So here's an odd one. All the gold we've ever dug up from the Earth would fit in just three and a half Olympic sized swimming pools. That's really not a lot of gold Yet, it's well everywhere.
In our jewellery, in currency, Tutankhamun's mask, royal thrones, toilets. It's even in your smartphone, meaning odds are you're probably carrying around some gold with you at all times
Gold has been fixated on by humans for most of our existence. We've used it, stolen it, even killed for it. And because there's only such a small amount, we've recycled it.
Which means the gold in your smartphone could have an interesting history. What we do know is that its initial origins go back even further. Billions of years, even.
To a place far, far away in space.
Because gold is made here in a supernova, when stars explode in the ultimate spectacular death and scatter gold throughout the universe. But crucially, not just any star can make gold. Even our own sun can't.
It has to be a special one, probably rotating very fast with a strong magnetic field. Or it's made when two neutron stars collide.
Gold is very heavy, so it's difficult to produce such heavy elements. It has to be very high temperature and high density.
But if the process itself is rare, then the gold it creates will be rare, too. So where is it?
Well, that's an answer in two parts. Whilst around 30% of the world's gold can be traced back to the Witwatersrand Basin in South Africa, the largest single source of gold in history.
The biggest stash of gold is held here at the US Federal Reserve in New York, which has, as of 2019 over 497,000 gold bars. If that seems like a small amount of gold,
it's important to bear in mind that it's virtually indestructible, meaning all the gold we've ever produced has been recycled countless times.
So the smartphone, you're probably watching this video on. The gold inside it could have been mined by the Romans, the Aztecs or the Egyptians.
And that gold is handy not just because it's a great conductor, but also because it's extremely unreactive, which makes it useful for a wide array of things.
So we use it in gold fillings, it's used in jet engines, it's using spacecrafts. We're even using gold for the mirrors on the James Webb Space Telescope because gold is incredibly reflective.
People even eat gold despite it offering no nutritional value whatsoever. Although to be fair, there's few better ways to flaunt wealth than my literally munching on something extremely rare.
In a way that kind of makes sense because the main use of gold around the world is wealth. Whether that's as a status symbol or just as a currency itself.
If you were picking an element from the periodic table to be your money, you wouldn't want one that was super reactive or flammable or too difficult to work with, or a gas or radioactive, but you would need it to be really rare. So all of those requirements together lands us with gold.
It helps us well that it's beautiful and shiny.
It's a beautiful material, but it also carries with it these kind of negative characteristics the lust for gold, greed, idolatry, the environmental and human costs of gold.
Which means that any gold you have has a potentially dark history.
For example, it could have come from that one American dude who basically stumbled across a literal treasure trove of gold glinting away in a river in California in 1848. That sparked the California gold rush, which saw hundreds of thousands set off west, one of the largest migrations in U.S. history.
The gold rush led to the creation of the state of California, which rapidly became an economic powerhouse. It sped up the buildings of railways spanning the country, towns became cities, and the US became a hub for global industry.
But mining was tough work, and alongside it came gambling, prostitution, violence and racism. Lots and lots of racism, especially against Native Americans.
In 1850, the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians was passed, which included facilitating the separation of Native American Children from their families.
This contributed heavily to the California genocide, during which the indigenous population of California plunged from as many as 150,000 people to around 30,000. And this human cost went hand in hand with environmental damage.
Dams changed the course of rivers, sediment clogged waterways, and mercury, which is used as an amalgam to extract gold from ore during the mining process, flowed downstream.
So that gold you're carrying around could have a legacy of death and destruction. And that legacy isn't necessarily that old.
While we think about the gold rush as having happened in the 1800s there are modern day gold rushes throughout the world, and this is where, in fact, about a fifth of all the gold on the world market comes from.
Many of these modern gold rushes tick the same boxes as their more famous California cousin. Artisanal miners working in precarious conditions, mercury pollution and, of course, dire environmental consequences.
In the Peruvian Amazon alone, over 250,000 acres have been cleared since 1984.
But if mining gold has the potential to cause so many problems, what's to stop us from making our own?
Well, many of our greatest scientific minds have tried. In 1669, Hennig Brand tried to make gold from buckets of urine. Yep, he was that gross. And to be fair, he did accidentally discover phosphorus in the process.
Whilst Isaac Newton's only accomplishment in his quest to produce gold across the 17th century was to accidentally give himself mercury poisoning.
Thankfully, nowadays, neither urine nor hospitalisation are necessary requirements for the process of making gold. As scientists can actually make it using a particle accelerator.
Except it's only atom by atom, because making a single bar would take an unbelievably long time, and the energy used to create it would be enormous. So it's not really anything more than a pipe dream.
But there must be gold out there somewhere. We can't really have used nearly all of it up making fancy jewellery. Can we?
Well, it turns out there's actually a few more places we can find gold, like here, in the ocean. But good luck trying to get it, because it's very spread out with a concentration of about one gram per 100 million tons of water.
So although it does exist, it's very likely to remain where it is.
But what about further afield like here? Because yes, there's even gold in space, there's some on the moon, and there's even been genuine talk of stripping gold from asteroids.
Nasser have been investigating where we might be able to get gold from, and they've actually been looking at an asteroid called 16 Psyche, which has got, I think, 700 quintillion USD worth of gold potentially in that asteroid.
The methods of mining either deep sea or in space are obviously very involved and extremely expensive to do. And space mining and deep sea mining present some ethical and environmental concerns around the mining of gold as well. So we'll have to take all these things into account.
So for all intents and purposes, the gold we have now is all we've got, which makes it that bit more precious.
It's hard to verify what percentage of gold in circulation is from ancient times. According to the World Gold Council, two thirds of the current gold stocks have been mined since 1950.
But beyond that, because gold has been recycled so much across history, it would be difficult to pinpoint exactly where all the gold in your possession originated from.
But at the same time, isn't that kind of the coolest part? Think about it. That gold could have traveled from the stars via ancient Rome or Latin America all the way to your pocket. And the best part is that could only just be the beginning of its journey.
Every mobile phone that we throw away currently has about 50 milligrams of gold inside, and that could be extracted and then used again.
Because that's the thing. Gold will continue to be used for the rest of human history in new and fascinating ways that we cannot predict.
Years from now, the potential for a future gold bracelet to have its origins in a smartphone could be as exciting as the prospect of ancient Roman gold being in our jewellery today.
So next time you look at your smartphone, your jewellery, or even your watch, just think about the incredible history that, that object may be privy to and all of the future history that it may become a part of.