invest all their eggs in one (gold) basket, whence the economic chaos?
High finance is all electronic these days. Seems to me that someone with m@d hacking ski11z like Leon is much more of a threat to the world economy than a dude with a shit ton of gold.
Economy works to a massive degree on what people believe. It’s basically a market of dreams and assumptions and pixie dust. And most people believe that gold is important.
Dropping 37.89 billion(at current value) worth of gold on the economy all at once would be catastrophic. Even though gold is not used to back currency anymore it is still used as a convenient way for countries to pay each other. The results would utterly destroy the world economy.
Still doesn’t make any sense. Just because few countries government lose some stored gold value doesn’t sound to me as “world economy crushes down in flames.”
That’s because those ‘few countries’ are helping to prop everyone else up
And while they don’t actually move gold around between banks anymore, they still use the value of the gold as the basis for the currencies (why physically move the gold, and risk another Great Train Robbery, when they can keep track of it electronically?)
No, they don’t, that’s the thing. None of the major economic powers of the world support their currency with gold to any appreciable degree. The U.S., for instance? Less than 5%. IIRC, the country to support their currency the most with gold is Lenanon, at 50%. Gold reserves are a thing of the past – they mean very little, anymore. It’s an electronic world.
Also, I don’t think I heard of any major gold deals since WWII.
It’s the same effect in the USA, where government keeps printing more money without actually backing it with something tangible…Each NEW dollar in circulation lowers the value of every dollar already IN circulation. The key factor in defining the actual value of anything is determined by how rare it is…the more of them you have, the less value they will have.
Sorry, but you’re essentially just repeating the premise, not supporting it.
Uh, why tell everyone except the inspection team then?
“This is where your paychecks come from”? Certainly he has a vested interest in making sure no one else pops the gold bubble…
Yeah, that’s actually a fair point. Archon seems sure they can keep his identity secret though, so without that information, tracking down his vault would be a pretty daunting task. Knowing it even exists is a definite start point, but Zeph may be fudging some of the details as well.
Even if someone does find out his identity, still not likely to get them any closer to his private Fort Aurum
1. Geeking out a little at you responding. TY for that heh.
2. I suppose a ‘you may be required to save this guy’ can help explain that, though yeah I’m sensing this could come back to bite them.
If he’s able to siphon out metals of the earth’s crust, why gold?
Siphon platinum or REEs. More valuable, highly desired by microelectronic industry (= powerful friends to cover your ass) and at the same time draws much less attention to yourself than running around with a bar of gold.
He probably wanted a big room full of gold bars?
I don’t think it matters what he draws out of the core at this point. He could probably siphon out copper and still get enough to be filthy rich (is there copper down there? I asume so)
True dat.
There is something … decorative … about shiny gold bars.
Most likely.
I suspect that he FIRST extracted all that gold, got a “now I’m super rich” moment, then stopped and though about how to actually cash that. I can totally see him realizing that platinum might be more useful too late.
that or he figured gold might be valuable enough to sell yet not so valuable that you get people asking where your getting your supply from
Why would putting a large amount of gold on the market do any more damage to the “global economy” any more than the invention of a cheap way to manufacture aluminum (which was once more valuable than gold)? A single commodity’s value changing is not economic damage, it’s just the economy working. Some companies might find their business model failing, but you don’t see many buggy whip makers these days either.
It’s disturbing that they think even for a minute that maintaining the status quo in regards to what products are scarce is part of their mission.
It would only be a problem if he did it all at once. A large change is harder to absorb. Going to your aluminum example. It took many years for that to work it’s way in to the system. A sudden change would be much worse.
Yes, but it’d still mainly affect one industry. The overall health of the global economy is not tied to the price of gold.
Honestly, this guy is doing the rational thing though just to maximize his personal profits. He probably wouldn’t get to live that “understandably comfortable lifestyle” otherwise. I’d do the same thing, in his place (I might not for diamonds, because seriously, screw the cartels), but if the government tried to tell me that they were going to be “keeping a close eye on” me, or that I didn’t have the right to flood the market with gold if I chose to, I might do it out of spite.
I agree with you in general except he doesn’t need maximum profit. He gets enough and this cave looks like something he did for the fun of it or to show off.
Really above all it makes me wonder what they have suppressed. What innovations are this world’s people denied because the government fears change?
One can expect that when the mining of asteroids and other planets becomes a thing, there will be more than a few upsets in metal prices. There are supposed to be quite a number of asteroids with commercial-purity-grade-plus levels of various substances.
Add to that the huge quantities of hydrocarbons to be found in the gas giants.
Add to THAT something I saw in a news release a few years ago. Apparently, NASA scientists have discovered a dwarf star someplace with absolutely colossal quantities of Gold in it. They joked about keeping it secret until they could figure a way to get there and do some mining.
It rains diamonds on Saturn and Jupiter
Don’t forget the “Super-Earth” they found that might theoretically have what amounts to the mass of Luna in crystallized Carbon.
Psst, the normals are more impressed when you use the common name. De Beers spent a fortune in marketing the diamond brand name to have the appeal it does today.
Plus, they have warehouses (plural) full of diamonds
Yep, Rubys,Sapphires and Emeralds are each like 100x rarer than diamond. It’s all marketing
Real rubies, sapphires, and emeralds, yes. But what do all three of those have in common? They all come from corundum (with different impurities that cause their coloration). Synthetic corundum is made commercially, and used for many things… there’s even one watch company that uses it to make the lenses on their watches. Because the only mineral that’s harder than corundum is diamond, their watches are damn near scratch-proof.
