Man Has Landed on Mars...Shiny Rocks & stuff

Okay, so Mars is our next nearest "planet" in the Solar System, just a 120m mile hop, skip and a jump. All arrows point towards mankind going to Mars sooner than later.

So man lands on Mars, and someone observes a shiny rock a few meters away from the landing site. Someone suits up and goes out to said rock to investigate. Wow, it really is shiny, so he (or she) picks up said rock. Wow, it's pretty heavy too. Better take this back to the ship to investigate further.

Once back on the ship the astronaut's suspicions are confirmed. It's a rock of solid 24ct. gold! We're rich, they think. Then, everyone on the ship get's 'Gold Fever' and they all suit up and grab their space shovels and head out to find more. To their amazement, there's gold everywhere! In fact, there's solid gold just under the surface no matter where they dig. They discover, though the planet is covered by centuries of dust, Mars itself is actually made out of solid gold!

Some of the astronauts try to buy items from each other, but there's so much gold it's worth nothing and they wind up using things like air and water as currency. Gold is worth nothing on Mars, but back on Earth gold is worth a fortune. If they could only figure a way to get some of this gold back to Earth.

Back on Earth, the Elon Musk's of the world are all running around with their hair on fire screaming..."Mars is made of gold!! Mars is made of GOLD!!" NASA and Space X and countless other countries start building massive cargo ships to go to Mars and mine the gold and bring back spaceships full of gold.

THEN...the realities set in! Gold is pretty damn heavy. Effective space travel requires the polar opposite of heavy, everything needs to be ultra-light in weight. Even lifting water into space is a challenge, but now we're talking about solid gold? And what of the mining effort itself? Gold is one of the most malleable metals known to man. It doesn't fracture like regular rock does. Digging the gold out would be nearly impossible, and you can't blast it either. Okay, so we'll use giant torches to melt it into liquid to extract it, problem solved. Now back to the issue of getting all the gold back to Earth.

One day someone discovers a void in the gold, and inside this void they discover a whole colony of benevolent Martians. The colony of Martians can cure all diseases with a machine they've developed, but the machine uses the same thing they use for food as fuel to operate it...gold. The Martians themselves are disease free, but they cannot survive without consuming vast quantities of gold each day for food.

Now what?

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

I could probably make a comment here about everyone knowing Martians don't have 'front holes', but it was actually a semi-serious question illustrating the futility of manned space travel and colonization of space.

Fascinating predicament.
Humans probably wouldn't care. Gold is more important than life. Of any kind.
Kill off some tiny martians? Meh.
WE GOT GOLD!

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Scientists have speculated for years that diamonds are abundant in the cores of the smaller, cooler gas giants, Neptune and Uranus. They believed that the larger gaseous planets, Jupiter and Saturn, didn't have suitable atmospheres to forge diamonds.
But when researchers recently analyzed the pressures and temperatures for Jupiter's and Saturn's atmospheres, then modeled how carbon would behave, they determined that diamond rain is very likely.

www.businessinsider.com...

a reply to: Slinki

Martians are fine with humans taking all the gold they want. They've got plenty. Their whole planet is made out of it.

a reply to: DBCowboy

Yep, same issue, right?

And...then you have to consider (in the Martian scenario), okay, what if someone did figure out a way to get millions of tons of gold back to Earth. What would happen to the value of gold over time?

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

A couple things.
One, if Mars was made out of solid gold, it would be a much heavier planet and its orbit would be different.

And two, it costs more to get to Mars and back than can be made from mining the gold.


As for the gold disease cure,,, have you paid for health care recently?
Eating gold might be cheaper...lol

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

This actually has happened before. only instead of mars, call it "The New World" as it war, Spanish treasure fleets raided the Inca, Aztec, and all the rest of the indigenious tribes under them of gold, silver, furs, you name it. To the point where their economy was flooded with the stuff, and it was astronomical prices for basic items.

Its an interesting concept, I'd say we as humans would go there, mine as much as we could, and fight the aliens since this is our solar system and not theirs. just my opinion.

Chris

Venus us the closest planet, not Mars.

It would sure help me decide if I wanted to grow a mustache.










Or save the weight and instead bring gold home with me rather than facial hair.
Seriously, the other thread, that was posted earlier made me wonder if I wasn't looking at gold nuggets .....

www.abovetopsecret.com... the 'Dutchman' comment.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk
I thought for a start you were going all "Treasure of Sierra Madre" cos I was going to say " badges! We have no stinking badges", in a Mexican accent.
To find that much gold would be the same as diamonds on Earth. The only reason diamonds are so expensive is because certain people keep the majority of diamonds off the market therefore ensuring their rarity, when in fact they're not rare at all.

a reply to: Bluntone22

That's not the point, but yes you are correct.

This is like that terrible movie John Travolta was in where her came to earth and made the humans mine gold. Ok, its not really that similar.

a reply to: schuyler

Okay...yes, I misspoke. I guess I should have said...all the rage now is people wanting to go to Mars.

Sheesh!

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Don't you just hate smart dudes?

a reply to: Mark08

No, I knew better and should have been more careful, but I wasn't focusing on those details, more the underpinning theme.

a reply to: crayzeed

True, but diamonds aren't really a commodity by which value is established in a commerce sense such as gold is. Plus, you are correct in stating diamonds aren't particularly rare, but gem quality diamonds certainly are. Industrial grade diamonds are a dime a dozen...metaphorically speaking. And then there are synthetic diamonds which change the whole value paradigm altogether.

Doesn't really matter though, the point is pick whatever material you want, the logistics of the situation are what illustrate the futility of the matter. And, when you scale the theme up to something like interstellar travel it only becomes exponentially more pronounced.