this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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Adding to what others have already mentioned... Most of the gold will be from various collisions of external objects. The vast majority of the gold and other heavy elements are in Earth's core due to gravitational differentiation.
There is a volcano (in South America IIRC) that has unusually high gold content, but it is from the underground magma reservoir coming in contact with gold deposits. This is why space mining is a really big deal. The Earth is a resource poor gravity prison by comparison. The wealth in space is enormous compared to any differentiated body.
Gold is actually everywhere and relatively common, but only in very small quantities. Under the right conditions, the weight can help gold to concentrate and fall out of solution when that solution was once covering a very large area, dissolved the tiny bits of gold found all over a large area, and then pools into a low point over extremely long periods of time.
I hear you. So to get rich, all I have to do is get a shovel and dig to the Earth's core.
Just keep going until you hit China. Five year old me will be blown away.
It would be far easier to hit up some near Earth objects, then maybe Vesta, but Ceres is the mother load. Small enough to be solid, but large enough to be spherical and therefore somewhat differentiated if you can get to the center of that Tootsie Pop.
Maybe in the process we'll learn enough to effectively mine and utilize Phobos, the larger moon of Mars at 11 km in mean radius. That is the largest accessible orbital habitat that we have available (in flat pack IKEA furniture form) and it only has around 30-50 million years before it hits the Roche limit and turns into a ring, unless we manage to intervene.
How many licks to get to the center of a Ceres Pop?
At least 2
Are you a dolphin?
Roughly 240 miles.