Welcome to brain Stuff from house Stuff Works dot com, where smart happens. This podcast is brought to you by Audible dot com, the Internet's leading provider of spoken word entertainment. Get a free audio book download of your choice when you sign up today. Log on to audible podcast dot com slash brain Stuff Today for details. Hi, Am Marshall brain with today's question. If you took all of the gold in the world and put it in one place,
how much would there be? It's amazing, but the total amount of gold in the world is a surprisingly small quantity. Here's how you can calculate the total amount that's available. If you look it up, you'll find that the annual worldwide production of gold is something like fifty million troy ounces per year. Gold as a specific gravity of nineteen point three, meaning that it's nineteen point three times heavier than water, So goldways nineteen point three kilograms per leader.
A leader is a cube that measures ten centimeters about four inches on a side. There are thirty two point one five troy ounces in a kilogram. Therefore, the world produces a cube of gold that's about four point three meters or about fourteen feet on each side every year. In other words, all of the gold produced worldwide in one year could just about fit in the average person's living room. This cube weighs one million, five hundred thousand kilograms,
or about three million pounds. It would be worth about thirty to forty billion dollars at today's prices. Figuring out the total amount of gold that's been produced by man in all of eternity is a little harder to get it some kind of estimate. Let's figure that the world has been producing gold at fifty million troy ounces a year for two hundred years. That number is probably a all high, but when you figure that the Aztecs and the Egyptians produced a fair amount of gold for a
long time, it's probably not too far off. Fifty million ounces times two hundred years equals ten billion ounces. Ten billion ounces of gold would fit into a cube roughly twenty five meters or about eighty two feet on a side. Consider that the Washington Monument measures fifty five by fifty five ft at the base and is five hundred fifty five ft tall. That means that if you could somehow gather every scrap of gold that man is ever mined into one place, you could only build about one third
of the Washington Monument with it. Platinum is even more scarce than gold. Only three point six million troy ounces are produced every year. It's specific gravity is twenty one point four five and it was discovered in the eighteenth century, not in three thousand BC. If you assume that the world has produced three point six million ounces per year for fifty years to estimate the total worldwide supply, all of the platinum in the world would fit into a
cube about twenty meters on the side. In other words, all the platinum in the entire world would easily fit inside the average house. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me an email at podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, go to how stuff works dot com.