What if some alien civilization had the technology to strip not just the earth of all gold but also from satellites surrounding the globe in space? Think like Bad Guys 2 movie near the end.
I didn’t write “should” because my first thought goes to tech that we use already that relies on gold being a part of the equipment. It gets worse when I imagine people having gold teeth and then gets even worse when I think about health tech that could also be using gold for some reason (fake hearts?).
Anyway, it’s kind of a nightmare scenario in my mind.
I’d be more worried about zinc oxide.
On the plus side, the White House would look a lot less gaudy.
I don’t think it works on gold spray paint and self tanner.
Wouldn’t we still have quarter of the gold? Or maybe all gold would get less dense by three quarters since its the atoms getting snapped… 🤔
Yes, Thanos snaps are multiplicative.
But I think we can establish that objects get eliminated in their entirety and not on an atomic scale, or else the snap should have killed way more than half of the people considering that about half their cells just committed sudoku.
Btw if it worked on an atomic scale:
We assume Thanos only wants to snap the gold that has use for humans. We mined around 210,000 tonnes of gold and known reserves of gold hold another roughly 80,000 tonnes. That makes 290,000 tonnes total. 290,000 tonnes of gold have around 8.87 * 10^32 gold atoms, so Thanos would need to snap on average log_2(8.87*10^32) + 2 = 112 times to eradicate all of that gold.
Note that the total amount of gold on Earth is much larger than that (unknown deposits, deeps in the crust, in the core), but that would get rid of the stuff we actually care about.
I assume you mean seppuku, the Japanese ritualistic suicide by disembowelment, and not cells getting frustrated by number puzzles.
It’s a very common meme to call it sudoku.
Committing sudoku is a sort of meme way to refer to seppuku.
All technology would instantly halt.
The actual bond wires between the silicon pad and chip packaging for every chip with some kind of leads (feet) is actually an extremely thin thread of pure gold. It has to do with the super tiny size of the actual pads that are being bonded on the die, the robotics, the welding, and the physical properties of the wire connection.
Plot Twist, you input the target as “Gold”, but the alien’s universal translator was made in China, therefore it converts into the character 金… they get confused and wiped out the entire Kim Dynasty (Kim is written as 金 in Hanja)
Now you have a bunch of angry generals with nukes…
Good Luck.
Oh
I’d be more worried about rare earth metals like ruthenium or iridium. They’re used in many industries, not least in chlor-alkali electrolysis which is often used for water purification.
