Comment by omnee
7 days ago
The relevant part: "The ALICE analysis shows that, during Run 2 of the LHC (2015–2018), about 86 billion gold nuclei were created at the four major experiments. In terms of mass, this corresponds to just 29 picograms (2.9 ×10-11 g)."
Just need to scale it by trillions to make 1 ounce, but transmutation of lead to gold - the dream of many alchemists - is now just a by product of particle accelerators.
Ran the numbers. The LHC would break even if the price of gold was $48 trillion trillion per ounce.
Only if the LHC doesn't quire gold to operate. If you're using ICs and components that have some gold in them and they need maintenance, you consume more than you produce.
Can still recover the gold from old parts though.
Quite fitting actually, alchemists scamming investors with needing a "starting" amount to get their reaction going
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Well, except for in particle accelerators, stars, and supernovae, atoms are never created or destroyed, so if they're creating gold, it's here for good.
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Well, until they flood the market.
At 10 picograms per year, that'll be a while
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My high school science teacher(Brother Quinn in the 80s) always said it was possible, although rather expensive, now I know how much - thanks.
hard to compete when stars do it for free
Tariff Alpha Centauri!
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The stable isotope of gold is produced by the collision of two neutron stars, which is unlikely to happen in our stellar vicinity any time soon.
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Shhh keep that to yourself. He might even fund science again!
and you can enjoy that gold for bilionth of a second
How many years of inflation til that's realistic?
10,000?
I just saw the price for lead jump up!
Wait a sec… ok I’m back. Had to go short $GLD.
You'd probably need to build another facility to actually extract the gold.
Sounds like a factorio expansion pack.
lol, and this is deflationary for gold...
On the other hand, it's only doing this accidentally, right? It could probably be optimized further if the goal were just transmutation. Who knows, maybe we could get all the way down to only 10 trillion per ounce! /s
The scale here is absolutely nuts to me. 86 billion nuclei represent only 29 picograms. One gram is 10^12 picograms.
1,000 billion billion gold nuclei per gram of gold.
The analogy I heard was that if you take a golf ball and enlarge it to the size of the Earth, the atoms in the enlarged golf ball would be about the size of the original golf ball.
It took me a while to understand this comment, because I imagined that scaling up a golf ball would involve creating new atoms, but what you said only makes sense if you are scaling up the individual atoms.
What you're saying is that the ratio of the size of an atom to the size of a golf ball is approximately the same as the ratio of the size of a golf ball to the size of the earth.
I'm surprised atoms are so big, I would have guessed much smaller.
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This makes more sense to me shrinking down instead of sizing up: "Hold a golf ball. Imagine you're looking at the Earth with its own golf balls. Those smaller golf balls are the same size as atoms in the original golf ball you're holding."
Speaking of scale, this is a fun video at the other end of the spectrum:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J_Ugp8ZB4E
That's actually how they chose the size of a golf ball.
Yeah. I think most ppl (incl me) lack strong intuition about things at scales outside our human day-to-day. Reminds me of a conversation about wealth, someone said "The difference between a million and a billion is... about a billion."
A tenth of a percent is often a rounding error. So the difference between a million and a billion truly is about a billion.
When the above isn’t enough to light a bulb, I like introduce that as analogous to pennies.
1 penny is $0.01 10 pennies is $0.1 100 pennies is $1 1,000 pennies is $10 10,000 pennies is $100 100,000 pennies is $1,000 1,000,000 pennies is $10,000 10,000,000 pennies is $100,000 100,000,000 pennies is $1,000,000 1,000,000,000 pennies is $10,000,000
Most people understand that ten million dollars is not just a different amount but a distinct kind of amount from ten thousand dollars. The powers of ten seem to become clearer with a smaller starting amount. Once they grasp the above, point out that the relationship is the same if everything starts 100 times as large.
There’s also a great one out there comparing 1,000 to 1 million to 1 billion seconds, converted to years plus days.
Avogadro's number has a 10^23 in it to account for this atom-->physical matter sort of "scale up" conversion. Atoms are really small...
Sometimes I have a hard time wrapping my head around reconciling that with the estimated number of protons in the observable universe which is "only" ~10^80 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_number). Seems like it "should" be much higher, but orders of magnitude are sometimes deceptive to our intuition.
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Avogadro was a weird looking guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amadeo_Avogadro.png
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> The scale here is absolutely nuts to me.
Being able to detect these tiny amounts is nuts to me.
