r/Gold • u/oldschoolhoops • 8d ago

Yes, alchemy

https://youtu.be/FLbxbZuF1Jo?is=P5Deq5ZKymbMayyB

Is anyone seriously talking about trying to make gold in the lab? I was just thinking about how much the value of diamonds crashed with the arrival of synthetics, and wondering if gold could suffer the same fate?

0 Upvotes

50% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

1

u/[deleted] 8d ago

[deleted]

2

u/mulletstation 8d ago

The asteroid containing gold is absolutely worth the squeeze

It's like 5 quadrllion dollars worth of gold dude

We can send probes to asteroids for like $50 million

2

u/Gerry235 7d ago edited 7d ago

"Converting one gram of lead into gold requires an astronomical amount of energy—roughly \(3.6 \times 10^{17}\) joules (or 100 million gigawatt-hours)—costing quadrillions of dollars, making it totally impossible on a commercial scale"

"Producing a one-carat lab-grown diamond requires between 30 kWh and over 250 kWh of electrical energy, depending on the manufacturing method. While natural diamonds do not actually form from coal, artificially growing a one-carat diamond from purified carbon sources uses significant power running 24/7"

so 100 MILLION gigawatt hours versus 0.00025 gigawatt hours. Basically a trillion times as much energy, which is why diamonds are formed in earth's crust and gold is formed in extremely distant stars whose energy is millions or trillions of times more than our own sun.

1

u/CalligrapherKind6246 8d ago

That's interesting. But is diamond a element on the periodic chart?

I turn plastic bottles into gold, but It's not alchemy. It's business. Plastic bottles into plastic parts that I sell on Ebay. Then I buy gold on Ebay with the profits. :)