The biggest problem with any mining operations off-planet is that it would be more expensive to get to it than the value they could get by bringing it back. It’s sort of like the guy who figured out how to filter gold out of ordinary ocean water…The cost to get it was more than he could sell it for.
… At least at this stage of development.
But if I offer one simple hypothetical.
Consider all that goes into building satellites and space stations – building of the actual components, then boosting them up out of Earth’s gravity well. With this in mind, suppose that the industries most relevant to this activity were instead based on the Moon or in a stable orbit. Yes, it’d cost a buttload to set up. but the savings on fuel costs alone would be considerable. No worries about the environment in those places either.
Yes, this would be a MASSIVE undertaking at our current and immediately foreseeable stage of development, but there may come a time when it is not only feasible but a dang good idea.
The damage this guy could do to the economy is one thing, but what I want to know is if there’s any risk to the planet if he mines out too much. I mean, Could he damage the Earth’s magnetosphere or slow down it’s rotation or something by lessening the mass of our core?
I’m guessing that he probably could, but that it would take the removal of a more sizable chunk of it than just the gold.
The magnetosphere is not generated by the crust, but the molten core.
So it doesn’t really matter even if he would mine all valuable metals in the world.
Read the first panel again. They specifically say that he’s getting his gold from the Earth’s molten core.
Oops, my bad!
Sorry, it looks like you were right after all, Zwibelchen. After all that talk about the core, Zeph said that their mysterious miner was siphoning the gold from the mantle, not the core.
Your good, my bad.
Actually it’s generated by the SOLID inner core (the thing spinning is what causes it)
The inner core rotates in the same direction as the Earth and slightly faster, completing its once-a-day rotation about two-thirds of a second faster than the entire Earth. Over the past 100 years that extra speed has gained the core a quarter-turn on the planet as a whole, the scientists found.
Weeeeeeee…..
Concidering how big the planet is, there’s no way he could ever get enough to even put a dent in the inside of the planet
The planet’s mass wouldn’t change but shifting enough from the core could cause…problems.
Apparently, some 20 percent of Earth’s mass is in the core. (the lower mantle contains 49%)
That is, roughly 2*10^24kg (2.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000kg). For tons, remove 3 zeros
I doubt there’s any way anyone could ever extract anything close to a significant portion of that
The weight of all gold in the core, compared to the weight of the earth is so low, that even if he removed all the gold in the core and placed it in one location it would not affect the earth’s rotation to any notable effect.
Gold is not magnetic and would therefore not affect the earth’s magnetic field at all
Ignoble, Iron is the primary magnetic field generating material in the core. That little bit of gold would have minimal impact given how little impact gold has on the process to begin with.
Don’t think this guy is nearly as big an economic danger as they make out.
Sure, he could quite thoroughly tank the price of gold (more by the implication that he can double the mined gold supply again whenever he feels like). But gold hasn’t been the basis of any major monetary systems in quite some time now. There’d be some market disruption from everyone with major investments in gold (either bullion holdings or mining) taking a financial hit, but it’s hardly apocalyptic.
Right. The global (well, European) economy survived when Spain actually flooded the market with New World gold in the 16th century, and then gold was much more important to the economy. Now we don’t even have any major currencies tied to it.
Actually, the New World gold replaced, or supplanted, the former market
The point is the world kept spinning.
Every nation keeps a significant portion of their liquid reserves as gold though.
Losing all that (because it got worthless) would have an impact
No, they don’t. Sure they used to, but the world changed. It’s all electronic, now. None of the major economic powers support their currency with gold to any appreciable degree. It’s become the relic of an antiquated system.
Nope, they still do
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_reserve
It’s used to back up currencys
Your link does not support your assertion. This is the link you want: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard
Gold is irrelevant to the world economy.
Can you put hands on that clock please? I keep thinking the “What?” is a thought bubble from Vance…
Well, as long as the 20 million tons of gold in the oceans are safe… ;)
This is the first time I’ve seen stacks of gold bars stored on shelves. If he sold the shelves or the patent for them, he’d make more money than if he sold all the gold. What’s the material? Indestructible metal?
I’m sure sea life would appreciate us not tampering with the ocean’s chemistry so blatantly.
Here you go, British Gold reserves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTtf5s2HFkA
I think you very convincingly countered that Dave. :-D
Not to mention the narration pointing out how important gold reserves are to national banks, even in the modern world.
The shelves you drew have a lot more rows of gold bars between each support column, and are piled a lot higher. Was this artistic license, or is the shelf material that much stronger than ordinary steel?
In my opinion very clearly artistic licence. Dave was drawing the stacks at a greater distance, than the reference, and needed to make the stacks deeper for suitable impact.
But the geomancer clearly can pull up any mineral he chooses, so that could be made of literally any metal on Earth. And he can likewise afford to buy the best, if nothing natural would do the trick. And could enhance the material similarly to how Iron Cloth improves their armour, with his powers.
Sorry for answering a question directed at the artist, but I honestly feel that the artistic licence is something which is both self-evident (from the reference he already provided, compared to the end result) and something we should grant as a matter of course.
Albeit that it can be fun finding ways to justify it, like here. :-)
Not that it does harm for folks to question things mind. The comic does have a lot of hidden meaning, which can encourage that.