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.

Obligatory

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.


Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.