It’s probably true, but I literally can’t believe it.

Did you know a solid piece of gold the size of a deck of cards can be made so thin that it covers the square footage of a tennis court?

They can get it down to 250 atoms thickness

you can't swim in gold

Says who?

that's why it has to be molten

But you can float real well

I didn't know that. That's super interesting though! :)

Scrooge McDuck would like a word with you

I actually thought it could be made a lot thinner. Is that a full deck of cards?

In style no less

Looked it up and the tennis court size reference was starting from a matchbox which might be smaller? Idk

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I honestly dont know if i feel that's surprisingly low or about what I expected tbh.

Much smaller

Yeah show me it then I’ll believe it

This may be true? An Olympic pool could hold 50,000 tons of gold and the estimated amount of gold ever mined is 200,000 to 250,000 tons.

I'm not sure where that estimate comes from, tho.

Probably the association of goldsmith's or some shit.

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The messed part is the only real use for gold only came around 50 years ago when we started making computer parts since it doesnt corrode

If they said the amount of gold mined last year I would 100% accept that but I don't know how they estimate all the gold mined by ancient people like the Egyptians or the Inca.

Actually 2 atoms. https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/08/06/world/thinnest-gold-scn/index.html

You can do it! at least one time!

I recall one that went something like “you could take a 1cm cube and turn it into a thread a mile long”.

A euchre deck probably

That’s a mined bending fact

It seems like that would really suck for the people in those areas who want to go swimming.

The mining rate increased so much during the Industrial Revolution that the total gold mined in the millennia before probably fits in the margin of error for the estimate

I really doubt that

Not necessarily; gold has been used in dentistry for hundreds of years.

Gold was so coveted people shaved it down to 2 atoms

It’s for this reason it was used for coins and other items before that so I’m not sure “real use” is accurate here.

Which means it can be easily stretched to make fine electronic cables used in medical equipment.

Also wondering why this is an interesting amount.

I think someone did this measurement with platinum too. I remember hearing that it would all fit into a medium-sized room, could be wrong though.

That would be a waste of gold.

No it couldn't. First, it would be impossible to collect it all. Even if you did manage to get it, you'd have to melt it to make it fit. Even if you managed to melt it and make it fit, the Olympic swimming pool would collapse because it can't support the weight.

And Scrooge McDuck's got one of them.

NERD ALERT!

Not at all, gold leaf has all kinds of applications. For example, it’s the best material for spacewalk sun visors.

Oh boy. Shiny doesn't mean useful. Love the hate. Pour it on

But spread out on a tennis court, it's pretty wasteful.

“mined” is the key term here. there’s been tons of river gold and in areas like australia when they were first colonized, there were nuggets in some areas just laying on the ground.

Let’s go lookin matey

Tell that to King Louie XIV

You can still use it after.

Gold is easily recycled

One of the main qualities of money is it needs to be durable, you daft mustard packet. Having your coins not rust makes them more durable than other metals.

Yes you can. Will hurt like a bitch but gold can be melted down or dissolved, and you can swim in that for as long as your flesh holds up.

Dude i get excited when i find a dollar bill from the 60s money has and always will be reprinted. Eat it dick fucker

Wait til/if we figure out how to mine an asteroid.

Rated arggg for pirates

Good luck scraping gold leaf off a tennis court.

The size of an Olympic Swimming Pool is about 85,000,000 fluid ounces.

You just burn the court and separate the gold from the ash.

Right, and gold leafing on books actually protects the pages, makes handling easier, and prevents paper cuts. I'd call that a real use. Gold fillings, a material that can actually be cold impact welded in an environment as bad as a human mouth and wing break down after installation. Gold mending of materials. The low melting point makes it easy to work, ideal for repairs.

All of those are genuine historic uses of gold that aren't just GOLD PRETTY. I mean, the attractive end result sure doesn't hurt, but the properties of the gold itself are the reason to choose it.

Do you understand how easy it is to recycle gold off electronics? What makes you think a tennis court would be a difficult surface to separate gold from?

You dont need to remove it from the tennis court, you can dig up the whole tennis court and dissolve the gold in a solution and reconstitute it as a purified ball of gold. You can just shovel the whole thing into a smelter and melt it off. Everything not gold will float to the top.

This is a non-event, if people are willing to dig a mile underground through quartz and granite using explosives and mercury baths to get gold dust out of the ground, why do you think a tennis court will be any type of obstacle? It would be picked clean that day.

Aqua regia! Wonder how long a person could survive. Can't imagine it's measured in anything longer than minutes.

