Grrl Power #368 – Billions of bullions
Edit: Ok so I’ve updated Dabbler’s estimate from 2748 times as much, to 20 billion, because I am the worst at math. The actual worst. I’m getting a reverse Nobel Prize for it next year. A Lebon Prize.
Also, if you want to see a lot of gold stacked up in one place: British gold reserves
Having a ton of gold (531 tons, actually) in a virtually inaccessible location is not the same thing as having 531 tons of gold be totally inaccessible. Yes his identity is a secret, the location of his vault is a secret, there’s not an actual ten mile deep tunnel you can base jump down into to get the the gold, you either need his powers or something else that can tunnel through 10 miles of crust to get to it, Archon advised him on additional security he could take, etc, etc. I just wanted to include this page to show an example of a super using his powers intelligently. He does present a potential threat, but he’s not breaking any laws. It’s one of those “watch this guy closer than the strong guy making his living in construction, but otherwise live and let live” supers.
He could try to threaten cities on fault lines and ransom them for millions with is geokinesis, but he’s not living in a silver age comic book, so why would he? It is something that bothers me about a lot of supervillains. So many of them have powers, or their whole shtick is predicated on a gadget they made that with the tiniest application of intelligence could make them millionaires in the private sector. The Trapster made incredibly strong yet easily sprayable adhesive. The Green Goblin made something the size of an opened pizza box that not only can fly, it can carry the weight of at least two humans plus equipment, and based on some of the fights he’s had with Spider-Man, it’s not exactly short range either. Yes, the usual excuse is that most bad guys are a little bit crazy, but then consider this. The first time Spidey beats the Goblin, there’s this flying thing just sitting there. It’s not like the crazy bad guy filed a patent for it. Ok, maybe the first version before he went crazy, but Goblin’s been around for a while, and he’s probably upgraded the flyer, and post crazy, he’s probably not keeping up with the patent process. Somebody would take that thing apart, file their own patents, and boom. Delivery drones, extreme sports gliders, hoverboards, military hovering sniper platforms, whatever. Someone would do something constructive with it. That’s why I’m careful not to throw a lot of gadgeteers into the world, because it would cause an irreversible tech spiral, and the comic world would diverge dramatically from our own.
I actually worked out Dabbler’s math. The total amount of gold mined is estimated to be a 25 meter cube, converted that volume into a sphere, found a reddit thread where someone worked out the total volume of gold in the mantle and core to be a 52.25 mile sphere. Convert to meters, divide by 2 to get the radius, etc. Dabbler only had to google the volume of an Olympic sized swimming pool (which she can do in her head with her cybernetics) and did the rest in her head. She estimated the volume of gold because she knows the size of Earth and it turns out the composition of Goldilocks planets that support life are all pretty similar. (At least in the Grrl Verse) Spinning solid core surrounded by a mantle creates a magnetosphere, without which higher order life won’t evolve because the local star blasts the surface with too much radiation, and solar wind strips away too much of the atmosphere. Earth orbits a medium sized yellow sun which says a lot about its composition, planets are coalesced from stellar dust, debris and asteroid impacts, etc. Anyway, she’d been on enough planets to come really close on her estimates.
Harem jokes about marrying multiple people on this page, but legally, she is still considered a single individual.
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It is a shame that Harem is so morally challenged. I have a soft spot for freckles. If hers were a bit more pronounced, Harem would look the spitting image of one of my ex’s, in that final panel.
Harem isn’t morally challenged. Morality presents no obstacles for her.
*rolls on floor laughing, with tail wagging*
Diamonds are a more easily moved and compact form of wealth, but admittedly gold is more readily accessable and less suspicious. Glad to see I’m not the only one who’s thought of this superpower and ways to abuse the hell out of it.
Well, he abused it in a semi-good way.
I’d say part of him is thankful though. Trying to say where the gold from can get tedious when the government comes and asks. So having a superpower agency to give an ironclad description, helps.
True but diamonds are intrinsically worthless there value is entirely artificial
Everything’s value is artificial.
While true on an ultimate sense, diamonds are kind of a special case. Humans can now manufacture chemically and structurally perfect diamonds much cheaper than it is to mine them (yes, even gem grade ones). Jewellers can only tell the difference between natural and artificial diamonds because natural ones aren’t as high quality, they have more flaws and/or impurities. So the supply and demad that would normally dictate a high price doesn’t apply.
Diamonds are expensive because most people agree they are.
unless of course you compress 4tons coal and then dip it into a volcano instant naturally made diamond
since its heat+ pressure+ years which can be speed up with new mining tech but as to get the coal and enclosure that pressing on the coal would have to be withstand the heart of active volcano with out compromising the integrity of said device
Food and shelter has actual intrinsic value to human beings. Gold is a useful electrical conductor, but not really good for much else. Diamond can make good edges for cutting tools. Not all values are based on scarcity, but the main value of gold and diamond is.
True, but the scarcity of “real diamonds” – which is already an artificial category that excludes artificial diamonds and the like – is largely artificial, accomplished by a monopoly that deliberately allowed the world access to only a fraction of it’s diamond stocks and inflated the demand with ad campaigns.
(And it’s harder than you think to sell a diamond – since most of the demand is from people buying new diamonds from jewelers, it’s not that widely known, but the resale value of a “secondhand” diamond is much lower than the sale price.)
Whereas the scarcity of gold is at least a a natural phenomenon, and it’s hard to imagine things being otherwise; aluminium was expensive, too, but once better techniques were invented it became cheap.
Aluminium originally being expensive is rather ironic, given that it is both naturally occurring and one of the most common elements in the universe. With about 8% of the Earth’s crust being composed of it.
The reason refined aluminum was expensive was the difficulty entailed in refining it.
It can be found naturally in a pure state. But that is rare on the Earth’s surface, so your point is valid. Still tickles me though. Especially as I imagine a lot of the (really) deep stuff is in pure form.
DeBeers is a real life super villain.
Don’t forget its malleability and ductility. I’d like to get my hands on several ounces of gold so’s I could play with it (hitting it with a hammer). I’d happily give it all back when I was done. The problem is that it is so shiny (and doesn’t tarnish), it has high value, and no one would trust me with several ounces of their gold, despite being pretty trustworthy.
Everything’s value is not artificial…It’s based primarily on its rarity. If you were in an air-tight room & about half the air was pumped out (making it rare), you’d start to put a VERY HIGH value on it, wouldn’t you?
:P
This is why he’s being smart to NOT “flood the market” with the gold…If he makes it less rare, then it becomes less valuable.
The price of gold is determined by a lot of things, not the least of all speculation. If investors believe the price of gold is going to tank due to a known increase in available supply, they’ll expect the price to go down. Therefore, people who have gold will want to divest themselves of it, thus lowering the price even before the excess supply gets added into circulation.
In short, the simple knowledge that that much gold is now available affects the price of gold.
The Golden Barron would probably only need to spread the rumour that he can create gold out of (effective) thin air to tank the price
Since he is the ONLY one with the infinite supply of gold, the price would only briefly crash.
“You have tons! I’ll give you $10 a ton.” “No.”
“A hundred dollars?” “No. I sell at $1000/ounce”
When TWO people have large supplies and a desire to sell, then the price could crash to nothing.
You are putting way to much faith in the stock market.
The very fact that someone COULD dump unlimited gold on the market would cause a crash
Which is all the more proof that having the stock market at the core of our economy is stupid.
Just because he wants to sell at a higher price, doesn’t mean the buyers would be willing to pay it. Not if they know he has tons and not if they can still get it cheaper elsewhere.
That’s the thing, he just has to undercut the actual miners by a little bit to be cheaper. And it’d still be nearly as expencive
That situation is kind of the definition of artificial Midnight. If you pump all the air out than sell at at whatever you can get you’ve created a vertical demand curve. That doesn’t make air intrinsically valuable you’ve just manipulated demand by causing a shortage.
Diamonds are used for their hardness, such as in cutting tools, and their optical qualities, but I have forgotten the application.
Gold is great where you need a low-resistance conductor that can be stretched out very thinly, such as in electronics. Just watch the amount of current you pump through it or you can melt the gold. Gold also has some useful optical qualities.
I have read that diamonds are transparent to infrared. They were used in one of the Venusian landers as a small window to the pressure controlled inside so that they could take temperature readings.
It is too bad that they are too expensive to be used in the vision care industry. It would be nice to have a pair of glasses that I would never have to worry about scratching.
Gold is also useful in radiology, medicine, dentistry, the current best way to produce antimatter (the most valuable thing in existence) is by shooting an electron beam at gold, its relative abundance compared to platinum and palladium and its rarity and usefulness compared to silver has made it a near global currency.
Diamonds are hard and we can make them in a lab, training is required to verify their authenticity, they are good for cutting things but can still shatter.
Of course Jiggawat could out money him easily by darkening into a magnetic containment unit.
At $62.5 trillion per gram positrons out value gold by a few orders of magnitude.
If such containment units existed, her powers would make her one of the most dangerous people in existence.
Stored antimatter isn’t too different than stored nitroglycerin, except that the detonation isn’t just when excited, but even if the unit runs out of power. Also that the explosion (per weight) is orders of magnitude greater than a fusion bomb.
Her powers *already* make her one of the most dangerous people in existence. She makes positrons — putting them into a containment field or loosing them at the environment doesn’t make much difference.
Side thought: I wonder how Max’s invulnerability responds to antimatter annihilation? Carbon fullerene can take a massive hit, but it will still go ‘poof!’ if you blow positrons at it.
I imagine that Max would be destroyed by antimatter annihilation. No reason for it other than gut feeling. Achilles, on the other hand, would be unaffected. An interesting question is whether he’d even react to antimatter.
Of course he would.
“Ooh, I want to put that in my mouth and see what its mouthfeel is like!”
Probably tastes like pop rocks
Thinking on Achilles, with him behaving like this, until the last stars fade out, makes me chuckle. Never maturing as a character, never gaining more depth or learning greater skills. Just pratting around and jumping out of aeroplanes, without a parachute.
