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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;-jeffB, post: 24699634, member: 27832&quot;]Gold doesn&#039;t predate <i>fire</i>. I wouldn&#039;t be surprised if some of the very earliest exchanges of &quot;gold for value&quot; were to secure a warm place to sleep.</p><p><br /></p><p>Think about all the millions of ounces of gold (equivalent) that are being spent annually on fusion research. The fuel for fusion (tritium) currently costs tens of thousands of dollars <i>per gram</i>; full-scale cyclic production would likely bring that down to single-digit thousands of dollars <i>per gram</i>, tens of times more expensive than gold itself -- but it would be profitable to <i>burn it as fuel</i>, because the amount of energy you get is more valuable than the amount of tritium you burn.</p><p><br /></p><p>&quot;Making&quot; gold would run that process in reverse. Even if you could drive the process with perfect efficiency (which isn&#039;t possible), you&#039;d be spending millions or billions of dollars worth of energy to produce thousands of dollars worth of gold.</p><p><br /></p><p>If we suddenly find a way to drop the price of energy by a factor of a thousand or a million, you&#039;d get <i>much</i> better ROI by launching a large mining concern to a metal-rich asteroid and setting up full-scale extraction. That&#039;s not happening in our lifetimes, either, more&#039;s the pity.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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