Renewable Revolution

Quote from: Golden Oxen on July 02, 2015, 10:56:07 am

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And for the record, I am agnostic about gold, as befits a peasant. I don't have any money, but some gold would be good to have. As would beans, rice, potatoes, and weapons. Plus a storage locker full of pint bottles of whiskey to use as trade goods when TSHTF, but we've all heard all this before...

 :laugh: :laugh:

Look to put some Silver on you list Surly.

Poor man's gold is currently 75 % off its recent high of 50, a bargain in my view. Gold's friendly less noble cousin metal is a great alternative which offers protection from Fiat going berserk and you get some real bang for a buck with the silver gold ratio currently around all time highs about 80 to 1.

I hear you.

I had thought about it when silver was going up a while back, then talked myself out of buying into the teeth of a spike.
If you have any disposable cash, it couldn't hurt to have some silver. AG has also written about its medicinal properties as well, so eddie's point about it being valuable as a commodity via severqal demand vectors is a good one. IMO.

I learned a fascinating tidbit about a metal that was once considered more precious than Silver, Gold, or even Platinum!

That metal is Aluminum.

The obelisk in DC has an Aluminum cap because there was no metal more precious in those days.

It was a high energy process, needed to produce pure aluminum, despite the fact that about 7% of the crust has it (unlike Silver, Gold and Platinum that are really rare in comparison), that made Aluminum super cheap in the 20th century.

Can that happen to the precious metals too? If MKing and his pals have their way, certainly.

It is a scientific fact that if you can get out of our planetary gravity well cheaply, you can get an unlimited supply of ANY metal from precious metals to rare earths (they ain't rare out there) and ANY hydrocarbon (see Titan) as well.

Outer space energy expenditure needed to move something from here to several million miles over there, once you are out of our gravity well, is akin to a slight push on a boat in New York harbor sending a giant ship to China (distance multiplied by several million times) with no added energy except the slight push to stop it when it gets there. Friction is, in comparison to travel here on Earth, not a factor.

Another upside from getting our Gold and Silver from outer space is that mining asteroids has zero environmental impact, low energy expenditure because your mining and processing factory is at zero or low G and, thanks to robotics and computers, can be operated remotely (low personnel costs). A corporation has already been established to do exactly that.

Of course nobody needs to run out and sell their precious metals now. But, if there is a future, you can be certain that said precious metals will eventually be plentiful = cheap.

Considering the health applications that precious metals have, I would welcome that. Considering the electronics applications that precious metals have, that means faster and cooler running computers. Considering the fact that Silver is better than Copper for the transmission of electricity, I don't need to say why I would welcome silver wiring.   


Aluminum: Common Metal, Uncommon Past

In the mid-1800s aluminum was more valuable than gold. 

Napoléon III's most important guests were given aluminum cutlery, while those less worthy dined with mere silver; fashionable and wealthy women wore jewelry crafted of aluminum.

Today aluminum is a critical component of modern life, found in airplanes, automobiles, soft drink cans, construction materials, cooking equipment, guardrails, and countless other products. The difference between scarcity and abundance (and between obscurity and ubiquity) of this metal depended solely on scientists' ability to find the way to release it—the third most common element in the earth's crust by weight—from its ore.

The most familiar story of the first extraction of aluminum is that the youthful Ohioan Charles Martin Hall developed aluminum's electrolytic extraction process in his family's woodshed in 1886, patented the invention, helped found the company that would later become Alcoa, and died a rich man.

A more complicated version  reveals that Paul Héroult developed a similar process in France at the same time. In reality both Héroult and Hall were participants in a much larger program of aluminum research that started in the 1850s and lasted until 1903, when the last major patent dispute was settled.

By then Alcoa was the undisputed world leader in aluminum production, and Hall himself was a multimillionaire. But neither Hall nor Héroult operated in a vacuum—their nearly simultaneous discovery of a process for aluminum extraction built on several decades' worth of electrochemistry and, indeed, centuries' worth of knowledge on the nature of metals.

Early History

While aluminum metal is a recent discovery, its compounds were fairly common in various industries throughout history. Alum (aluminum potassium sulfate, KAl(SO4)2 ), was best known as a dye fixer (or mordant) first developed in Egypt over 5,000 years ago, and clays containing aluminum silicates appear to have been favored by contemporary Persian potters for their strength.

Anhydrous aluminum sulfate (Al2(SO4)3) was used by the ancient Greeks as an astringent to stanch wounds—a use that continues to this day in styptic pencils.

Electrolysis, a process central to the modern history of aluminum, has its roots in the early 19th century. In 1800 the Italian Alessandro Volta invented the "pile" battery, which provided the source of stored power that pioneering Englishmen William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle used to break a compound (water) into its constitutive elements through a process known as electrolysis. Generally defined, the process involves applying live electrodes to a liquid containing the compound to be electrolyzed. The negative electrode in electrolysis, the cathode, naturally attracts positive ions, which take on electrons; the positive electrode, the anode, attracts negatively charged ions. When water is subjected to electrolysis, hydrogen gas is produced at the cathode and oxygen is released at the anode.

The remarkable Cornish chemist Humphry Davy also started experiments in electrolysis in 1800. He struggled to isolate metals by putting a current through solutions of their alkali salts, which did nothing more than free hydrogen. But he met with much better results when he started to electrolyze molten compounds, first isolating potassium from potash and sodium from table salt in 1807.

The following year Davy used electrolysis to produce elemental calcium, strontium, barium, and magnesium before capping off his remarkable string of success with the identification and naming of aluminum.

He did not actually isolate aluminum; rather, as Norman C. Craig, professor emeritus of chemistry at Oberlin College, explains, "Davy had learned enough about compounds of other metals to conclude from the composition of aluminum compounds that they contained a new metal, aluminum." He first called the metal alumium, although it has evolved to aluminium in most English-speaking countries, and to aluminum in the United States.

One of early chemistry's true geniuses, Davy was knighted and received a baronetcy in 1812 and became president of the Royal Society in 1820. (The society has awarded an annual "Davy Medal" in his honor since 1877.) Nevertheless, his repeated attempts to isolate aluminum metal met with no success before his death in 1829.

Read more here:

http://www.chemheritage.org/discover/media/magazine/articles/25-4-aluminum-common-metal-uncommon-past.aspx