Like that he would be the human personification of the Winslow.
@Yorp: Well, since we already know that dinosaurs can evolve into humanoids (loosely used in the movie Super Mario Bros.), so what’s to say The Winslow hasn’t done the same after all this time in this universe…
Achilles strikes me as having been a “Lounge Lizard” back in the day…
Achilles’ description actually explains that he resisted attacks that would destroy matter at the subatomic level. So he’d be fine
Well the thing is if he was otherwise invincible antimatter could only remove an equivalent amount of him, so you would need $28 quadrillion of antimatter (or 378 earth economies worth of antimatter) to take a pound of flesh.
Also we do have magnetic containment cells to hold antimatter, they are expensive though.
So, the only way to get rid of him is to make an Anti-Achilles and get them to collide? Let’s hope nobody thinks of that in-universe 8-)
Loosing positrons into the environment just creates a sphere aproximately 0.5 meters around here that is somewhat hazardous to your health (gamma rays emitted from annihilation). Unless she does it in large quanntities (any amount you still measure in “electrical flow” kinds of units, as the amount in a few hundred lightning bolts is much too low to do much, due to the extremely low mass of positrons).
I do wonder, however, where the charge is coming from. Proton->neutron decay seems to be the most likely source.. Which is significantly more dangerous than the positron radiation. :)
He could wipe out De Beers.
Sooner the better!!!
The problem with diamonds is that there’s a lot of variables associated with the value of them. Unless his ability allows him to remove flaws and impurities without too much effort, gold would be the lazy geomancer’s way to riches. Once ounce of pure gold is just like any other ounce of pure gold. Too pure/clear of a diamond and a professional jeweler would be suspicious of it and figure it’s somehow a manufactured fake.
Or a manufactured reality, but manufactured diamonds are still more expensive than the natural, out of the ground, variety, especially those lacking certain type of flaws which get introduced when you try to do in hours what nature does in millennia.
It appears that I was incorrect as technology marches on. Some of the modern technologies for making diamonds can actually be cheaper than digging them out of the ground and provide higher quality diamonds as well.
… because the value is based around several decades of marketing and artificial scarcity. The geomancer could flood the market with diamonds just to stop the harm they cause.
But think of all the happily married women who would then realise that they have a low-value chunk of rock, representing their marriage, instead of the glittery fiction that they have in their mind at present.
Next you will be proposing that we should tell kiddies that the Easter Bunny does not lay chocolate eggs!
That is not true by the way, any kids reading this. Your eggs will be lovely chocolate next Easter. In the meanwhile keep a close eye on the comic, to see if you can spot any Easter eggs here.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s observed that. I once put together a Champions one shot for convention play where all of the characters used their powers ‘more intelligently’ and each character is tricked into saving the city by a elderly precognitive who basically lived as a barely employed semi-homeless person, because although she could win any lotto jackpot, she could also see how it would make her miserable. She could earn just enough money to be happy, and would always be financially secure and healthy, because she could predict any financial or health hardships and evade them.
She secretly protected the city by manipulating people and events indirectly.
The PCs were:
– The Crane: Freakishly huge with the power to get even huger, who made buckets of money by renting out his services on construction sites.
– Freejack: Super intelligent frat-boy who used his inventions to become wealthy, and has power armor for the same reason other rich people have yachts and speed boats.
– DJ Sonic: Sound manipulator who is a one man band, and is doing pretty well as a musician.
And so on. I had a few different characters set up the same way.
If you can teleport (the power that I’d personally want) why fight crime when you can live as a full time tourist and make a bit on the side as the ultimate high speed courier. For that matter, if you can teleport a decent amount of mass with you, and your range is a few hundred miles, you can get all sorts of people to give you giant piles of money by putting on a space suit and putting satellites in orbit for them.
Wormholes. All of of the above plus you can make every door in your house lead to another time and place. Your larder could open into a twenty-four hour supermarket. Your kitchen to your favourite restaurant. The freezer to an Arctic cave. Your cellar to the gold vault we see above. The attic to Tibet, long before the Chinese invasion.
One bedroom door leading to Helen of Troy’s chambers. Another to the home planet of the Succubi. A third to Sydney’s apartment. One bathroom to a Sultan’s harem baths. The library to the Great Library of Alexandria. The balcony to a beach in pre-Columbus Hawaii.
Columbus never got to Hawaii. In fact he didn’t get to main-land North America. He just took trips between Europe and the Caribbean.
I was specifying the era to choose for the wormhole, rather than suggesting trying to meet Columbus for tiffin or a game of bowls. Ie. pre 1492. An era guaranteed to be free of European diseases.
No disrespect – I mean, I’m sure your up on all of your shots and everything – but wouldn’t you be likely to introduce some of those diseases, though?
Read the YA sci-fi series “Jumper” by Steven Gould (not the biologist). The books are: Jumper, Reflex, Impulse and Exo. David (the star of the first novel) works for the NSA, dropping agents into hot spots undetected. In the last novel, Millicent (his daughter) has the same skills and she’s a courier for NASA, putting packages in orbit or fixing satellites at $1K/kilo. They made a movie of the series, and he wrote a novelization of the movie, but they both suck, you can ignore them. — Dagonell
I’m actually surprised here. All this talk of the natural ‘intrinsic’ value of things (or lack thereof), and nobody mentions the fact that gold is one of the least reactive solids in existence? I mean, there are only four properties of gold that have notable value: It’s one of the most conductive single elements known, It doesn’t corrode (or react with much of anything), It’s extremely malleable (to the point where a simple hammer can be used to flatten it to a few atoms of thickness), and it’s very dense. It also has a fairly low melting point. That, combined with it’s reactivity and density, cause it to be found almost exclusively in pure form, thereby making it very easy to mine and refine. But that doesn’t make it more valuable. It’s valuable because it has the aforementioned four properties, because it’s rare, because it makes very pretty decorations and, most importantly, because people think it’s valuable (this works on the same principle as the stock market).
Also, unlike the value of diamonds, the value of gold isn’t expected to drop should we ever gain access to cheap* space travel. There are entire planetoids made of diamond (look up Lucy), but gold is rare everywhere. Also, as previously noted, diamonds can be manufactured from one of the most common elements in existence, so as the technology of the human race continues to improve, their value can only be expected to decrease. Gold, however, can’t be “manufactured”, at least not easily. Technically, we’ve known since the advent of the Bohr Atom that it is possible to turn lead into gold by bombarding it with protons and neutrons, but simple sources of neutrons are even rarer than gold and sorting gold from lead is slow. Also, given the nuclear nature of the transmutation process, it’s only possible to make single atoms at a time, so the process is very slow. So, if we take an amount of money that can make things generally considered ‘impossible’ into a reality (say, $10,000,000,000), you can buy machines that will produce gold or diamonds from less valuable materials. For diamonds, at that price, you can create several (perhaps even hundreds of) tons per hour. For gold, though, even ten billion dollars will not be able to produce even one kilogram of gold per hour. Recent research shows that huge amounts of gold and other heavy elements are created in the collisions between neutron stars. Note that the creation of a neutron star will take billions of years, and that the only way you’ll get a reasonable chance of a neutron star collision is if you start with a binary star system (a very rare system). Then both stars have to, separately, undergo supernovae. Then they fall into each other. And then, after this several billion year wait, you get a payoff in which about 198,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Kg of gold are created in about two seconds. Okay, that’s a lot of gold, really fast. Unfortunately, the resulting mass ejection is only 0.000001% gold. About 20% of the ejection is radioactive, so it will probably be at least another ten million years before you can touch your new gold without fear of radiation poisoning. But you can create gold remarkably quickly with this process. If my calculations are right, you should be able to average about 6,274,241,387 (6 billion) kg of gold per second. Which is actually pretty amazing. Of course, if we assume that you can buy stars for about the same price per unit mass as you can buy gravel (which is pretty cheap at $13.90 per ton), you’ll need to invest $91,427,137,164,019,631,283,464,106,041.47 to buy the two stars in the binary system. If you sell the gold at the market price I just found on the web of $35,527.22/kg, you’ll get $7,034,389,560,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 . That’s 76940 times as much as you invested. The return on your investment is 0.00000025908% APR. But that’s what you get for investing in the inflation rate of the universe. The point of all this (besides that I like playing with cool numbers) is that while fabricating diamonds is fairly easy, fabricating gold is astoundingly difficult and almost always not worth the effort, so the value of gold will stay high for a long long, LONG time, while the value of diamonds will decrease at a rate proportional to the cost of fabricating it until all intelligent life dies (thus stopping the increase in technology and halting the price drop).
*a relative term: even if it costs the equivalent of billions of dollars and several years of travel time, interstellar travel can be considered ‘cheap’. You could say that the important division is whether or not the technology makes it possible for one person to decide to travel to another star and to, within his or her lifetime, make that a reality. I mean, if you wanted to and you had an incredible amount of money, you could buy a rocket that would put your body in the Alpha Centauri system, even with present technology. The difference is that the trip would take something on the order of 1.3 million years. Your body Would make it to another star system: you just wouldn’t be alive to enjoy the view. Your great grandchildren wouldn’t be alive to enjoy the view. It would probably be the single most expensive funeral service in human history, even if you were a toddler when you departed (though that would probably also make it the longest lasting funeral service in human history, too).
Gold pretty.
One number-player to another: You are awesome! By the time I got to the APR calculation I was laughing out loud. Thanks!
Can I copy this? If so, how would you like to be cited?
Aww, shucks. ‘Twas nothin’. Although it was the most fun thing I’ve written in ages.
Can you copy me? Yes, by all means. I don’t really care if you cite me, but if you do, do so as “Rms” or “Rms2000”. That’s my alias for just about everything.
