Gold is the shining embodiment of wealth.
Not only is it used to make expensive products,
but it's also used to add extra bling
to luxurious items,
from smartphones,
to supercars,
and even beef steaks.
But other metals that are rarer than gold are much cheaper.
So, why is gold so expensive?
Scientists believe gold arrived on Earth
after the collision of two neutron stars in space
forged gold atoms together into meteorites,
which crashed into Earth about 3.9 billion years ago.
Over millions of years, Earth's bubbling hot core
forced gold nuggets towards the surface.
Gold flakes have been found in Paleolithic caves
estimated to date back roughly 40,000 years,
marking the first known instance
of human contact with the material.
But what exactly is gold?
Gold is a relatively rare metal
with lots of versatility.
It's highly malleable,
meaning it can be deformed or changed
without fracturing the material.
But what distinguishes it from other useful precious metals
is its totally unique bright-yellow appearance.
These factors give gold many practical
and superficial uses on Earth.
Alistair Hewitt: If you're a bride, gold is the perfect
embodiment of love and emotion.
If you're an investor, gold's an excellent
portfolio-diversification tool.
People like to know that they've got
an element of their wealth which they can feel.
Often, it looks beautiful,
it's got a wonderful design on it,
and that adds a degree of emotion to the investment.
And if you're a manufacturer or if you're someone
making smartphones or tablets,
gold is an element with the symbol Au
and the atomic number 79, viewed as the most noble
of all of the noble metals.
It's a perfect material for conducting electricity.
And it doesn't corrode; it doesn't rust.
So it's great to have in your product.
Narrator: Over many centuries, civilizations
across the globe became enamored with the beautiful metal,
such as the ancient Egyptians.
Not only did they use it as a currency,
they also buried themselves in gold,
believing it to be the flesh of the gods.
In fact, King Tutankhamun was laid to rest
in three gold-wrapped coffins,
the innermost of which was made from sheets
of pure, beaten gold, which would now
be worth over $1 million.
In 1792, the US Congress passed the Coinage Act,
which established a fixed price of gold to US dollars.
Over the next century, gold mining captured
people's imagination, during the great US gold rush.
The first was in 1799, after 12-year-old Conrad Reed
discovered a huge, 17-pound gold nugget
on his family's farm in North Carolina.
Fifty years later, in 1849,
tens of thousands of prospectors,
known as the 49ers, raced to San Francisco
in search of riches, giving name to
the San Francisco 49ers football franchise.
These gold rushes heralded the start
of modern-day gold mining.
Despite humans mining gold for millennia,
the complexity of this process hasn't changed.
Hewitt: Mining is just as challenging
and difficult as it's ever been before.
What's changed, probably, is the labor intensity
in some mines, as people have increasingly used technology.
But some of the challenges aren't necessarily
associated purely with mine production.
They could be associated with the environments
within which they're operating, so.
And licenses that people need to operate,
whether it's a formal license from a government
or a social license from a local community.
I mean, those are still challenges
that mining companies need to navigate
and kind of work their way through.
And that contributes to the complexity
of mine production today, probably just as much
as it did many, many years ago.
Narrator: Identifying gold mines is a daunting task.
It can take up to 10 years for geologists,
chemists, and engineers to examine a potential site.
And even then, the likelihood of a mine
being developed into a productive gold mine
is less than 0.1%.
Only 10% of these sites contain enough gold
to justify further development.
But aboveground, gold is everywhere.
On our fingers, around our necks,
and even in our mouths.
Gold is used in medicine, architecture,
and almost every electronic component.
We even launch gold back out into the universe
from where it came,
not only as a reliable component of spacecraft circuitry,
but also in the lining of astronauts' visors
to protect them from the sun's harmful heat
and ultraviolet light.
So, with all that in mind, it might surprise you to know
how little gold there actually is here on Earth.
If you melted down the world's entire
aboveground stock of around 190,000 tons of gold,
it would form a 72-foot cube.
However, if that was divided up equally
for every person on Earth, we'd all get
roughly an ounce of pure, 24 karat gold each.
That's about $1,500 worth.
So, how does this volume divide out
into different industries?
Hewitt: If we have a look at the 190,000 tons
of stock of gold aboveground,
the lion's share of it's in jewelry.
Around about 50% of it is in jewelry.
The next level down comes to private investment.
So, that could be individuals holding bars or coins,
or, indeed, individuals holding a share
of an exchange-traded fund.
And then you've got central banks.
Central banks account for around
about 17% of that stock of gold,
so a very significant volume.
And then the final element, around about 13%, 14%,
is technology or dentistry.
Narrator: Is the future of gold as bright as its surface?
New deposits of gold are increasingly hard to come by
and increasingly difficult to locate.
Geologists have estimated that only 55,000 tons
remains buried away in the Earth's crust.
Which means, if current global mining rates continued,
we could run out of newfound gold in just 20 years.
So, as gold mining continues to slow
and the costs associated with mining increase
to meet the challenge of extraction,
gold could become even more expensive.