[dachris]

Except that everyone with a fusor can feed the gold atom a neutron which converts it to unstable Au-198 that decays to mercury. Fun times when you can (theoretically) transmute gold to mercury with stuff you can order on the internet.

[marcosdumay]

You could do that for decades already!

It just doesn't make a lot of economic sense, but I wonder why nobody made fusion art yet.

[HenryBemis]

I definitely will mis-speak/mis-write, but my mathematic (also flawed) tells me that if Gold + 1 = Mercury, then Something + 1 = Gold, so we can find that "something" add 1 of the thingie, and booya!! gold!! (right?) (please read the above with silly humor)

In a slightly more serious note, I remember listening to Elon in some podcast 1-2 years ago saying how they create new metals/alloys that nobody had created previously, because they needed specific needs covered, and no known material had the attributes they needed. So.. in a way..

[bruce511]

The whole concept of "turning lead into gold" is somewhat self defeating. Because turning lead into gold doesn't make lead as valuable as gold, it makes gold as valuable as lead.

This has happened before. Aliminium used to be very scarce, and hence expensive. More expensive than silver. The top of the Washington monument is capped with aluminum.

A new process was invented to extract aluminum. So scarcity disappeared and value is negligible. Today we use it for packaging soda.

Turning anything (cheap) into gold means gold is cheap. It doesn't make us all rich.

[LtdJorge]

Tbh, it if couldn’t be recycled, it wouldn’t be used for soda. I’ve heard that 70% of aluminium in use today id recycled.

[sltkr]

> The top of the Washington monument is capped with aluminum.

Interesting. I was curious how large and expensive this was.

Apparently the tip weighed only 100 ounce, at a time the price was around $1.10 per ounce. Translating to 2025 dollars it would be around $36 per ounce, or $3,600 for the entire tip; much less than I expected, but still more expensive than the silver price today ($32.75 per ounce).

[HenryBemis]

In a way yes, but(!!) if I know the way and I turn 50gr of lead to gold per month, and I slowly do this (not convert 200 tons of lead into gold and flood the market) then I can have a rich and easy life without destabilising the price of gold. But that's just me.. Someone else may play this differently.

[throwaway2202]

There was a point in history when science was not public. Even after it became public, moat was still a thing.

[bruce511]

I presume you're referring to the concept of alchemy in the middle ages?

The problem in that context is test it would have been impossible to keep the process a secret. To be useful (to say the king) it would have to be more than one guy in a castle. And between spies, and traitors who could be materially incentivised), and outright kidnapping and torture, well, I just don't see it staying hidden.

And its not like a King could really even hide the fact that he had a "gold mine" producing endless quantities of gold.

It's kinda like the story of the goose laying the golden eggs. The story fails to elaborate on what they did with the eggs. Presumably they sold them, but to whom? And did that person not get curious as to the source of the gold? And what did he do with all that gold? He'd need to sell enough of it to pay the peasant. Did his customer not notice the increase in volume?

So no, alchemy wouldn't have remained a secret for long. And the king would just be financing wars to protect it.

[throwaway2202]

Fair point.

[saagarjha]

Yes, the moat is that you need the LHC.

[chipsrafferty]

Not if you're the only one with the knowledge or means to do it.

[addaon]

> I remember listening to Elon in some podcast 1-2 years ago saying how they create new metals/alloys that nobody had created previously

Comparing a slight tweak to the mix ratio of 304L stainless steel alloy to transmuting elements is a stretch...

[Tuna-Fish]

The same mechanism that lets you convert gold-197 to mercury does in fact work to convert the equivalent isotope (that is, 1u lighter than gold) of the element left of gold on the periodic table to gold.

The only problem, the element left of gold is platinum, and platinum-196 is not even the most common isotope of platinum, making up ~25% of it. You're rather unlikely to be able to make money on this.

(Not that you would have been able to regardless of the price of platinum. There are 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a gram of gold, and a desktop fusor is going to generate ~<1m neutrons per second.)

[hn_acc1]

Start with Tungsten?

[fzzzy]

Wouldn’t that be platinum?