@aboo Well, not exactly. I mean, this is only looking at one small star system amidst the hundreds of thousands per galaxy, and there are plenty of those in the universe as well, so it probably doesn’t simulate anything on quite such a universal scale. Also, it would be more accurate to say “the progress of heat decay in the universe” than anything else, since 99.5% of the mass in the system winds up in a black hole, which doesn’t exactly promote expansion. Also, I’d like to note that that APR was just for selling the Gold (Au) in the mass ejection at present market price. The remainder of the mass ejection would be primarily composed of other heavy elements, many of which are actually priced higher than gold on the present world market. Notable examples are Plutonium and Neodymium. 75 lb or so of Plutonium is enough to make a fission bomb, which would sell for a really high price if it didn’t get you killed first. Neodymium is used in extra-high strength permanent magnets. It’s price isn’t all that high right now, but it’s expected to go up, as it’s used in high-efficiency motor for things like Tesla Roadsters and Boeing 787s. Granted, those are presently top-of-the-line cutting edge systems right now, but if that technology proliferates as far as it’s the Internal Combustion Engine (the technology that we hope it will replace) did, then the demand for Neodymium magnets is going to push prices sky-high. Given that the ejection came from a collision between two neutron stars, there is also likely to be some quantity of Neutronium. That’s a solid mass of neutrons, for those of you who don’t know, and it’s the densest matter that can exist outside of a black hole. If it’s bound together by the Strong Force, it may also be the strongest material. On a side note: Neutronium is also Element Zero, technically (with no protons, you could also claim that it isn’t an element, and with no electrons, it certainly isn’t an atom, but that’s what you get for trying to index the periodic table from zero). Back to the original point though, the expansion rate of the universe is different from the inflation rate of the universe. We know that the universe is expanding (though not why). But inflation is the decrease in value of an object as more copies enter the market. Or the decrease in value as something ages. So, unless you can show that the value of a small universe is greater than that of a large universe, the inflation and expansion of the universe are two different things.
Did you just calculate the expansion rate of the universe using investment returns?
the uncontrolled release of any commodity causes chaos in the markets. even though we no longer use the gold or silver standards you have to be careful.
the world economy relies on two things Commodities and Confidence, to much or to little of either or both and bad things happen.
As an example, see what happened when Saudi Arabia increased their petroleum output just a little bit. $100/barrel oil sank to $40/barrel in less than a year. Don’t worry, we will be going back up to more restricted levels, with its high oil price, when enough of the North American oil plays have been wiped out, not just knocked down.
The only way to wipe out the North American oil plays is to keep the price of oil HIGH, so they are profitable, long enough to drain them.
Low prices will wipe out the players. But the next time prices are high, there will be new players. The oil will still be there.
North American shale oil is now functioning as a cap on the world price of oil. We know where it is, we know how to get it out. Price rises high enough, we do, and then the price can’t easily go much higher.
(And in the meantime, there will be people trying to figure out how to get that oil out at lower cost.)
Except for one thing: Initial investment. OPEC and Saudis are playing it to crush the shale oil and wipe out the investors. When they raise the prices later, new players must front serious investments before first drop of shale oil can be extracted… Investments everyone knows OPEC and Saudis can wipe out in short order if they want to. Very few will be willing to make that gamble with their fortunes.
Wow, that’s a lot of gold! Also, Dabbler is smart.
BTW, in the first panel, the word ‘Does’ should be ‘would’ and the word ‘know’ should be removed to make the sentence correct.
I’d also like to suggest switching cavern to bunker.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole
tl;dr, the heat at about 15km (9 miles) down is expected to be around 300 °C (570 °F).
Cavern implies the area they visited is unshielded. Bunker may be better as it pre-emptively explains how they’re surviving the visit..
Yeah, that’s a lot of gold. Indeed, as that geokinetic guy is on the floor, panting from the effort of getting it, I’d be on the floor panting from the dreams of avarice by merely seeing it.
:P
I am not seeing what your seeing. The person panting is Arianna.
Okay…My bad in not looking closely enough. As such, I modify my earlier statement that my reaction would be just like hers.
Well, since every Gold Bar in existence is stamped, he needs pretty much a fence to sell his gold and he needs to exchange below the Radar to keep the economy in balance.
Also there are rare metals that are worth a sh**ton more than gold and he could sell a few kilograms to the right research organizations (mostly entertainment companies with really deep pockets), and make an absolute KILLING.
I think it´s fair to say that “intelligent” is kind of a stretch when talking about the use of his powers.
For a Geomancer this guy is kind of a Noob.
Only a fraction of gold is kept in bars. And solid percent of it is counterfeit, and not every stamped bar is actually gold (there is an alloy, of wolfram or something close that is identical in weight to gold, and after gold plating it, you wouldn’t know until you actually saw it in half).
Exactly my thoughts.
Germanium, Platinum, Neodymium, Yttrium, Thulium, Terbium, etc….
All these elements will get you way more cash with way less unwanted attention.
Don’t think you are going to get away with your occult chanting. I am keeping my eye on you!
“Official” gold bars are stamped, sure. But so what? Gold is gold, and it hasnt been illegal to own gold bullion for over 40 years. All the lack of a stamp means is there will likely be a small extra cost to test the purity of the gold being sold, but he’s making his own gold so what the hell does he care?
There might be some other metals worth more per kilo, but not THAT much more, and the market (by your example) is too small to support much in sales, and it would both hurt and draw notice from the businesses that usually supply it. If youre filthy rich from essentially printing your own money you dont want to draw attention to the fact. Plus of course, everyone recognises and values gold. The same cannot be said of the various exotic metals. (assuming theyre not also radioactive into the bargain…)
China produces basicly all of the world’s rare earth elements. Literally *every* other nation in the world would be your customer (and protector) if you were to sell Germanium.
I’m sure Archon has considered making him an offer. He’s probably not to interested.
After all, there’s nothing they could offer him. He doesn’t need protection if noone knows who he is (he’s just a guy who inherited a bunch of spanish gold. Nothing suspicious here), and he doesn’t need their money
There are unused rare earth element mines in the US, but it’s cheaper to let China pollute “way over there” than to find a clean way to mine and refine them in the US.
Um… if he could pull up 190Pt ( an isotope of platinum), it would be worth around $1 billion per troy ounce in it’s pure state. I believe that might be slightly more valuable than 1 troy ounce of gold…
https://www.curiousnotions.com/home/metals.asp
It’s probably easier (and safer) trying to find a buyer for gold, though.
Good luck finding someone to buy a troy ounce of it while staying under the radar
But he doesn´t need to stay under the radar then.
1 Billion is more than enough for a comfortable Lifestyle, especially if you let your Money work for you.
So in essence he needs to sell only one ounce and is set for life. WAY less work than watching the gold market. and it doesn´t destabilize anything.
As I said, kind of a noob.
Or just VERY happy with being anonymous
So your sugestion is for him to mine a even harder to find metal, to get even more attention to himself with even fewer sales?
Our definitions of intelligence seem to be opposite to each other.
Gold has just about the right value/commonity combination that you can life of it, while not drawing too much attention to yourself from selling it. (He still got attention from Arc of course).
Anything more valuable draws more attention.
Anything less valuable would need so much effort, people would wonder where that mine is and also draw attention (or need that much people for the transportation).
The problem with gold is that the everydude knows it’s worth something.
Ask random people around you. Most of them haven’t even heard of most of the rare earth elements, yet know they market value.
It is much easier to just sell these rare earth elements directly to a microelectronics corporation than to turn your gold bars into money.
Is it? Remember, he wants to stay unknown.
There are plenty of ways to turn gold into cash without people knowing who you are (black market). I doubt official corporations would want to deal like that (and even be able to keep it a secret).
Easy way around that: The guy registers as a gold miner. He has one claim, surrounding his rural property, where he extracts gold that he personally mined and smelted. Because gold melts at a relatively low temperature, a small smelling and forming rig is all he needs. There are several one-(wo)man gold operations working a single successful claim here in Canada; his will be slightly more successful than the others with a lot less work. As a gold miner, he would not raise too much suspicion by introducing new gold into the gold market, seeing as that is what gold miners do.
Even if his gold is in bar form for storage it doesn’t have to stay in bar form when he sells it. Who is going to give a gold ring/cross/chain/etc. a second look at the pawn shop?
Certainly not Chumlee . . .
Someone who keeps going into pawn shops over and over to sell bits of gold jewelry though will soon start to arouse some suspicion that he stole them. Not only would the pawn shop not buy the stuff, they might call the cops.
That was meant to be just an example. But even if he did arouse some suspicion that he stole them that suspicion wouldn’t last long if the police can’t find a match for the items on their stolen property list.
Actually, if I were him, I would not store it as gold bars, I’d store it as gold bar! That way even if someone manages to get down there, they still have to figure out a way to bring it back up.
The gold bars are close to the size of builder’s bricks. What he needs to do is build a house of of all those gold bricks and then paint it to look like like regular bricks. And if he is a Wizard of Oz fan he could also make the driveway going up to the house an actual yellow brick road.
Why paint? He’s basicly an Earth bender. He can just encase the bricks with actual earth
All well and good, but there are a lot of shoplifters around. If they can rob a shop, then a house is even easier!
Given that gold is a superior conductor, this would make it viable to use in electronics. It’s one of the reasons I hope someone cracks the base alchemy thing and artificially creates gold. Not to mention that the sort of achievements that would be necessary to get that one would have a tremendous amount of broad applicability and be something of a societal game changer making “turn lead into gold” look like a parlor trick. Sort of like how tackling the troubles of space travel revolutionized our daily lives.
In any case, the economy is not nearly as dependent on gold as it used to be. Flooding the market would be damaging but not as catastrophic as people might think. Even by the time Hudson Hawk came out, flooding the market with gold would have done severe damage to segments of the global economy but wouldn’t have destroyed it.
Cracks the base alchemy thing? Seriously? You’re talking about high-order atomic fusion. Without several (dozen) breaththroughs in a wide variety of scientific and engineering fields, this is effectively impossible to do on a scale which would make it in any way useful.
