Here's an interesting new post from AGXIIK and Renozep. It will serve as your morning thread. I'll post updates and charts into the comments section and then record and post your podcast a little earlier than usual today.
TF
GOLD. RARE, ELUSIVE, COMMONPLACE or...(d) ALL OF THE ABOVE
All gold in the universe formed when two neutron stars collided.
All the Gold in the Universe Could Come From the Collisions of Neutron Stars | Smithsonian
It's mind boggling that the equivalent of all the gold mined in human history can be found in a cube about 66 by 66 ft.
It's even more surreal that every speck of gold from your wedding ring to coins and 400 ounce good bars came from this one source 3.5 billion years ago.
Chart: How Much Gold is in the World?
Those 2 neutron stars produced the gold equivalent of our moon. It's thought that all the gold in the universe came from this single collision. Apparently this was the only collision of its type in almost 4 billion years.
When you think about it our galaxy was just forming when pieces of gold, maybe asteroid-sized, hit the earth while it was hot and molten. That cosmic drive-by salting of the earth gave us a finite supply of the yellow metal and we're the beneficiaries of this occurrence. No wonder that we've seen gold's scarcity as the most valuable form of money in the world.
Gold almost seems to have a life of its own.
Hundreds of countries have tried alternatives that eventually ended in a fall of empires, hyperinflation and the devastating effects that fall on the heads of people who forgot what's really valuable.
To own 1 gold coin or 100 means we hold in our hand a 3.5 billion years old relic; sometimes a barbarous reminder of the earliest and most violent years of this universe. To give a moment's thought to this should make one feel a bit humbled. It's hard to find places on the planet that hold claim to being 3.5 billion years old.
3.5 billion-year-old rock structures are one of the oldest signs of life on Earth | Live Science
I wonder if contained in the basic DNA structure of 3.5 billion year old blue green algae Stromatolites are a tiny piece of our genetic heritage, telling us gold really is that important.
How many times have neutron stars collided prior to this generation of galaxies formed 4-5 billion years ago? Some say our universe is 15 billion years old. Others say it's 60. But even the James Webb Star Telescope JWST viewers are only able to peek back 14 billion years.
James Webb telescope spots rare 'missing link' galaxy at the dawn of time | Live Science
No one knows the exact chemistry of those eras though some make few good guesses given the Live Science article above.
As the universe 'breathes', expanding and contracting on billion year cycles, the formation of gold might be less than rare than thought but still rare to us mortals digging for this metal.
With a scattering of all gold in the universe, we seem to be abundantly blessed with just enough gold to be rich, or so it seems. Maybe it's God's way of letting us we've been given just enough of the yellow metal to know it's inextricably linked to homo sapiens and our well being.
Or maybe we got lucky.
I like the first choice because God doesn't play dice with the Universe.
95% of today's gold was mined in the last 150 years It's no coincidence that our technologically modern era started the time we started pulling large quantities of gold from the ground. Prior to that gold was scarce because technology was not adequate to large scale mining.
The early gold was easy but it still represented an almost exact pinning of dollar to gold buying power.
In the fullness of time this is true everywhere gold was used as real money.
Plugging one of my favorite stocks, Fortitude Gold, FTCO relies on very thin ratios of .5 to 2.5 grams of gold per ton. In another article we saw what it takes to get just 5000 ounces of gold from the Pearl Deep pit. It's worth $13,000,000.
New permits were just approved so we're happy to see that Fortitude has another nice tranche of mineable gold to sustain operations and its 10% dividend for several more months. More permits should drop in the next 3-6 months.
We could see market caps shoot tens, hundreds of millions or even billions in junior miner market values as gold grabs hold of its real monetary price. Yet all this comes from scraping tiny bits of really old metal from the pebbles in a 500-foot deep open pit mine.
BTW...Neil asked me some questions about gold and why it's $2700 an ounce. Even though he's a really brainy physicist it took a mid-wit gold bug like me to explain these facts to him
