[wintorez]

Are resources really scarce? Other than stars and planets, there are plenty of resources in the astroids and gas giants, and interstellar space. We can argue that the most scarce resource is organic matter. In universal scale, wood is exponentially more scarce than gold.

[ertian]

Yeah, and the nature of the Dark Forest galaxy would mean that no civilization could get anywhere close to utilizing a significant share of total resources--or even a significant share of the total resources in their backyard--because doing so would attract attention and lead to their extinction. If everybody is busy hiding and being as quiet and careful as possible then resources would be abundant for lack of use--and thus it would not be worth it to fight over resources in the short term.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Are you sure?

The estimate for gold in the universe is 50B tons.

There's 550B tons of organic matter on earth - I'm assuming most of that being plant mass.

And that's if you're certain Earth is the only planet in the entire universe that has organic life.

[ertian]

This...cannot possibly be right. It's estimated that there are a minimum of 200B galaxies in the observable universe (up to 2 trillion). 50B tons of gold in the universe would mean 0.25 tons per galaxy (shared among the ~100B stars, and let's guess 500B planets)--but we've already extracted ~250k tons from earth alone.

50B tons seems like a suspiciously low number even just within our own galaxy.

[macspoofing]

>The estimate for gold in the universe is 50B tons.

That is a wild underestimate. Our galaxy alone has around 100 million Earths worth of gold [1].

[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/astronomers-ta...

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Interesting - this was the first thing that popped up on Google: https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/natural-sciences/che...

But I see there's an estimate that there's more gold than that just in our Sun.

[davorak]

Maybe a serious math error? From your link[1]

> It is estimated that the amount of gold present in the entire universe is about 50 billion tons, with about one ounce for every 150 billion tons of Earth.

According to Alexander Budianto on quora[2] the earth is ~6.58310^21 tons ~ 710^21

710^21/(15010^9) / 10^9 = 46 billion

So that is ~46 billion ounces of gold on earth, rounded up 50 billion. Maybe that is where they obtained 50 billion from?

[1] https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/natural-sciences/che...

[2] https://www.quora.com/How-much-is-the-mass-of-the-earth-in-t...

[floxy]

According to this:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/did-neutron-stars-or-supernov...

...one supernova can produce 7.4e22 kg of gold (the moon's mass), while a neutron star to neutron star collision can produce 1.9e27 kg of gold (a Jupiter's mass worth). 50e9 tons is 4.6e13 kg.

[dumah]

USGS estimates humans have discovered 244,000 tons of gold, and that’s just in the crust near the surface.

This estimate is off by many orders of magnitude.

[margalabargala]

The estimate for the amount of gold on Earth is a bit short of 50B tons.

The issue of course is that most of that gold is at the center of the Earth, not accessible to us.

So that's not 50B tons per universe, but rather, per rocky Earth-type planet.

[wintorez]

I think 50B tons is a huge underestimation.

[RichardCA]

I think there is a hypothesis going on, that the Earth has an above average quantity of gold because of some novel cosmic event, e.g. neutron star activity that just happened to be in our neighborhood ~5 billion years ago during the formation of our Solar System.

My layman understanding of Astrophysics is that we understand things up to Iron pretty well. Beyond that there is a lot of conjecture.

I've never heard it explained very well, the best I can find is a 40 year old PBS show. Thanks to Virginia Trimble.

https://youtu.be/0byMj2VrT2g?t=565

[anonymouskimmer]

>Are resources really scarce?

That's the claim in the linked article.