And those same breakthroughs would also let us mine asteroids cheaper than building gold by smashing say, Iron and Iodine together.
It’s been done. Someone DID figure out how to artificially make gold. The problem is that the source is an even rarer metal. Platinum.
That was the plot of an old Superman episode.
Adventures of Superman: Season 6 – Episode 13: “All That Glitters”
https://www.supermanhomepage.com/tv/tv.php?topic=reviews/aos-ep104
Actually according to that link in the billion dollars per troy ounce post platinum is LESS rare than gold by a factor of closing on 20%. Its more expensive because its a pain in the ass extract, not because its rarer.
That was the point of the later part of the paragraph. Generally, big projects are more world changing in the steps that must be achieved to get to it. High-order atomic fusion is somewhere far down the road from where we are, not nearly as far as, say, stellar lifting, but it’s on the path.
A couple dozen radioactive gold atoms were produced at Fermilab, outside Chicago, back in the 1980’s, along with other materials from a proton collision into a stationary target. I am not sure how much it cost to run Fermilab’s accelerator ring, the Tevatron, and the subsequent analysis, but that has got to be some of the most expensive gold every produced. Too bad it had decayed to something else in a few days.
Which one of the Harems is the original?
All of them
Remember that they were identical from the initial split, and their different apperances are only because Harem have styled herself so.
It does raise the question: What does a “new” Harem look like after a split?
I always thought that the white hair and glasses harem is the original because it¡s the only one that isn’t modelled after other character (or perhaps is modelled after a character that has yet to be introduced), unlike the other harems:
Blond harem=arianna
Goth harem=Gwen
Redhead harem=heatwave
short hair harem=Peggy
The redhead is the original look. First Dave has stated this before second the freckles they all share are a giveaway.
Strawberry blond is the least modified, but not even Daphne knows if she is the actual ‘original’ Daphne (and they all have the freckles)
All of the above. None of the above. It can almost be thought of like a bacteria; when it divides, you are left with two daughter cells, but no parent cell; its material went into forming the daughter cells. The daughter cells then operate independently/interdependently, just like any other bacteria cells of that species.
In a similar way, when Daphne splits in two, there are two “sisters”, not “original” and “clone”. Up until that moment of separation, there was one, then there are two, but still with only one mind.
Oops, like a bacterium cell;
Goofed my plurality.
• *readies biopsy needle*
• *turns on, and tests, thoracoscope*
• *opens wormhole to David Nuttall‘s location and steps through.
• *hands over liability waiver, to David Nuttall *
Ok, first you will need to study that, before signing it. Allow me to point out important factors though. Firstly that I have no experience with this procedure, nor am I licensed to conduct it in any jurisdiction. Most importantly though I have no medical training nor experience.
Fortunately my Antarctic base does not fall under any national jurisdiction, bar my own, so we can conduct the operation there. We just need to step back through the portal, once you are satisfied with the waiver.
Now, just to check, you think that the bacterium has given you pleurisy, right?
Not even she knows
That’s like asking if you are still the same person after stepping in a teleporter.
Or even worse: The teleporter spits out 2 of you. And than asking which one is the real one
I am with McCoy on this one. It is wormholes or nothing for me. I am not signing up for being disintegrated. No matter how much you think you can recreate a look-alike afterwards!
What if Harem was more like…this person???
https://www.yojoe.com/images/resize/w/MAX/imagestore/58/74930.jpg
My opinion on teleportation would remain unchanged. But you have managed to find a way to make her even less appealing,* than she presently is, I will grant that.
* Visually highly appealing, in the final panel, but loyalty is very important to my kind, and she lacks it, even at the social level. So my comment is not alluding to her joke above. Wanting to marry a richer older spouse has never bothered me, as concept. It simply represents a desire to ensure a comfortable standard of living and/or to ensure that children are well provided for.
Richer older women, who remain fairly attractive, and who remain willing and able to have children, may proceed to make enquiries with me.
See, i told you I was a soppy romantic!
I never claimed that I was good at it mind.
I love it…. Very little is known about his background…
except he can change his skin color, the minimum number of languages he speaks, that he can throw his voice, he’s an acrobatic contortionist, knows several mystical (not just your run of the mill) martial arts, strong suspicion of having European military academy training, AND that he’s a paranoid schizophrenic with multiple personalities…
yeah, they really don’t know much about his background…
“he’s not breaking any laws”
He only has rights to mine the land he owns, or the portion of the Earth directly under it. Unless there is a depth cap that I am unaware of. In addition, there are restrictions on mining for most lands, even those privately owned. So he has broken mining laws and stolen from other people, technically.
Well… technically if he took it from the core.. it would be directly under his land. Also don’t ascribe US mineral rights to all countries. We in Canada have very different laws on mineral rights and I would assume most other countries as well have variants.
Why are so many commenters using the word ‘core’? The text says the geokinetic took it from the “mantle” and the diagram agrees. The mantle is still quite near the surface, relatively speaking.
All countries that I know of control mining, even on private land. Otherwise you would have strip mines everywhere. No country that I know of allows you to tunnel under a neighbor’s land and take things from under it.
just ask Kuwait about Iraq and slant drilling, or any slant drilling operation in general.
in Canada owning the land does not equal owning the rights. Mineral Rights on crown lands are open to exploitation and while mining has to go through environmental assessments I suspect that being a geomancer the environmental assessment is kinda pointless. This allows for panning for gold etc without having to buy mineral rights(in british columbia, a canadian citizen can obtain a free miners license is 25$ and as long as “destructive mining” does not take place there is no oversight.
as for core and mantel, yes she said he took from the mantel. (they reference core in first part of the statement) but the point stands… arc degrees headed downward to the level of the mantel is enough to say entire cities worth of people could claim that as being under their property… maybe not the entire earth – but everybody on the other side that has an angle that intersects the location and everyone above on the same side where the converging angles meet…
I drink your milkshake?
There is also a part of the mantle directly below his house though…
In the UK the default is that the owner of the land also holds any mineral rights. However the rights can become severed.
That was how I understood it to operate in South Africa, as a pup. And was surprised when I found out that Australia and other countries did not all follow that principle. But, whatever the case may have been, nowadays it is all exclusively owned by the state and licensed to prospectors.
Sadly one of those severed rights, in the UK, is for particular types of minerals.
Namely: oil, gas, coal, gold and silver are vested in the Crown
Soo if you find natural plutonium, get yourself a radiation suit, and start digging, its all yours!
Someone would have to prove that the gold came from under land they claimed. And if there is no depth limit, then any gold at the core would technically be under the ownership of literally every mineral rights holding land owner on the entire planet.
“Someone would have to prove that the gold came from under land they claimed.”
Agreed. Proof of mining and damages would be quite difficult. That’s what saves him.
“And if there is no depth limit, then any gold at the core would technically be under the ownership of literally every mineral rights holding land owner on the entire planet.”
The actual center of the Earth is a single zero-dimension point, not a ball. There are several possible ways to define it, but gravitational definition makes the most sense: the zero-gravity point in the center. So if there is no depth limit, an owned piece of land looks like a 3-D very lloonngg slice of pie.
I believe that depends on the specific laws of the nation though.
I once read that China does indeed consider land owned to go all the way down, which means they need underground roads to follow only public property, which causes some very stupid designed being needed.
Other lands have different laws though
The base theory of any government is that everything belongs to them, and it is a matter of practicalities, such as bigger governments saying it is their loot, that stops them from taking anything they can reach. Our gold boy is likely going to have to cough up to keep the thugs off his back. He may not be doing anything illegal now, but knowledge of a billion $ payoff and some smart lawyers, and he will find himself “guilty” of violating all sorts of laws.
Which is why noone knows who he is.
He may not BE a super villain, but he sure is capable of being one. I like to think those nations atleast realize it’d be stupid to piss him off for such a childish reason
Archon knows who he is… AND they are accountable to various “Government” entities for their part in things… therefore it is guaranteed that his name WILL be available to some sort of government personnel OTHER than Archon, and sooner or later the computer that the database is currently being stored in will be hacked and his personal info will be leaked… whether it is byt some goober fogetting to log out and the cleaning crew spies on it, or by rival governments cyber warriors *cough* china/north korea *cough* or by somebody like the hackers known as “Anonymous” once they find out, or more likely, by DEUS as soon as Harem tells him… then again, Zoeng may be playing the long game here and putting out MISINFORMATION… sort of as a “loyalty test”, and if certain OTHER parts of Archon see who falls for it hook, line and sinker and bites, well, then they have a whole ‘nother angle on things…
Mmm, the latter does strike me as interesting. I had been wondering at the wisdom of mentioning stuff like that in front of the recruits, given that Dabbler is classified above their pay-grade. Partial misinformation though, which was not playing with something which could disrupt the economy, would be a useful way to mass-test loyalty and discretion.
Harem should stand out like five sore thumbs!
Hypothesis: There is no Geomancer and there never has been – Archeon has another method of obtaining gold that they REALLY don’t want anyone to know about, maybe from seawater, asteroids, alchemy or just Harem teleporting into North Korean vaults, and this is a way of setting up a plausible cover story. They want it to gradually leak out to the right ears that someone can produce large amounts of gold on demand so when Archeon needs to discreetly sell some gold everyone will assume its The Geomancer with his non-replicable power instead of Archeon with an currently unknown but replicable invention. That way no one will be too surprised and, more importantly, no one will try to reverse engineer a repeatable mechanical process. Look how quickly other countries got the Atomic Bomb after America proved it was possible.
international waters…or hell he just goes straight down from his house,, the key word here is swirling.. he just waits till the gold is under his property then pulls it up. sooo many ways around your issue.
not to mention that it relays on the definition of mining. Mining normally comes in the form of mineshafts and other potentional instabileties to the earth.