>but transmutation of lead to gold - the dream of many alchemists - is now just a by product of particle accelerators.
The ultimate philosopher's stone.
The medieval alchemists were correct. They just couldn’t get their furnaces hot enough!
>> Just need to scale it by trillions to make 1 ounce, but transmutation of lead to gold - the dream of many alchemists - is now just a by product of particle accelerators.
Quick, somebody call nVidia!! They already integrate accelerators into their GPUs and they have scaling better than Moore's law!!
Considering that this was an unlooked-for byproduct, I'm sure those numbers could go way up if they opted to pursue this as a primary goal.
I hope that this can one day be scaled, even if 100 years into the future.
I do not want gold to be prized as a store of value. It is too useful as a material (inert, doesn't oxidize, food safe) that it would be vastly beneficial to society if it were possible to produce in limitless quantities.
Pick something that isn't useful as a material to be a store of value.
Basically, pick something with no value as a store of value. If we want to do that, we can just stick with fiat currency in a database. No reason to pick a material.
If we want a physical store of value, I actually think something of use that can easily be subdivided and combined is ideal. It doesn't even have to be as valuable as gold is today, this makes just as much sense if gold is cheap and plentiful. The natural inflation from creating more of it even helps cut down hoarding. It just gets harder to carry around enough to buy coffee (which of course brings us back to databases).
I can't help but worry that the technology wouldn't be enough to solve the way social problem of existing stakeholders not wanting to lose the value of their investments. I'm not sure exactly how comparable it is from a utility perspective, but diamond seems like there would at least some incentive to have available cheaply given how durable it is, but my understanding is that its scarcity is almost entirely artificial, and for non-utility purposes, it seems unfortunately very common for people to prefer "real" diamond, which fuels the inflated pricing.
That's not to say I think this shouldn't be pursued, but I feel like the science and technology side might end up being the easier half of cheap gold from this becoming a reality. I sadly have more faith in humanity's ability to figure out solutions to incredibly difficult technical problems in the long run than I do in our ability to solve the social problems that would benefit almost everyone but require changing the status quo.
(As an aside, I personally find the idea of lab-grown diamonds pretty cool just from a science perspective, and the fact that they're cheaper and don't have the same ethical concerns to make it unfathomable that I'd ever want to purchase a mined one, and I'm lucky that my wife felt the same way when we picked out her engagement ring, although she ended up selecting a lab-grown pink sapphire instead).
There is no scarcity of diamonds for industrial use, only for ornamental use -- and both are equally "real".
An ounce of gold is an ounce of gold. Apart from the cost of turning it into a desired shape, gold is entirely fungible. Not so with diamonds, because you can't forge a single 10 ct crystal out of one hundred .1 ct crystals.
So it would seem that lab-grown gold has a better chance of disrupting the market than lab-grown diamonds ever will. Unlike with diamonds, nobody will be able to tell where that gold came from!
You forgot that those smaller nuclei only existed for microseconds. It doesnt scale at all, just tricks.
I thought bonbardment like that led to made radioactive gold
Given the half-life of Gold-198 is 2.7 days, you've got an arbitrage opportunity during which running it to the closest pawn shop might be viable without losing too much of your hair.
yes in this case it collides right after and becomes single protons
Have we already done it before with thermonuclear weapons?
Have we transmutated lead to gold in other ways?
No, but in the Medieval days, it was a common hobby to try to figure it out, called Alchemy. They figured lead and gold were otherwise so similar, why can't you just... convert it? Because it requires nuclear physics instruments, or neutron stars. Some suspected it might be complicated, maybe impossibly so. Imagine going back to the 1500s and telling one of those guys "yes, it is possible, but it's not as simple as melting lead and mixing in some gold starter... first, you need to understand superconductors, supercomputers, subatomic physics..."
Irony is that Newton was seriously pursuing alchemy. The whole gravity thing was a side quest.
Turns out though that gravity was the philosopher's stone he was looking for.
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Stick some in a nuclear reactor and it is bound to happen. But it obviously isn't economical to sort out a few specs from the soup of other exotic and probably unstable elements.
Should have called it ALCHEMY instead of ALICE. Missed opportunity
Is this even news? I remember reading about this ages ago.
Profitability is just a matter of time. Uber was not profitable for years, too. Just wait until the economy of scale kicks in. Alchemy is here to stay. Element conversion is only getting started!
Dont forget network effects and bandwidth. Once there is an AI MCP the share price will blast off.
Finally a real world use for the "factory factory constructor".
If Newton were alive today..