| Gold has always held a
special allure and fascination in people’s minds. Perhaps it is the
color, weight, or the fact that over time it has come to symbolize
an elemental resource for value and wealth. Whatever the reason, I
wanted to see if there were any estimates as to the total amount of
gold we humans have laid out hands on.
 After
a small bit of research on the World Gold Council website, I saw an
estimate which pegged the total amount of mined gold from ancient
times to the present, calculated at 158,000 tonnes.
A big number but one that is a bit
hard to get your mind around. What does a tonne of gold look like?
Let’s do a little math.
If the estimates are correct and
there has been 158,000 tones of gold recovered from “Mother Earth”
(assuming 24 K purity) then that would translate into 5,079,817,925
troy oz. of the precious metal. However unless you are Bill Gates or
one of the other billionaires on the planet, I still have a hard
time grasping what over 5 billion ounces of gold would look like.
Back to the calculator.
If a cubic centimeter of 24K gold
equals 19.3 grams, then a cubic meter of gold would weight 19.3
tonnes. Likewise all the gold ever mined would amount to 8,187 cubic
meters. That still doesn’t mean anything to me.
I have to put that into perspective
and visualize what that much gold would look like. So, if all the
gold in the world would fit into a 20.15 meter cube, or 66 feet 1.3
inches square, that would kind of be the size of a small office
building. Now that I can understand. |