For him? It’s practically taking the gold out of a storage area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_the_Law_of_the_Sea
Search for ‘mining’. There are limits on mining in international waters. The laws refer to “seabed”, but it includes mining.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantle_%28geology%29
The mantle is solid or plastic. It moves around only on geologic time, and the land above generally moves with it.
And international waters, which even excluding EEZs makes at least half the surface of the earth.
And in a larger context, what if aliens moved in and took all of the planets except for Earth? Or, more simply, mined out all useful materials on the Moon? “I can do it, you can’t stop me, and you couldn’t use it yet because your technology hasn’t gotten good enough” is a horrible way to run a larger society.
This guy could make billions consulting for legitimate mining companies, which would improve their profitability and lower the environmental impact. He could make billions taking toxic waste down to subduction zones in the mantle and safely getting rid of it. Instead he takes a resource because he can, no one can stop him, and the world hasn’t developed the tech to do the mining on its own.
He would be in very high demand, as an invaluable asset.
Maybe too stressful for his taste?
He could. Doesn’t mean anyone has any right to force him to do though.
Also: We will probably NEVER be able to down into the Mantle. If we ever do get that far, we’ll already be an international society, and don’t need to.
Soviet scientists once tried to drill a hole down as far as they could. To see what would happen. They had to give up at 12km because the heat and pressure basically made it impossible. Took them 26 years, and they didn’t even get halfway down the crust. Which is tiny compared to the rest of the planet
It is possible he’s not getting it from anyone else’s land. He could dig a hole straight to the mantle. Since the gold he is extracting is in molten form (i.e. liquid), he can simply pull up whatever is below his property at the time, wait a bit for more to flow under his land and pull that up, rinse repeat.
I went looking to see if there were limits on how far down property rights extend. I found this.
https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3216/how-far-down-do-property-lines-go
Thanks for the link. US oriented, but considering the international angle, so of wider use.
Hrrm… fundamentally laws, don’t work with super powers in the mix. This is the “is Dabbler a rapist” discussion all over again. The law doesn’t have an opinion on “citizen uses magic powers to produce core gold”, and squinting really hard at its notions of mining and the rectangles we draw on the world to which human is allowed to do what where without other humans shooting bullets at them won’t suddenly make it grow one.
There’s a lot of seeking of victim in the comments above, my favorite being reinterpreting this as stealing from everyone on earth, but none of that is going to matter when you think about the existence of a dude/lady who can tap his foot on the ground and break the earth in half. The only sane stance for the law to take regarding this guy is the same one it takes towards Maxima or Dabbler. “He is more powerful than us, but all he wants is things we can give? DONE!”
International law tends to be fairly pragmatic for these things. If you look at claims on islands for instance. You have the principle of ‘first come first served’. Also, although mostly a saying, ‘possession is 9/10ths of the law’ is actually a practical statement which does underpin property disputes, and has actually been used to settle such.
I could lay claim to the Moon, but if some other bloke gets up there and starts digging, he has the more convincing claim. Every country and property owner can lay claim to their share of the Earth’s pie, down to the centre. But if they can’t get there, their claim is both unenforceable and weaker when compared to someone who can.
This is ignoring the moral issue. I too consider the worlds resources to belong to the people of the world. But that is not how our societies operate. So we should not adjudicate his claim differently to normal.
As has been seen recently, if I don’t agree with the morality portrayed I speak up. In this case though, I think Dave has made a good call on the ownership of that gold. He can access those mineral reserves, where nobody else can.
Further he has even created, and made habitable, the region where it is being stored. Which could even be considered to be sovereign territory! Given that deep mineral rights, or territorial rights, have not been contested in international law. So no precedent has been established.
If I were the guy, I would stick a flag in the ground and lay claim to it. Either in my own right, or for the country of my choice.
He certainly has a nice war-chest to fight any legal dispute. Nobody has better than his 9/10ths claim to it. Especially not if it lies directly beneath land which he already holds the mineral rights to.
You are overthinking this dude. He doesn’t need a flag. If folks show up to confiscate his stuff, whoops, it sank into the ground. In an ironic twist on the usual saying, he is beneath the law.
The ground was what I suggested he laid claim to. Archon have already accepted his title to the gold.
All he has to do is go down below the level of the sea bed and them go off shore 200 miles to international waters before mining. Actually he just has to claim that he did this as it is impossible to prove that he didn’t.
i know Harem is joking about marrying the geokinetic, but i am guessing Max’s golden visage would be a lot more attractive to the guy. just saying.
i’m also wondering if the geokinetic brought that vault temporarily up to the surface, or if he has the ability to make sure Ariana and Zephan Zoeng aren’t hurt by the pressure/temperatures of 10 miles below the Earth’s surface.
also disappointing: he should make a huge bed of gold coins and sleep on top of it in dragon pajamas.
There wouldn’t be any pressure 10 miles below the surface, not in the way you suffer water pressure at the bottom of the ocean.
There would, actually. 10 miles is really deep, enough for air pressure to be significant. By the estimates of a couple calculators I found online (the air pressure one I doubt if it’s actually designed for this scenario, so YMMV), it’s equivalent to being about 130 feet underwater.
If the air pocket is as artificially created as the chamber itself, there’s no reason it would have anything but sea-level density.
air isn’t weightless, as Random 832 posted. there’s also temperature to consider.
so fun facts for the deepest mine IRL, Mponeng gold mine:
it is only 4 kilometers deep, 1/4th of the depth of this geokinetic’s gold cache
it is hot. 66 °C (151 °F). so they have to use ice to cool the mine down constantly, to 30 °C (86 °F)
there was an extremophile bacteria living in the mine when they broke ground.
Apparently, during the drilling of the deepest hole ever (12km. Soviet scientists were bored), they also found microfossils super deep
In the same way that air pressure drops when you go up, it will climb FAST when you go down.
Also, the temperatures would be insane at that depth. Think 200 degrees celsius
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D1nK7q2i8I
“Somebody would take that thing apart, file their own patents, and boom.”
Yeah, pretty much. Boom. Steal GG’s design? You pretty much want to ask permission unless you want to spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder for a lunatic seeking revenge.
Even if he DOES grant permission, he could always “change his mind” later. He IS crazy and has done some real nasty stuff in his universe. Killing Gwen Stacy is only the tip of the iceberg.
Spoiler: He’s raped and impregnated his son’s girlfriend/fiance, he tried a repeat of the Gwen thing with Mary Jane, he’s PROUD of the things he’s done, and he’s tried to kill Aunt May repeatedly despite knowing that she has nothing to do with Spider Man.
All the more reason not to **** with his tech. I guess I should have been clearer: you should pretty much steer clear of GG if at all possible, but if you absolutely *must* study his tech, then you should ask for his permission.
Or, as morality would clearly not be a concern, kill him first.
Wait, Aunt May has nothing to do with Spider Man? o_O
Something completely different:
What are the chances this geomancer – if he appears in the story – turns out to be a relative or even an (unknown) parent of Maxima?
Her Golden skin was never explained so far. This could be the beginning of a story arc that ventures there.
Ok, I can see why Archon isn’t messing with him. He has 5.3 trillion USD in gold stored in a mostly secure location… A fraction of that dropped into the world economy would be really bad.
And, if you study the subject a bit, gold IS the metal you want for this. The other metals talked about here are either far rarer (or not present) in the core or simply too hard to dispose of discreetly. And rare metals are called rare because of relative scarcity (which is going to be true even in the core). Gold is correct because or both perceived value (versus actual rarity) and the fact that there is a world market in it.
They are also not messing with him, because he. has. done. nothing. ILLEGAL!!!
If you had geomantic powers, you literally could swin trough gold coins, maybe even bars.
If he is afraid of destabilizing the markets he could simply cycle through various metals and/or minerals to sell in smaller amounts. Platinum, titanium, copper, the rare earth metals, even uranium are in high demand. For that matter being able to sell the location with 100% accuracy or coal, oil, diamonds, or the other mineral deposits would be worth a fortune as well. Not as flashy as just having gold of course but would probably draw less attention to yourself, especially if you’re the boss of a mining or oil company that “happens” to find huge deposits. And if it is in fact just told you love you could buy the gold from the gold brokerage that you just happen to own as well, literally having the gold and the money too.
No I haven’t imagined what I would do if I had powers like that, why do you ask?
And if I was in fact a rich super I would pay vast sums to have a smartphone that has an autocorrect that only changes misspelled words rather than changing perfectly good words to something else randomly.
I don’t knot what you’re walking about.
oh wait… one geokinetic super could literally end all the really horrible labor conditions currently in place to mine rare earth minerals for our technology. they could make using smart phones ethical!
I actually made a teleporter character who used this as the reason he was rich. He was still an adventurer, but we used his mansion as our not so secret “secret base”.
I am a long time reader of Girl Poser and consider it an excellent comic, one of the best web comics I have found so far. I don’t often take time to comment on it, but this page has so many errors and misconceptions that I had to do something.
1) Amount of gold already mined:
Estimates wary a lot, but even going with the lowest estimates there is enough gold mined to fill 2 Olympic swimming pools (and that’s if you go with the recommended depth of 3 meters, if you use the minimum depth of 2 meters you can of course fill 3 instead)
The largest estimates are about 16 times higher than the lowest, so enough to fill 32 swimming pools…
If we go by DaveB’s estimate of a 25 m cube (which is a pretty fair middle ground estimate) there is enough gold to fill 4 Olympic swimming pools (or 6 if we use pools the are only 2 meters deep)
2) Amount of gold in the entire world:
Nobody knows for sure how much gold there is in the earth and estimates vary a lot, but again, the number DaveB is using, is a pretty fair middle ground. And yes a ball of gold 52.25 miles wide could indeed cover the earth in about half a meter of gold (more like 60 cm actually).
What I don’t understand if how anyone can think that that massive amount of gold would only fill 2748 Olympic swimming pools? That number is just so wrong that one should imminently realize that something is wrong. And indeed it is, the actual number is 82,757,066,666 Olympic swimming pools! (or close to 83 billion!!)
