September 2, 2025
Aluminum: concentrated electricity.
Ok – you’ve had the gold post. Now for a post about another metal. But first – let me back up on the gold topic before segueing to today’s metal…
Two questions…
1. How much gold has humanity extracted in all of history?
2. How much gold‘s left in the Earth’s crust?
I’ll answer :)…
1. If we trust this source, the total amount of gold ever mined in the world is about 216,000 tons (with two-thirds of it mined after 1950!). All of it would fit into a cube measuring 22x22x22 meters. Basically, that’s about the size of a skinny six or seven-story cube-shaped building. Not that much really. And if you rolled all that precious metal into a ball, you’d get a sphere with a diameter of over 26 meters.
2. As for what remains, the numbers vary wildly. From 40,000 to 80,000 tons could still be dug up. But what happens after that? Well, obviously, we’d have to start bringing gold from the Moon, Mars, and Venus – if that’s even possible. But can you imagine how much that would cost?
So that’s the deal with gold. There’s not much left, and the price just keeps going up. Time to move on to another metal – and the industrial systems used to make it…
Here’s a 90%-automated industrial system, where, under the constant watch of digital telemetry and automatic “iron hands”, rectangular containers filled with gray liquid metal move along a conveyor belt. The liquid solidifies, the solidified bars are shaken out, stacked, and packaged by those same iron hands. And you could watch this process forever. So – what’s the metal?…
…Aluminum!
// Thus – we’ve jumped from box 79 (gold: Au) to 13 (aluminum: Al). in the periodic table.
