Before the 1970's, gold was worth ~$40 - $50 dollars/troy ounce (that is, ~1 euro per gram), but since then, the price has fluctuated wildly with economic speculation and the swings in the stock market. The price of gold today is ~$1710/troy ounce (more than 40 euros a gram). This is up nearly $100 from a just year ago, and the rise in gold prices is literally off the chart.
What, essentially, is gold really worth to us?
Whether gold can be mined is based on its current price in the global market place and on the environmental conditions where it is found. The value of gold as placer deposits depends on how pure the gold is – copper and silver are contained along with the gold. However, no matter what the worth of gold, if it is found deep in the ocean, at impenetrable depths in the earth's crust, or in a locality where mining may endanger human population or archeological and environmental treasures of invaluable worth, the cost of mining can surpass the worth of the gold ore.
Gold is one of the earliest metals mined by humankind because, though relatively scarce, it’s easy enough to find among stream deposits, easy to shape into lovely forms, never loses its shine or luster – it’s pretty, let’s face it.
For one of our ancient ancestors, finding a pretty pebble in the river was great, but what was its real use? Gold is too soft and there’s too little around to make an arrowhead. In terms of real value, stones such as obsidian or plagiogranite could be used in making spear points and axes; on a survival level, these would apparently be worth a lot more than a pretty little pebble. Obsidian from the Milos Island volcano was traded throughout the Aegean by Neolithic cultures; possibly it was used as a kind of currency. Natural (native) metallic copper or iron is even more scarce than gold, and would have been much more useful to our Neolithic ancestor had he/she found any; not until the Bronze and Iron Ages were there technical means for transforming ores of copper or iron into useful metals. By then, the loveliest of metals, gold, was already more highly prized than either as jewelry and used as a portable currency.
Had some Neolithic person not come across a gold nugget and thought it looked really keen, would we today prize gold so dearly? Other than being pretty, what is gold good for?
“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.” –Alan Greenspan
Gold is used as money, or at least, it once was. Being heavy (a standard gold bar weighs nearly 12.5 kg) and awkward to weigh precisely with each expenditure, paper money was invented to keep track of how much gold someone actually had in a bank somewhere. This lead to gold being hoarded as bullion: nearly 150 million ounces alone are kept in Fort Knox. In this sense, gold was used to give worth to paper money, except that it doesn’t seeing as there is no longer a gold standard (the USA went off the gold standard completely in 1971). As bullion, gold is kept around to gather dust but not actually utilized for anything.
78% of all gold today is used in jewelry. Jewelry is not, probably, essential to our health and survival. Gold is not even essential to jewelry: a leather thong and carved shell can be nice looking as well. If push comes to shove, we can live without jewelry.
Gold, flaked out into thin gold leaf, is used as a decoration, and some is used to add color to decorative glass objects. Yes, the “pretty factor” of gold again, but not a use critical to our survival. Well, there are reports that some eastern cultures believe eating small quantities of gold leaf or gold dust is good for them, though eating too much is toxic.
In part because it’s toxic, gold is included in the arsenal of drugs that fight cancer. Other medicines that contain gold are used to treat the symptoms of immune diseases including several kinds or arthritis. Because these auriferous drugs are not effective on everyone, there are alternative non-gold-bearing drugs as well.
Until about the 1970’s, gold was commonly used in dentistry. Then as its price started to go up, various kinds of composites and ceramics were developed that could replace it. Poor gold! Not essential.
“All that glisters, is not gold.” – Shakespeare quoting Aesop
Let’s enter the modern age; let’s consider in what ways the essential properties of gold as a material make it actually invaluable to us.
Gold is not just pretty because of some fortuitous condition; it is pretty and remains pretty because it is inert, very dense, and it lasts forever. The nuclei of gold atoms are surrounded by an impenetrable array of electrons; these give gold a wondrous sensitivity to electricity so that it can conduct just the slight amounts needed in solid state devices. Golden molecules are themselves so “hard” (a nice cubic crystal structure) that they don’t even bond well with other gold atoms: hence, en masse they can “slide” around and be worked into thin, malleable sheets. But these molecular collections do form alloys (molecular mixes) that change the properties of pure gold in useful ways (like making gold dental work harder by the addition of copper). Gold cannot be destroyed; it does not tarnish, it conducts electricity, it is malleable so that it can be made to fit anywhere – anywhere that a material is needed that can’t be lubricated, that will not corrode, where the transmission of very low amounts of current are essential and where a little rust would shut down the system entirely.
Finally! Thousands of years after that ancestor of ours picked up a pretty pebble, gold is worth something other than just being pretty. It’s essential in your laptop, your cell phone, televisions, your GPS and in the satellites that allow us to have GPS. We can live without jewelry or bullion, but in the modern electronic world, we can’t survive without GOLD!
“Everything has its limit – iron ore cannot be educated into gold.” -- Mark Twain
Annie R
Graphic: Price of gold by A.Rassios. Crystalline gold (synthetically generated) from wikicommons; photo by Alchemist-hp (talk)
www.pse-mendelejew.dehttp://geology.com/minerals/gold/uses-of-gold.shtmlMilos Obsidian:
http://www.geoengineer.org/milos.htmPrice of gold recently:
http://www.monex.com/prods/gold_chart.htmlhttp://www.gold-traders.co.uk/gold-information/what-is-gold-used-for.asphttp://gold.yabz.com/facts.htmhttp://ezinearticles.com/?How-Gold-is-Used-in-Medicine%3F&id=3308199http://airforcemedicine.afms.mil/idc/groups/public/documents/afms/ctb_108343.pdfhttp://crcleme.org.au/Pubs/Monographs/regolith2004/Butt&Hough.pdfhttp://www.quora.com/How-much-gold-is-in-Fort-Knox-and-is-it-enough-to-get-the-USA-out-of-debt