3) Importance of gold to modern economy:
Since it is a very long time that countries stopped basing their currency on gold, and since the value and trade in gold is only a very small part of the overall world economy, and even if the gold prices dropped very low (like to the value of cobber, gold is a better conductor than copper, so it would never go lower than copper) it would really affect the few countries and companies that depend on mining of gold, as well as anyone that had invested heavily in gold. The rest of the world would just benefit from cheap gold jewelry and slightly cheaper/better electronics.
Also, selling what is at most 50% of the gold already on the market, would not really effect the gold prices that much on a long time basis. Initially they might drop to something like 1/10 of the current price (which would still be 10 times the price of silver), but they would likely stabilize at 2/3 of current price after a while.
And that is why one should always do the math themselves instead of puting any trust into internet mathematicians.
Actually, I’m willing to place a bet at even odds that the author did the math himself. He just did it wrong. :p
25 mile radius vs 25 meter side ~= 3000* times difference, *linear* dimensions. Problem occurs when you realize that you have to use cubic measurements for volume, where you go up to the tens of billions difference.
It’s basic math once you realize you have to check dimensions, but most people don’t realize they *have* to make that check.
*– 3000 times is close enough for Fermi estimation. And when working with such uncertainties, it’s *better* to be imprecise, anyways. It lets people realize how uncertain the estimates are than 12 digits of precision, when you aren’t really sure of even the first digit, though you got the order of magnitude right, Which me and Kris are closer to.;)
Lighthawk. Please correct the spelling errors. I know your math is probably correct (much better than my math) but as far as I know, there is not an element named cobber, the comic is named Grrl Power, not Girl Poser and it’s vary, not wary under these circumstances.
I would love to correct those spelling errors (especially the embarrassing “Girl Poser” one), but unfortunately we can’t edit posts…
I should have checked better before posting I guess.
(Also, I am from Denmark so spelling in English is not exactly easy for me)
I realized it as soon as I hit submit that you would not be able to correct it. Apologies.
Personally found ‘Girl Poser’ to be an hilarious autocorrect :D
The actual quantities of gold in the world is largely irrelevant to the point being made. That being that pulling gold out of the earth and selling it is an effective way to make money with superpowers. Maybe not the best, but pretty good. Also, despite the fact that few economies are still based on gold, a sudden surge in gold would mess with investor confidence which COULD send the economy into a tail spin. I emphasize could because it can be hard to predict the economic effects of any action, even for an economics student.
DaveB, I think this issue is very important, at least as far as Dabbler’s reputation as a math genius is concerned.
Usually, when you compare amounts of a bulk material, you use mass, which is proportional to volume NOT to the cubed root of volume (linear dimension/radius/etc.).
If you use no rounding on intermediate steps, assuming the numbers you have are exactly correct, the actual ratio of the radii of these two spheres of gold would be about 2710.9908, not 2748.
Then, to compare their volumes, you need to cube this ratio, yielding 19.924 billion. Having Dabbler say, “20 billion times as much! Approximately,” would cause that “WHAT!?” to make a lot more sense. (Or, if you’re going for the precise mental math genius angle, you could have her say, “19.924 billion times as much! Approximately.”)
Alternatively, if you like your 2748 ratio, you could cube that to get 20.752 billion. It’s almost the same.
Don’t worry, Dave is taking note of the comments. There will be a corrected version.
Dabbles has a reputation as being a Math genius? o_O
Or we could just assume that since their world has super-powered beings in it, and ours doesn’t, that the differences don’t end there. That world may have had less gold mined than ours. It may have had tectonic plates shift in such a way that the continents don’t look like ours–maybe there’s not even an Australia because it remained attached to Antarctica. Maybe the US is made up of 56 smaller states than our 50 because history played out differently. Maybe instead of Venezuela, there’s a much larger Colombia.
A world without an Australia? Give me a ticket there please, one way :D
Gods Own was never part of Australia, so should still be there even without Convict Continent :P
I have absolutly no deep knowledge of geoly or physics… but if you put away the entire gold element of the planet core, is there not a risk of i don’t know disturb the balance of it?? like if you put away the hydrogen of water it become oxygen and basicly disapear… i’m really worried there…
It would more like pulling out the metals suspended in the water.
No, because the core IS metal. Practically the entire core is made of iron (99% according to some)
He has only taken a swimming pools volume out (over a period of a decade), so that indicates his capacity is not enough to warrant alarm. Alarming for the economy. But not for upsetting the balance of the Earth’s spin or whatnot.
Of course if it turns out he could poof the whole lot up, stripping the planet in one go, and dumping it somewhere on the surface, yea, there probably would be some very unpleasant side effects. Especially if it is still at the pressure and temperature it was deep below the Earth!
Wibbling planet syndrome would be the least of our worries. Brown trousers all round.
I’ve considered something similar myself. My personal choice of Power is telekinesis that can work on the atomic level. That leads to the idea of a Cape working for the military and making an OK salary saving for his/her retirement by spending half an hour a day turning coal and trace minerals into rough diamonds. This hypothetical TK is limited by the fact they have a human brain and can’t multi-task fast enough to handle hundreds or thousands of atoms at once, but half an hour a day producing a single, believable but almost perfect to cut 1 carat diamond (call it $500 on the open market) and assuming they didn’t do weekends would yield over $100,000 a year. That’s a nice little nest-egg.
When you get telekinesis down to the sub-atomic level added together with telepathy you effectively have magic.
your problem with that plan is that, as has been mentioned in the earlier comments, the value of diamonds has been grossly and artificially inflated as it is with current technology already perfectly feasible to produce artificial diamonds far, far cheaper than it would cost to mine for equivalent natural diamonds of a given quality.
Ergo if you start selling these perfectly pure diamonds, the powers that be will deal with you the same way they’ve dealt with anyone trying to undercut their efforts to keep the price of diamonds high.
(granted, they’d probably get away with offering you a thousand dollars a day to Not produce nor sell those diamonds ever and if so that’d still work out for you.)
That’s why I said “believable but almost perfect”. As long as you’re producing diamonds with the right impurities and not getting greedy about it, adding 52 carats a year to circulation won’t trip any alarms and is a nice, steady little earner. Let’s face it, most clever schemes for getting cash fail because people get too greedy.
like you would, when it comes to taxes… how do you think they got Al Capone… it sure wasn’t because they caught him with the illegal (at the time) Booze… nope it was tax evasion… he got more money IN htan he let the Government know he did… same would happen to you, as there would be no way for you to legitimately get that many diamonds without it showing on you tax return. then they would audit you and you’d get caught out as a super… in fact I’ll bet that was how they caught this guy… gold just started being sold on the market that he had no way of getting in as short a time as he said, sure he could find a ship wreck of “Spanish Gold”… but then the treasure-hunters out there would demand the historical records and documentation to “Prove” where it came from, how HE found it instead of THEM, etc… then the History buffs would go on and on about how his “Find” was impossible because no such shipwreck or mine or whatever excuse he used was ever there in the fist place, so it “must be” a fraud, etc.etc.etc… nope, with the way the Worlds financial systems are so intertwined now days, there is no way he could sell off a “bar” of gold that’s worth an estimated $700,000 PER BAR (as seen in the video: one shelf held 4 rows of 9 bars on the long sides and 4 bars on each of the short ends of the shelves for a total of 80 bars per shelf, figure this into his $56 million USD per shelf,and that gets you $700 K per bar) and buy whatever he is buying with the money and NOT leave a trace in the system…
ARRRGHH!!! Spelling errors…
The fact that he has not been arrested implies to me that our geomancer went by the book. So probably declared all the gold as being mined. And will have complied with whatever regulations were necessary (for instance obtaining prospecting permits if he was acting underneath US soil, or import licences, if such is required, for gold mined elsewhere).
But that is only to counter the illegal connotations that usually get associated with ‘caught’. It is possible that (in line with him being discreet in how much he withdraws and spends) that he did not volunteer how he did the mining. In which case it would be fair to say that he was ‘caught out’, by Archon. However having or using a super power is not something folks are required to declare.
Although most comments seem to be assuming he would hide what he did (presumably inferred from the fact that he has hidden his gold 10 miles down), nothing Zephan said actually implies that he did not just out and say on his tax declaration “mined by super-power.”
I personally would have chosen a metal that is a little less conspicuous. No one would blink an eye at a couple hundred tons of aluminum or copper being dropped on the market.
But no one would pay as much for a couple hundred tons of aluminum or copper on the market.
Actually, have you tried to sell copper? Unless you have a business license, selling a lot of copper get’s police attention quickly. It’s an often stolen metal by amateur crooks. Ask a metal scrapyard all about it. Drop a couple hundred tons of copper on the market and watch the entire city’s police department come down on you.
Gold really is the best choice. Get yourself a dealer, reveal your powers to him after making him sign a NDA and you’re golden. A bar here and there will keep you comfortable and happy, the dealer keeps your secret because of the Non-Disclosure Agreement and to keep his meal ticket happy, and no cops will ever get involved.
This.^
For that matter, in my home state, in order to sell scrap metal, the seller must:
* present and allow a photocopy of a driver’s license, military ID, or state ID card;
* present and allow a photocopy of an HVAC or contractor’s license to be kept on file (if applicable);
* sign a statement that they are the owner of the metal, or are authorized to sell the metal on behalf of the owner;
* sign a statement that they have not been convicted of metal theft;
* provide a right thumbprint to be kept on file.
The buyer must:
* record the vehicle make, model, and license plate number of the seller
* keep a record of the seller’s name, address, phone number, and date of sale
* keep a photograph (keep on file for 181 days) or video (keep on file for 91 days) of the seller’s face and the materials being sold
* All sales tickets must have the date and time of the sale, the name of the clerk completing the sale, and the address (including county) of the scrap yard;
* The sales ticket must also show the type of metal, weight, quantity and/or volume of the material; the dollar amount paid to the seller; and the sales ticket must be signed by the seller. The seller receives a copy of the receipt and the buyer retains a copy.