Yeah a couple minutes tops would be my guess. Horrible experience but you'd be swimming in gold lol

The wind would blow half of it away.

It would just blow away with the smoke.

People pan for gold dust in the streets of NYC. You are underestimating how quickly that wafer thin gold will be pulled up by whoever is working it.

Nope. It’s value in the past didn’t come from being shinny and pretty. Its physical and chemical properties like not being corroded, it’s usage in alloys and the fact that didn’t cause allergic or other reactions when in contact with skin is what made it valuable.

You're better off not putting it on a tennis court in the first place.

I'm sorry I thought this was America

Ok. As previously stated. NERD ALERT

TIL that all the gold in California is in a bank in the middle of Beverly Hills, in somebody else's name.

I was thinking that too. Lots of river gold indeed.

That was the entire california and alaska gold rushes

Three solid gold Olympic size swimming pool size ingots? That seems like quite a bit of gold.

You still wear your letterman jacket don’t you?

Send me your hate Reddit. I live off vitriol

Dont tell that to my countrymen. They believe that the Marcoses are lending the US gold with 1k USD interest per hour.

For starters that amount of gold is relatively smaller to the current value of the world economy and a lot of people wants to reconstitute the Gold Standard.

Not to mention a portion of the total gold "mined" could be missing since people do tend to bury their treasure way back then.

So in actuality, there is less gold peesent.

Funny though that prior to the discovery of vast silver in the New World, silver was rarer and more valuable than gold.

I first saw this stat in a National Geographic article, about gold, from about 2012. At the time it was “two” swimming pools, not three .

It's also not bad on toast

Someone explain to me how Scrooge McDuck ended up with an entire pools worth of gold coins then

Well in Victoria, which was the centre of the gold rush, there's still at much gold in the ground as was removed over the past 130 years.

Covfefe. Such a thin layer is called One Covfefe.

Let's do a back-of-the-envelope calculation. A mole of gold has a mass of about 197 grams, in the ballpark of our hypothetical deck of cards. The lattice constant of gold is about 0.4 nm (in a fcc structure, but let's assume simple cubic for simplicity). A commenter mentions a thickness of 2 atoms, but that's a very fancy setup, so let's go for something that's feasible with modern techniques currently applied in industry: 10 atoms. Arrange our tenth of a mole into a square and we get sides of a bit more than 2*10^(11) atoms, corresponding to a square with 80m sides. Actually not that far off from a tennis court - I would have guessed it would be bigger.

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Nah, gold dust is too heavy. It's a common separation/reclamation technique for gold in old flumes or carpets or other materials in workspaces where fine gold particles were common.

So scrooge mcduck had all the gold in the world!

You're thinking of gold particles. Ultra thin gold flakes are easily carried away in the wind. The ratio of surface area to weight mean that they experience a lot of drag relative to gravity.

Speak for yourself.

And you don't think a fire will alter the flair structure.

The melting point of gold is around 2000F. No way you are getting anywhere close to that in a open tennis court fire. The gold will not be effected by the fire except to be torn apart by the plumes of smoke that would also carry it away.

Thats it?????

And Mr T wears about a half swimming pool worth.

Plus the fact it's hard to mine having a high stock to flow ratio. This makes it a good store of value over time. Unlike fiat currencies that no longer adhere to the gold standard and devalue over time because more is produced.

That's nothing. You should see what my wife can do.

Or a durak deck!

I just hope Duck Tales wasn't a lie. My childhood will be ruined

This puts Scrooge McDuck into a new perspective.

What I'm hearing is "the world can only support 3 Scrooge McDucks"

That’s nothing. All sand mined could fill at least four olympic size swimming pools!

The amount in our crust is actually relatively small amount, even if you were to mine at all. It's estimated that the amount we can reasonably extract from the crust would amount to a solid cube 100m by 100m thick. Contrast that with how much gold is currently in the Earth's core, since heavier elements sink. If you were to take all the gold in the Earth's core and spread it evenly across the surface of the earth it would cover the entire surface of earth in a sold 1m of gold.

Damn. That’s crazy. I know that it’s comes up through magma and volcanic activity. But had no idea how much was in the core. And also how much that is i. the crust that will never be mined. Makes you think that the future for mining rare elements may really be in asteroids.

I'll hold my breath.

... are we close ? How about now?

I am old enough to remember when the Gatlin Brothers performed that live on TV and changed it to “in Kenny Rogers’ name”.

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How are we putting gold foil on steaks then?