These are just state requirements; there may also be additional requirements at the county or city level. Certifications, registrations, etc., will be kept on file onsite for 3 years. Records of all purchases must be kept on file for 2 years. And that’s just for starters… there are additional requirements for specific “restricted materials”. (For example, wire that has been burned to remove insulation cannot be sold unless the seller has written proof that the wire was lawfully burned or lawfully recovered from a burned structure.)
Of course, these laws would not be required if it were not for drug users stealing copper wire, street signs, air conditioner condensers, etc., so they can get enough money for their next “fix”. All states have their own laws regarding scrap metal, which can be found here: https://www.scraplaws.com
Umm, doing that would destroy our economy, as one of the (if not the) largest Aluminium Smelters is located just down the road near a delightfully named town called ‘Bluff’ (home of the World Famous Bluff Oysters), look it up, Tiwai Point Aluminium Smelter (already been threats of shutting it down because the government sold the electricity plant that was built expressly to power the Smelter, and the new owners wanted to raise the price of the supplying the electricity!!!)
If this guy could potentially control earthquakes his best option is not to threaten to cause massive quakes but instead offer to prevent them. The pressure on the San Andrea fault has been building up for decades and will eventually snap. What California needs is to hire this guy to periodically go out to high stress sections of the fault line and trigger a series of low level quakes that would release the energy in small increments. The Richter scale is by powers of ten. He would need to trigger a series of 100 level 4 minor quakes over a span of several hours or days rather than have it all happen as one major level 6.
in Divine Blood, Gods and Demons with granted this level of power have periodic duty watching for large extraterrestrial objects or monitoring places like Yellowstone, just because they’ve lived through two extinction level events already and aren’t keen on a third. (To be honest, only one Demon has lived through both events and something less than five hundred Gods and Demons combined have lived through the second…the majority of the population is less than 2,000 years old and were born during the current truce).
It’s one of the reasons that Tier 1 Immortals are often referred to as “Cosmic Janitors” because the main reason they’re allocated that much power is to watch for and prevent things like the K/T event from happening. It’s generally regarded that using that much power as a weapon is counter-productive.
Unless they take an approach similar to Storm’s weather control powers where there needs to be a balance or nature will push back. Like if she uses her powers too give Africa too much rain, it could create a drought or flash floods somewhere else in the world. Similarly, if this guy exerted too much control over the tectonic plate movement at the San Andreas fault, it could lead to a super volcano erupting or a massive tsunami wiping out Asia, and the more he tried to control something, the worse the side effects become.
Sydney Interruptus is over! Golly, I’ve missed our favorite heroine.
We just get a glimpse of her here, but it’s still good to see her again after she wasn’t in the last two pages.
And she looks so cute too!
SQUEE!
There’s an online story series about a school called Whateley Academy that handles this very well in my opinion by having two different types of super-inventors: actual gadgeteers, who create new technology that can be copied, patented, etc., and what they call Devisors, people who create objects that only work due to an empathic connection to the creator and most often will not function in any other users’ hands. The objects they create don’t really work on a physics/technology level, but in a way the strength of their personality is enough to warp reality around them and make their creations operate.
It’s not the only universe where I’ve seen this type of dividing line used — I believe I’ve seen them called Schimmelhorn devises elsewhere? — but it is a useful way of delineating between someone who creates true scientific breakthroughs, like Dabbler, and someone who creates, say, a gun that shoots living sharks that spit exploding piranhas.
I sort of took that idea as part of what I mixed in with the Full Metal Panic! Whispered when I developed the Understanding possessed by Gods, Demons and Visionaries (the last being the human evolution which doesn’t have a stable collective mindscape yet and thus don’t display potentially endless lifespans).
The Understanding grants a basic awareness of the operations of the universe at large down to quantum levels. It is mis-named, however, since they’re only really able to perceive things happening, not actually understand it. But if you combine the Understanding with actual scientific education then they start making….things. And even without much education, they can notice places were something isn’t working in a legitimate genius’s prototype.
The universe has slight enough different physical laws to allow for the production of “life force” to power psychic abilities (which reminds me, I need to write in a comment about the multitude of names given to different species’ life forces when they could just say life-force…) most people with the Understanding use most of theirs in constantly forming their own body (which is why the unstable Visionaries don’t live long yet, their mind wanders eventually and they give themselves cancer or something equally bad), but the Gods and Demons have stable mindscapes (allowing them to share the communal pool of what people aren’t using in their respective nations) further fortified by biotechnical computers/power generators (Orochi and Ashvattha…the eight-headed serpent and the world tree) allowing them rather insane amounts of power, most of which is unused. So they are able to seemingly warp reality without equipment. Sans the communal link and biotech, the average God or Demon has less usable psychic power than the average mortal.
I like so many of the Whateley stories….lots of good ideas….too bad they keep driving off their better authors.
Achilles using a rope wound of his own hair. Tho it does become a test of which is more invincible, the base of the root, or his hand. Hopefully his hand cuz I doubt even duct tape could reattach invincible fingers.
not really, both his hair and his hand are functionally invulnerable. You can wack one against the other for eternity and neither would suffer damage.
Achilles’ hair isn’t THAT long. Good luck getting some to come out – yes, he’s THAT kind of annoyingly invulnerable.
Whether Achilles hair grows or not is one of the many many unanswered questions of Achilles. Its funny, he’s such a minor character in the swing of things, but the absolute nature of his invulnerability rubs against physics in a zillion places.
Minor character?
He will be the one tasting the mouthfeel of the last burger before the heat-death of the universe!
Would a universe with Achilles in it even have heat death? It seems like the argument for heat death vs. advanced whatevs is “ultimately, entropy wins”, but that runs up against the “no, for real, he’s invulnerable” assertion of Achilles.
Ah, doing it again!
This is like the argument of “What happens when the Irresistible Force Meets the Immovable Object. Clearly, if either side is true, then the other must be false…Or as Sydney found out the answer, claws that can penetrate anything vs. impenetrable skin.
So, what happens if the entire universe slows its outward expansion, halts & begins to accumulate back into the Ultimate Mass again, would Achilles survive? I can think of only one way to find out: follow the Scientific Method of Inquiry…bring the two together & see what happens.
In short, we can only wait & see.
I hope my popcorn hasn’t go stale by then…
Thinking about it, I guess with this guy around we don’t have to worry about the Yellowstone Supervolcano blowing its top any time soon. Fingers crossed he can fix it permanently rather than just patching it every decade or so…
Yeah, Yellowstone and K/T are the reasons why some Gods and Demons are granted access to potentially global affecting levels of power in my Divine Blood setting.
Okay…did I hit some sort of rant eruption? I swear I’ve gone a while without ranting about my story settings on these threads and now four or five such posts in under a week…
Gah, I need to direct this at Bystander 2 and finally get a draft done.
Volume of a cube 25 meters to a side: 15,625 cubic meters
Volume of a sphere 52.25 miles across: 3.11×10^14 cubic metes(311,000,000,000,000)
Your calculations are a bit off.
The radius of a 52.25 mile sphere is 42,044 meters. The volume of a sphere is 4/3 pi r^3, so the volume of a sphere of gold with a radius of 42,044 meters is 3.113 x 10^14 cubic meters.
The volume of a cube of gold 25 meters on each side is 25^3 = 15625 cubic meters.
There is a little under 2 BILLION times as much gold in the earth than what we’ve mined.
Radius of the sphere: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2852.25+miles+to+meters%29+%2F+2
Volume of gold sphere: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4%2F3+pi+%2842044+meters%29%5E3
Ratio between mega-sphere and gold cube: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=3.113%C3%9710%5E14+cubic+meters+%2F+15625+meters%5E3
You don’t reverse-engineer supervillain stuff and patent it because supervillains are crazy and booby traps, supervillains are crazy and jealous about their brands, and supervillains are typically crazy intelligent, making reverse engineering what they did stupid hard to impossible.
I sure wouldn’t. I would just sling a bunch of precious metals and gems at a group of sane hero scientists and engineers, to commission them to make a bunch of patentable stuff for me. First off one of those microwaves from the 5th Element that create instant roast chicken dinners.
Chicken goood!
I dunno. I don’t really think “mine a potentially catastrophic amount of gold and then live comfortably” counts as using a power like that intelligently. When you have the ability to revolutionize materials science and have unlimited access to every kind of substance in the world, living comfortably would be a pretty small-minded goal, I think. (And he clearly does have the ability to do a lot more than just extract gold from magma: look at the shelves that are supporting hundreds of tons of gold.)
He also can either manipulate heat or else he’s a master at architecture and physics, because that room would not be survivable for normal people otherwise. Building underground houses, or even whole cities, seems pretty well within his wheelhouse. This is not a dude who is making the most of his talents. The existence of this guy ought to be enough to create Foundation (Asimov-style).
Oh god, yes imagine the money he could make by building underground cities. Just living comfortably would be a thing of the past.
He’s not trying to make the most of his talents. He’s trying to make the most of his personal comfort and enjoyment. And he’s doing so intelligently, at least in terms of amassing financial resources without drawing excessive or hostile attention.
Not having the same goals and ambitions you think you would have is not automatically unintelligent.
Also I don’t see how he would revolutionize materials science. He can make certain currently-rare materials more abundant – as long as he’s alive, that is – but if that has any longer-term effect at all it will be to stifle efforts to either make those materials more abundant by reproducible means or find alternatives to them. Perhaps he can arrange materials into (atomic-level?) strange structures with odd and useful properties, but unless he can find ways that *other people* can do the same, *without* his powers, that has rather limited value.
For example: the material those shelves are made from would be more valuable to humanity, per pound, than the gold they are holding. (And isn’t necessarily the most valuable thing he could do.) How much can he produce per year, without dedicating so much of his time and attention that it cuts into his chosen lifestyle and personal comfort? 300,000 tons a year (more than a thousand tons a day, five days a week) would be about 1% of *US* steel production. To get to 1% of world production, he needs to do about 10 million tons a year. Which, if it’s dependent on him, absolutely stops if he dies. Can he license out the technology so others can produce it?
+1
All bar the bit about the shelves. Check out the thread at the bottom of the previous page of comments. In particular the video which DaveB links. His reference for the gold bullion, on shelves, was drawn from those in use in the British Gold reserves!
Ok his are stacked about twice as deep. But theirs are probably Victorian shelves, knowing how archaic the infrastructure is for the Bank of England.
the video shows only 80 bars per shelf, at one ton per shelf six shelves high, so a total of 6 tons of gold in one unit… DaveB’s have what LOOKS to be 720 bars PER SHELF… i tried to blow up the image to get a better count but it starts to get real fuzzy for me i could be wrong… it looks like he has five bars going the long way with twelve bars high, and twelve rows going on the short sides of the shelves. 720 bars divided by 80 bars/shelf gives you 9… 9 tons per shelf with four shelves stacked for a total of 36 tons of gold per unit… that looks do-able to me even using “normal” materials, no need for the shelves to be made out of any unobtanium here… seeing as how the Bank vault shows the shelves to be stacked six high, the bottom shelf has to be able to hold it’s own weight of gold, plus the corner supports need to be able to hold ALL of the OTHER shelves weight as well… the difference from six to thirty-six tons just means they need to be more heavier-duty than those in the video that’s all…
Consider. By mining an insane amount of Gold, then letting certain people know all about it and his subsequent actions (or INaction), this person has ALSO sent a subtle but very clear message.
DON’T #### WITH ME.
Think about it. Under most circumstances, someone with this sort of power would get pestered unbelievably – with numerous and sundry governments, agencies. organizations and individuals all wanting some degree of control (or, at the very least, preventing their enemies / rivals from doing so).
Instead, he used this power exactly once and clearly has no need to ever use it again. And if outside interests get dick-ish about it …. well, best for them if they don’t. Smart move, methinks.
A fairly smart move, I would say. But one with a potential flaw. If he has overdone it and ends up scaring the government, too much, he could get them deciding to revoke his right to breathe. In the usual extralegal way.
He didn’t use his power “exactly once”, he uses it again every time he wants to make a withdrawal. Other than that, though, your logic is sound.
The gold guy (who according to Silver Age rules should be named Mr. G.O. Manser) has the ability to separate one element (gold) from the surrounding mantle matrix. I wonder what he could do in an area like Chernobyl or Fukashima. Could he suck up all the radioactive contamination from the area and make it safe again? His potential biggest legacy to the world may be to go around to all the nuclear waste storage sites at the world’s nuclear reactors and reprocess the spent material into purified nuclear fuel to go back into the reactors and extraneous decontaminated material that was safe to dispose of.
Then again, there is the chance that North Korea would then capture him and force him to process all their raw uranium into weapons grade material.
And I can see absolutely no way in which that could possibly backfire on them.
None whatsoever.
Especially none that involve Pyongyang suddenly being swallowed by the earth.
Unless NK has a Cape with Mind Control powers. Their own version of the Purple Man. In fact, NK with Mind Control enabled Cape who is a true believer of their rhetoric is pretty much a worst-case scenario.
Yeah, but that only lasts so long until the victim breaks out on their own or someone else breaks the control. And then South Korea becomes an island instead of a peninsula.
Someone like Colonel Glasshole? Okay, he didn’t have Mind Control powers, but he still firmly believed in their system
Kinda like Captain America, but not as much a patriotic superdick
Interesting idea. I wonder how physically close he would need to be to the process – if he collected radioactive material, would he put himself at risk?
If he can summon up stuff from the Earth’s mantle, to his vault, I think we can take it that he has a considerable range.
The alternative being that his power is so great that he can safely go down to those depths himself. Despite the pressure and heat. Plus I imagine the background radiation there is pretty high, as that is the source of much of the heat.
So, in the latter case, he would have to be shielding himself with his power, somehow. So even being close to a reactor might not bother him.
Sydney could just slowly fly him over the area while inside her bubble. We have seen that it is radiation proof. And her lighthook could carry a big lead box outside to contain the retrieved contaminants. The only thing to test would be whether his power also worked through the shield.
Get Arianna involved in the event. This could be the biggest P.R. boost for the team she could possibly imagine.
The problem with taking apart super doohickeies like Green Gobiln’s flyer, is they usually have some level of insane assembly methodology that doesn’t survive examination. Like if a villain could build stable quantum computers and was a “super hacker”. Even if you beat him up and take his stuff, the moment you crack it open the thing becomes useless.
Even if the initial iteration was not made when crazy, the inevitable madness inspired upgrades are what generally turn “that’s neat, maybe in 20 years” invention, into “¿did he build that with magic?”
And even if that’s not the case, the tech could still turn out to be too expensive for practical mass-production. Though that wasn’t the case with former Spider-Man villain The Prowler, who was explicitly said to have built his super-suit out of off-the-shelf stuff that could be purchased at Walmart and Radio Shack.
Refer ‘the Devisor Trait’, otherwise known as ‘the Schimmelhorn Effect’ – https://crystalhall.wikia.com/wiki/Devisor_trait
“…they usually have some level of insane assembly methodology that doesn’t survive examination.”
Not to mention that the crazy ones who are smart enough to build something like that are also more than likely to mammary-trap it…
Ha! I avoided the Make Maxima Say Bingo!
The danger of their invention penetrating your knickers, and your manocracy being shorn off, would make you quiver in fear, until you said “moo” and farted in your diaper!
In fairness to Arianna she probably hasn’t spent her life dealing with extreme temperatures and higher than average gravity. Temperatures at the bottom of the Kola Superdeep Borehole were about 180° C and the closer you get tothe center of something’s mass the gravitational pull. Admittedly considering the actual radius of the earth the difference in pull isn’t great but like still noticably stronger. Just goes to shown how beast Zeph is.
Fairly sure she is reacting to the gold
Actually, if you’re burrowing into a planet, the gravitational pull would get weaker the deeper you went; you would be ‘weightless’ at the core – but under staggering pressure and temperature from the weight of all the layers above you.
Perhaps after a certain point but the effects of that at 10 km to 10 mi down would be negligible. Remember the Earth does have a radius of 3959 mi.
No. It stays constant at the same value it was on the surface. By getting closer to the center, there is an increase from getting closer, but more and more of the Earth [or other planet] is now on the other side of you pulling you away from the center. The two balance, in theory exactly, with the interesting effect that, if you could build a frictionless tunnel thru the Earth you could use gravity to move from any place on the surface to any point on the surface, and it would always take the same amount of time. [I think it was calculated at about 80 minutes, but it’s been a long time since I saw this.]
I don’t know if anyone brought this up, but part of the patent analogy is incorrect. Later versions of the flier, unless filed for by the original patent holder, are likely to be denied. Additionally, simply reverse engineering the flier would not be sufficient to acquire the patent; an examiner would likely require proof of invention. Also, because it had been in public use for over a year, totally unpatentable. Sauce: I am a registered patent agent.
Ooh. I have an improved version of an earlier idea, which, with your background you are likely to know intimately.
Ok now it involves E=MC², as a starting point, then we factor in je pense, donc je suis from Discours de la méthode, of course (as I am sure you realise) this stage needs to be conducted whilst sitting on a beam of light, then Schrödinger’s cat gets in the way (pesky fellow that)… hang on, he distracted me. Had I gotten up to the bit on how God is simultaneously real, not real and just one of many gods, simultaneously
Anyhow…
DAVE, hey man! In the live action Spiderman movie, Green Goblin’s sled (or whatever) was offered to military, but it got rejected. Then he blast the competitor out of the sky, try again, and gets the contract & lots of profits. Or do I remember it wrong? I know it isn’t that way in the comics & cartoon… But at least somewhere in the franchise it got done right.
i’m with Syd and Dr. Zoeing if you had powers that would let you swim in gold you’d have to do ti at least once just to say you’d done it
+1
I think I mentioned this at least twice before, but it bears repeating: I LOVE reading the comments on this comic. Having people breaking down the math instead of using handwavium when figuring the theoretical limits of powers and abilities is entertaining as hell to me. Especially since I suck at math and wouldn’t be able to do this without a IMAC and 100yrs of time….It’s almost as much fun as the comic itself. And it’s great when DaveB goes back and makes corrections based on those comments.
+2
AAANNNDDD, another thing! Just found out one of my favorite authors visits this site and commented on it. I’m doing a happy dance in my chair at work. My Coworkers think im strange and my boss is looking at me funny.
He he. A great day, at work, beats a few funny looks. You will remember it, to your dying day.
That’s so Daphne! :D
+²
and you win the internets with that addition
Actually, when using superscript, that involves multiplication, not addition…
You, sir or ma’am, have severely under-calculated Yorp’s contribution.
;-)
and I was trying to be cute (yes the fire breathing makes it hard) when I deliberately said addition as in adding the post while knowing yorp was doing multiplication.
Yorp: any relation?
I can neither confirm nor deny matters relating to security issues. Nor any hypothetical detachment from Scotland Yard, to conduct special operations with K9 units in the Americas.
Typo in Zephan’s first bubble: “care to guess know”, should probably be “care to guess now”.
And his last should be “keeping a close eye on his financial…”
Not sure if anyone has brought it up yet, but… Frank Quitely, if he ‘mined’ that gold, then it’s his, he can do what ever he wants with it, and ARCHON can’t do a damn thing about it, just the reverse of what the De Boors are doing with the multiple warehouses full of diamonds (the De Beers have created an artificial, and highly inflated, price on the diamond market)
Unless… ARCHON is responsible for the Diamond Market as well o_O
Openly? True. Legally? True.
But then there is Arc-Dark.